Are you still using cold calling for sales? Do you have a strategy when approaching potential customers over the phone or is it mostly a shot in the dark? Are you aware that you can use social media for sales, which has advantages over cold calling?

In order to answer these questions, let’s take a look at how cold calling and social media can help you with three of the most important rules of selling.

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Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Martin Schneider, Senior Director of Communications at SugarCRM where he provided information about the company, Sugar 6 (latest version), and social customer relationship management (SCRM). In this first up close and personal blog post, Martin will discuss what made Sugar CRM the most successful open source CRM product and one of the best CRM products in the market.

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It’s a really noisy world we’re living in, and the social media universe is no exception. Even with the tightest security settings and minimal online presence/popularity, you are still subject to advertising, invites, recommendations, requests, etc., most of which are not very useful to you.

And things will only get worse: Twitter will start selling followers, Facebook launched Facebook Marketing Solutions to help brands and companies promote their products and services… this will create even more noise in the social media world. Read the rest of this entry »

If you have decided to use social customer relationship management (SCRM) to sell your products or services, you should be ready to adapt to what your customers consider SCRM to be, not vice versa.

As I mentioned in my post Social CRM is Dead, Long Live Social Media Flavored CRM, I see the “social” in SCRM as being related to human welfare and not only to social media. Therefore, SCRM should not only allow me to use social media when interacting with companies and brands, but it should also allow both companies and their customers (potential or existing) to have a positive impact on human welfare. Read the rest of this entry »

During an asset’s life cycle, you can save money acquiring, using, and disposing of it at the right time. When your activities do not require many assets, it is easy to understand what the optimal use of an asset is, but when you use sophisticated tools; heavy machinery; and hundreds of trucks and forklifts things can get a lot more complicated.

Depending on how you use it, any tool or equipment can have a utility ranging from useless, if you keep in its box, to extremely useful, if you know where, when, and how to use it. Traditional enterprise asset management systems (EAM) or computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) cannot always provide the answers to the questions above. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve all had bad experiences with customer service yet we still expect them to be great each time we call. I’m not saying that we should expect the worst, but maybe we should think of the following things before getting angry, frustrated, or homicidal (as someone said at the CRMe10 conference yesterday): Read the rest of this entry »

Being a human resources (HR) and customer relationship management (CRM) analyst is definitely a privilege. I get to follow the trends from these two different business areas, which (incidentally) have many things in common: employees are a company’s internal customers, recruiting is campaign management for the workforce, privacy data about customers and employees is equally sensitive, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

According to Paul Greenberg, an expert in customer relationship management (CRM) and social CRM (SCRM), the term “social customer” was coined by Chris Carfi “some six or seven years ago.”

But before being social customers, we are social media users—we use Facebook, Twitter, create blogs and comments on Web sites, and sometimes we can even integrate some of these tools and make them work together. Unfortunately, this is not an easy thing to do and if you use three or more social media tools, you will have a hard time integrating all of them (or most of them). Why? When a social media company launches a new product, they want to keep their followers, users, etc. and they would rather not share them with others (for instance, Twitter has an application that lets you find followers on Facebook, which was recently blocked by Facebook). Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you have a small network with a couple of printers and a fax machine, or a sophisticated shop floor using robots, cranes, etc., you have to make sure your assets are functioning properly. One of the main challenges is finding the right spare part to repair your equipment.

There are two facts that are certain in the enterprise asset management (EAM) world: 1. your equipment will break sooner or later; and 2. it will eventually become obsolete. It is common knowledge that when your equipment becomes obsolete, you need to replace it and when they break, they need to be repaired. Furthermore, one would expect companies to always have spare parts available for repairs, but it is not always the case. Let’s take a look at why this may happen. Read the rest of this entry »

We all recommend or have been recommended at some point in our professional lives, but have you ever thought about the hidden consequences a recommendation can have on the person you recommend?

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Although malpractice is usually a term used in medicine, its definition (“any instance of improper professional conduct”) shows that the term can be used in any profession. In my opinion, malpractice can also be found in customer relationship management (CRM).  It can result in financial damage (lost sales, penalties for not delivering on time, etc.) or loss of confidence, which can jeopardize the relationships between companies and their customers.

Here’s an example of improper professional conduct I witnessed when dealing with my bank.

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Maximizer probably needs no introduction, but I will do it anyway for people who are not very familiar with the customer relationship management (CRM) space. It was founded in 1987 and is one of the CRM pioneers that created personal information management systems (PIM) and opportunity management systems. The first version of the product (3.0, launched in 1996, one year after the acquisition of the Maximizer product line from Modatech Systems) was promoted as “a full-featured contact management system with activity scheduling.”

Many things have changed since 1996, including: Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I had a briefing with Jerome Ternynck (MrTed’s chief executive officer [CEO]) about the company and Version 9 of its product TalentLink. One key statement that Jerome made on talent acquisition was that before you manage talent, you need to make sure you acquire the right people for your company. Many human capital management (HCM) vendors have talent acquisition functionality as part of their offering, but MrTed specializes in this first and essential step of the talent management spectrum.

A Little Bit of History

MrTed was founded in 1999 by two recruitment specialists—Frederic Trinel and Jerome Ternynck. In 2000, MrTed raised a significant amount of venture capital and released MrTed’s flagship product called MrTedTalentLink (in November 2000). Read the rest of this entry »

If you do a search on the famous phrase “You can’t handle the truth!” from the movie A Few Good Men, you will find it in a list of useless movie quotes. Ironically, it was also voted as the twenty-ninth greatest movie quote of all time by the American Film Institute. Read the rest of this entry »

Montreal, QC — April 1, 2010 — Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC), a world-wide leader in enterprise software evaluation, has released a new decision support system for pragmatic decision makers who already know what’s most important for their company: jDICE™ (just Decide—Ignore [Your Idiot] Customers and Employees).

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