Salesforce has announced Salesforce Social.com, a product designed for social advertising and meant to enhance Salesforce Marketing Cloud. To date, Salesforce Marketing Cloud includes social listening (Salesforce Radian6), publishing (Salesforce Buddy Media), and social advertising (Social.com). Read the rest of this entry »

ReachForce, a vendor of business-to-business (B2B) data solutions for marketers, has made public its acquisition of SetLogik, which provides cloud-based data and analytics solutions. ReachForce’s Connected Marketing Data Hub has thus be launched with capabilities such as continuous data quality management and predictive marketing capabilities.

It is well known that lead information can quickly become obsolete, generating frustration among sales reps.  Read the rest of this entry »

Neolane has introduces a series of enhancements for its marketing analytics platform. The solution was designed to help marketers plan, target, execute, and measure personalized messages across channels. According to the press release, new enhancements eliminate the need to rely on the expertise of data scientists or information technology (IT) staff while permitting marketers to usebig data directly. Read the rest of this entry »

Kentico successfully completed the TEC Certification process for its Enterprise Marketing Solution (EMS) version 7. Evolving for nearly a decade now, Kentico’s Web content management (WCM) solution has progressed significantly. The company’s well-rounded offering and attainable pricing (designed for a variety of scenarios) has helped it expand its client base.

If you’re evaluating WCM applications, you should download this free certification report to find out more about Kentico’s offering. You can also evaluate the product for your own requirements using TEC Advisor free of charge. Read the rest of this entry »

Oracle’s attempt to tackle the customer experience cloud market has been advanced with the new acquisition of cloud-based marketing automation solutions provider Eloqua. Oracle expects to achieve an extensive product, which will help companies market, sell, and support their customers. The solution should be able to offer multi-channel and personalized client interactions. Read the rest of this entry »

The marketing automation provider Marketo introduces Marketo Program Exchange, a new addition to its Marketing Nation platform. Marketing Nation is a free-of-charge network that can be joined by any Marketo customer. Marketo Program Exchange provides users with access to a pre-built marketing programs library. These templates have been created and deemed as best-of-breed by Marketo customers.

The press release states that the templates were verified and optimized based on the experience of 21,000 users who engaged with them. The members of the network can either use the existing content or further develop it. With this offering, Marketo acknowledges the importance of a collective that includes its customers as active contributors to product and service development. So far, more than 2,000 companies have joined the Marketo network.

Part 1 of this series analyzed two white papers entitled “Customer Relationship Management: The Winning Strategy in a Challenging Economy” and “Maximizing CRM Effectiveness During Lean Times” and authored by Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Oracle CRM, respectively. The blog post made the case for forward-looking enterprises to leverage customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to help them both weather the ongoing storm and prepare for the inevitable turnaround.

In addition to several macroeconomic trends that seem to be helping CRM solutions prove their worth, the post also analyzed the recent technological enablers that are making CRM offerings more affordable, flexible, and easy to use. In addition to concluding the technical discussion and trends, Part 2 then introduced five main CRM strategies that companies can employ to survive and thrive during uncertain economic conditions, starting with the focus on existing customers. Part 3 concludes this series by analyzing the remaining four CRM strategies. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series discussed the current upbeat state of affairs of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, as one of the three best-performing products within the entire Microsoft Corporation of late. In a nutshell, during 2009 the product grew significantly and surpassed its one millionth user. Microsoft’s customer relationship management (CRM) offering has become attractive to companies of all sizes, in part because it offers multiple deployment options (with bidirectional migration options due to the same code base).

The underlying technology developments mentioned in Part 1 have enabled the rapid innovation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM in many ways. The first illustration of the rapid innovation is the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online offering, which was launched in April 2008 and has since had four feature pack releases (or service updates).

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While Microsoft Corporation has not usually been that forthcoming about breaking down its revenues per individual product lines, during one earnings announcement call for financial analysts in 2009, the worldwide leader in software, services, and solutions for people and businesses pointed out the following three products as its best performers: SharePoint, Microsoft Unified Communications, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. In fact, as stated in my previous blog post on Microsoft’s technology for enterprise applications, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics AX (formerly Axapta) already have built-in unified communications (UC) traits and collaborative SharePoint portal capabilities.

Microsoft claims that its so-called “CRM+” combination (i.e., Dynamics CRM and SharePoint) has become a compelling customer value proposition. The entire Microsoft Dynamics portfolio is now an over US$1 billion business with more than 300,000 worldwide customers and 10,000+ business partners. Still, the entire Dynamics line of business had a 7 percent decline in Fiscal 2009 (although Microsoft has kept almost religiously mum on providing financial data on individual Dynamics product lines). 

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