This is part 2 of the series “Targeting The Customer“, a 5-part series on using marketing automation to target customers and improve marketing effectiveness.
In the first post of this series, we discussed the importance of profiling and it’s purpose in gathering information regarding customer behavior and preference, and utilizing that data to target the customer [...]

Ian Hendry, CEO of WeCanDo.biz, recently had a post over at ZDNet regarding Social CRM for small businesses.  Hendry’s thesis is that most of the discussions surrounding SCRM involve distributed brand management.  While important for medium and small sized businesses, Hendry argues, the strategy has the danger of leaving small businesses behind.  Hendry argues that [...]

This is part 1 of the series “Targeting The Customer“, a 5-part series on using marketing automation to target customers and improve marketing effectiveness.

Sending off blind email blasts without regard to the end recipient is like a sales rep using the same sales pitch for a product, regardless of the customer’s specific needs.  While email [...]

As I’ve stated previously, Marketing Automation has become the forgotten child of CRM.  It’s features are underdeveloped, it is always an “afterthought” in CRM implementations, and has often been relegated to simple email marketing off of the CRM’s sales leads or contact management databases.  As important as email marketing is, in most CRM systems its [...]

It happened to me the other day, and it’s happened many times before.  I’m in a needs analysis meeting with a new customer, reviewing their processes and working to implement a CRM strategy that makes sense for their business.  When discussing process with a project management group, I came across the fact that there was [...]

Having been involved in many CRM consulting  projects and implementations over the last decade, I have always marveled at the fact that while CRM has done a very good job at implementing processes for sales, marketing, and customer service, the area of professional service / project management has been widely ignored.  While many CRM vendors [...]

All too often, when doing a CRM implementation, my customers will request dozens and dozens of email notifications from the system, for every event from a new lead being assigned to a scheduled activity being due, to a note being updated on an account.  I once had a sales manager request an email notification every [...]

A few years ago, one of the biggest hot-button items for sales force automation that rarely produced satisfactory results was offline synch.  The process of creating synchronization modules, coupled with data consistency issues and the dependency of the reps to initiate the synch (some offerings had automatic sync, but that brought its own set of [...]

Late last week, I called into a customer service department that had your standard “please hold” IVR.  It had no options telling me how long the queue was, and, as typical, had the most generic and annoying hold music.  After about 20 minutes, I gave up, and hung up the phone in disgust.  It is [...]

It is no secret that direct marketing plays an important role in most companies’ marketing strategy.  Yet at the same, time, most forms of direct marketing are an annoyance to customers, so much so that laws have been passed heavily regulating the means of direct marketing via electronic channels (email, fax, and voice;  SMS can’t [...]

Reader John Moore, in a comment on my Social CRM Must Be Social post yesterday, pointed me to Paul Greenberg’s ZDNet post from earlier this week in which he put a stake in the ground, and declared that he was no longer going to engage in the debate on what the definition of Social CRM, [...]

Social CRM envisions a company interacting with its customers, and providing what can be perceived as casual interactions between a company and its customers.  The interactivity involved is crucial in implementing an effective social media strategy, and ignoring that facet of social media misses the point entirely.  All too often, I have seen companies implement [...]