CRM sales hit $23.2 billion in 2014, an increase of 13.3 percent from 2013, according to Gartner. The research firm expects CRM’s healthy growth to accelerate even more, reaching sales of $36.5 billion by 2017. In fact, CRM leads all…
Businesses should give priority to advocacy marketing in their marketing budgets, Gartner analyst Hank Barnes wrote last January. “… Customers trust peers more than they trust you,” he pointed out, noting that buyers surveyed by Gartner named industry peers as…
Buying enterprise software without also addressing underlying business processes tends to cause more problems than it solves. An issue in any software initiative, it can be especially problematic with CRM since customer-facing roles tend to lack the kind of well-defined…
Mobile is becoming an increasingly important part of customer service. A recent survey of U.S. adults by Software Advice, a company owned by Gartner that researches and reviews help desk software, found 77 percent of those ages 18 to 24…
Many marketing departments operate more like multiple standalone departments, focusing on different areas like social media, content marketing and demand generation, instead of as a unified department with a cohesive strategy. This lack of cohesion makes it tough to understand…
The CRM marketplace is odd. While it’s dominated by some well-established heavyweights, it is also swarming with hundreds of upstart startups and more established, yet little-known, vendors. What explains the unusual makeup of this market? Five big boys account for…
Mobile marketing is beginning to really take off. According to eMarketer, in 2015 mobile ad spending in the U.S. will grow 50 percent to hit $28.72 billion, accounting for 49 percent of all digital ad spending. By 2019, mobile ad…
Most of us use embedded data analytics frequently as consumers. For instance, a travel search site like Kayak lets us search for flight information in one place instead of visiting multiple websites, using search parameters for items such as price,…
Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, introduced in 2008, is the granddaddy of enterprise application stores, marketplaces where users can download a wide variety of business apps. According to the company, the AppExchange ecosystem has generated over $1 billion for Salesforce and developers who…
Online app stores have exploded onto the technology scene over the last half a dozen years. More recently enterprise app stores have become a thing. As a result, millions of people download and install applications onto their mobile devices, laptops…