Best of CRM: June 1st

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Every week, we recount some of the best buzz around CRM and data integration. We’ll review our favorite articles and share the most pressing findings or key takeaways from each.

17 Tips for Achieving Social CRM Success
By: Jennifer Lonoff Schiff (@JenniferLSchiff)
Drawing on the expertise of social media and CRM experts, Jennifer shares tips on how to succeed with social CRM. The article includes advice ranging the more straightforward and high level “make sure you have a good platform for conducting social CRM” to tactical advice like “use list and group features” and “use social profile data to augment contact information.” Perhaps most important for companies excitedly embracing social CRM is the insight from Mark Smith, president of Provenir, who cautions that social media isn’t always the right channel to use to connect with today’s omni-channel customer.

CRM 2013: Growing Customers = Growing Revenues
By: Kfir Bar-Levav
Kfir provides a list of several CRM trends emerging (or continuing) in 2013 as businesses shift their focus to become increasingly customer-centric. These trends include a rise in Mobile CRM applications, more companies embracing cloud-based CRM, expanding data sources to create a 360 degree customer view, a shift towards company-wide CRM use and predictive over analytical BI. With the increased knowledge and power CRM provides, companies must remember to invest in the right people for the job – the employees in sales, customer service and other customer-facing departments.

CFOs Join CMOs in Tech Power Grab
By: Doug Henschen (@DHenschen)
At this point everyone has heard Gartner’s prediction that CMOs will outspend CIOs on tech by 2017. This article throws CFOs into the tech decision mix according to a new study from Longitude Research. The study found a large portion of CFOs placing more importance on big data, analytics and other areas of tech that the CMO and CIO focus on. One key takeaway is that, like the shifting dynamic between the CMO and the CIO, increased influence in tech investment from the CFO doesn’t have to hurt the CIO, and in fact provides more opportunities for the CIO to align the C-suite on IT investments to ensure faster decision-making and a better end result.

Five Conferences 2013: Infor One and Infor All
By: Paul Greenberg (@pgreenbe)
This review of Infor’s Inforum 2013 conference analyzes how close the company is to becoming one of the Big 5. Infor’s play for the majors comes as they recently created their own internal design agency with creative rather than tech types, which coincides with their announcement at the conference of Infor 10.x (with a much improved UI for CRM and all their offerings). The company also announced their decision to target micro-verticalization. However, they didn’t focus on CRM at the conference, and although they currently offer a strong CRM product, to make it to the next level Paul suggests they need to give their CRM the resources it needs, improve their CRM thought leadership and build out partnerships/products to enable better customer service and knowledge management capabilities.

Points to Ponder for a Successful Microsoft Dynamics CRM Deployment
By: Don Carnevale
This post from Don Carnevale of BroadPoint Technologies provides tips for a successful Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment. The tips include designing the system correctly based on organizational needs, understanding that the time for development phase happens in stages rather than all at once, and implementing a live solution that caters to a broad range of users across different functionalities, and not just one subset of employees. While Don provides these tips specifically for Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation, they hold true across other CRM solutions as well.


We hope you had a great week! We’ll see you again soon with a roundup of all the movers and shakers in CRM and data integration news.

Peter Chase
Peter founded Scribe Software along with Jim Clarke in the beginning of 1996. As Executive Vice President, Business Development, Peter is responsible for establishing and growing partnerships with other leading technology companies in support of Scribe's overall market and product strategy. Prior to founding Scribe, Peter held senior positions in sales, product marketing, and finance at SNAP Software, an early pioneer in CRM software that was acquired by Dun and Bradstreet. He has published numerous articles and whitepapers and is a frequent speaker and panelist at industry events.

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