If you have a small or mid-sized business (5+) sales people, you should be using a sales force automation (SFA) system. It just isn’t enough to use a white board as your sales pipeline report anymore. Tracking sales and improving closing rates requires more power than a whiteboard can provide.
Now that the Web has brought [...]

I’ve recently had a lot of questions about the difference between CRM and SFA and which one is right for your company. "CRM" is so broadly used these days it’s really hard to completely wrap your head around it.
Let’s start with a couple of basic definitions:

CRM - Customer Relationship Management is about finding, getting, and [...]

Inherent tensions exist between marketing and IT. This is often compounded by lots of cross-talk, with each function on different channels. When tension becomes unresolved conflict, CRM strategy is impossible to execute. To avoid clashes, it helps to understand that CRM is not just about the exchange of information, it’s about the exchange of relationships. [...]

In order to maintain a successful business, the business must understand and maintain a positive relationship with its customers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the process of bringing the customer and the company closer together. There are many different areas in which Customer Relationship Management can be implemented. The goal of CRM is to help [...]

The total Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market will reach $18.1 billion by 2006, representing an annual growth rate of 29.9 percent, according to the 2005 CRM Market Forecast and Analysis prepared by IDC, the world’s leading provider of information technology data and analysis. It is highly unlikely, however, that the CRM market will reach the [...]

M&As left remote access provider Tarantella in an information silo trance; a new CEO called on a CRM solution to cast a customer-centricity spell.
Why CRM?The new CEO who took over our company a little over a year ago decided the way we were doing things was too scattered and that a CRM application was needed. [...]

Who better to ask about customer relationship management than users who have been through a CRM rollout? Executives share their advice for a thriving CRM rollout.
To share some real-world experiences, we talked to three IT executives who have successfully implemented CRM software: Craig Berkson, CIO of Thomson Financial’s Portfolio Solutions Group; Ned Liddell, vice president [...]

You’ve already decided to implement CRM but you still dont know which flavor suits your needs. An on-premise solution with Salesforce.com CRM or another vendor, or perhaps a hosted CRM service. How do you select the best deployment method?
Is a hosted solution the best option?Its true, hosted solutions offer a fast deployment, but where [...]

CRM buyers, already burdened by understanding the differences in functionality between applications, the complexity of integration requirements and the various costs associated with the product are now facing another variable — how they purchase the software.
Traditionally purchased in bulk licenses with maintenance and support costs added on from year to year, CRM has also [...]

Everyone will have to integrate "If there’s an enterprise-level strategy in place, then there is going to be integration," Greenberg says. The only alternative is throwing out everything, which is highly unlikely given the money companies have invested in legacy systems.
Integration is necessary whenever a newer system is fed data from these older systems [...]