The best-designed CRM system in the world is useless if you can’t get your employees to actually use it. And yet companies routinely underestimate the time and expense that this crucial step to CRM success requires. In fact, AMR Research senior analyst Louis Columbus says that if you broke out a pie chart for the […]

Traditional CRM comes with hardware, software and, oftentimes, the headaches associated with protracted installations and integration snafus. Hosted CRM offers an alternative: buy access to software on a subscription basis and log on to the apps via the Internet. Sounds simpler, right? But the hosted model presents its own separate set of challenges, not the […]

A Butler Group report found that 70 percent of CRM implementations fail. A Gartner study found that approximately 55 percent of all CRM projects failed to meet software customers’ expectations. In a Bain & Company survey of 451 senior executives last year, CRM ranked in the bottom three categories among 25 popular tools evaluated for […]

With C-level executives, CFOs in particular, taking a greater interest in their organizations’ investments, pressure for return on investment (ROI) numbers hits the usual functions — production, sales, human resources and information technology — and marketing, which is being held to greater accountability for its spending.
Because of this executive involvement in decision making and a […]

Among the many announcements recently made by Siebel is the fact that Siebel 8.0 will be available in 2006, replete with a new user interface and improved business-process tools.
But the company still has challenges to address, said Yankee Group’s Sheryl Kingstone. According to her analysis of the information presented at Siebel’s annual user week, these […]

AMR Research estimates that 40 percent of companies are using hosted Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications. The hosted model differs from traditional licensed software because applications are served over the web from an off-premises provider. Software companies such as salesforce.com and more recently Siebel, with its On-Demand product, have popularized this model for CRM.

No one knows hype better than Marc Benioff, the ebullient CEO of Salesforce.com (CRM:NYSE). Benioff is so self-confident he once tried to use the Dalai Lama as part of a marketing campaign.
The idea fell through, but not before it generated more publicity than the campaign itself would have produced. Some months earlier, he enlisted […]