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How do they do this? That's all I want to know ...

Some of the challenges that app companies face, especially cloud front- and back-office companies, include data location and security. A cloud business linked directly to end customers might not see this, but service providers like financial institutions and telcos, integrators, and independent software vendors (ISVs) experience this regularly. They are both the customers of and vendors to others of cloud services...

CloudWorld, Oracle's rebranded user conference, kicks off this week in Las Vegas. The venue change during Covid also changed the vibe of the conference that once dominated San Francisco, but it's for the best ...

Salesforce is reinventing itself. Again ...

If you are reading this, you know Salesforce at least superficially. If you know the company just a little bit better, you know it is over twenty years old and practically singlehandedly invented cloud computing ...

Oracle's recent acquisition of Cerner for north of $28 billion plus layoffs in the CX business tells a story. How you read that story might tell you a good deal about the future of the CRM/CX world -- and you don't want to get this wrong ...

It's hard to see how Oracle's recent layoffs, especially those in the CX business would not benefit the larger CRM vendor space. There is nothing definitive here other than less spending and less labor chasing the same number of deals. Other vendors like Salesforce will naturally move to fill any vacuum created by the news ...

Over the winter, in the (hopefully) waning days of the pandemic, we at Beagle Research did a study of selling. Oracle sponsored the study and it included responses from more than 500 sales professionals and their managers ...

Software systems come and go ...

My last piece took modern selling to task because experience tells me there's too much emphasis on lead generation and not nearly enough on doing things that result in closing deals ...

This reminds me of that old joke about the guy who couldn't make ice because he lost the recipe. Selling is something we humans have done since the species climbed down from the trees and onto the savannah ...

The CRM vendor community seems to be trying to welcome us back to normalcy by priming the selling pump with new marketing tools. It makes sense. Marketing is the beginning of the pipeline that brings in revenue, so why not? ...

My analyst life has an interesting ebb and flow, as do most professional lives, I believe. My most productive times are when I work head-down on a project, drilling into sometimes arcane aspects of the market. From that comes unique information that I share with clients first, then more generally later. Other times, I'm swimming in the general pool of CRM, explaining my research and learning from others...

For some reason, McKinsey & Company publishes a newsletter-report on weekends that I dutifully read when I should be watching sports or otherwise recreating. Call it a busman's holiday. They call it "The Week in Charts" with the nerdy subtitle, "All the Week's Data That's Fit to Visualize." I love it ...

A long time ago, before CRM and very early in my sales career, someone pointed out that customers are at the bottom of the food chain. It was not a profound idea; we just kind of chuckled and moved on, but obviously, it has stuck with me ...

It's time -- past time, really -- to reevaluate sales force automation and maybe consider a new path. That's not as dire as it sounds though ...

We're at an inflection point that affects almost all of us. Should we return to the office en mass? Continue working at home? Further develop a hybrid approach to working from anywhere? ...

When you consider a sphere, it's well understood in math and physics that surface area increases by the square of the radius while the volume increases by the cube. In other words, what's inside expands faster than what you see on the surface by a considerable amount ...

Last time we examined at a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis that looked into the Great Retirement ...

CRM has become big enough to generate a significant shadow. When an idea like putting customers in the center of our universe takes hold, we see ripple effects everywhere in the culture. Nobody wants to be in favor of something else ...