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The Future Sales Force - A Consultative Approach
If your company uses a contact management or customer relationship management (CRM system), you need to ask one additional key question. Does your CRM or contact management system tie your consultative sales, ROI analysis and proposal production process together?
Provided by: Microsoft

True 360° Visibility: The Silver Bullet for SFA
For years, the mantra for SFA and CRM Systems has been to achieve a 360° view of the customer. The sad truth, however, is that traditional standalone Sales Force Automation solutions are not able to deliver this complete view for the sales force and leave major "blind spots" on key customer activity with the company.
Provided by: Netsuite

CRM Best Practices Adoption
Organizations continue to spend heavily on customer relationship management (CRM) - $11 billion annually by 2010 - to grow the top line, improve the customer experience, and boost the productivity of customer-facing workers. To better understand how enterprises can get the most value from this investment, we surveyed 260 business and technology decision-makers and influencers to discover their strengths and weaknesses in adopting 11 sets of CRM capabilities consisting of 150 best practices.
Provided by: Netsuite

Global CRM: Managing the Multi-National Sales Force
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) just isn’t what it used to be. Conceived as automated tools to help sales personnel maintain records of contacts, sales-related activities, and individual and team's progress toward goals and quotas, today's scope has become much more far reaching. Sophisticated marketing campaign management and total customer life cycle management have become entwined in the original sales force automation (SFA) roots.
Provided by: Netsuite

The Sales Benchmarking Primer
Right now and for the foreseeable future, corporations are and will continue to be deeply concerned about the overall economy and their profits. Throw on top of that possible changes to corporate tax liability and the picture gets murkier. With this uncertain environment, business leaders require greater accountability and transparency of their marketing and sales teams.
Provided by: Netsuite

A Buyer's Guide to Customer Relationship Management Solutions
With such a rapid deterioration in the economic environment, the 80/20 rule-that 80% of a business's profits are typically generated from 20% of its customers-is more important than ever. It's critical to know who those 20% are and maximize the value of those relationships while still driving cost-effective new customer acquisition.
Provided by: Netsuite

Customer Relationship Management: The Winning Strategy in a Challenging Economy
As the economic environment continues to fluctuate, many organizations are asking themselves what strategies they can pursue to bring tangible business benefits while taking stock of the economic conditions. While there is no magic pill or panacea, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions can provide the foundation for sustainable growth and enable organizations to survive and thrive in these uncertain times. Microsoft Dynamics® CRM provides organizations with an opportunity to improve their business by providing the right mix of features and platform flexibility along with strong corporate viability to help ensure long-term success.
Provided by: Microsoft

The Business Benefits of Software-as-a-Service: Making the Most of the On-Demand Advantage
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a growing phenomenon in worldwide business today. From the original ideas of outsourcing the data center and having third parties manage the software (the ASP movement of the turn of the century) to true SaaS today, the tsunami of outsourced IT and new methods of accessing business software solutions has created a multi-billion dollar market.
Provided by: Netsuite

Finally, a Simple Way to Deploy a Customer Contact Center
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review reported that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increased profits 25% to 95%. This article underscores an important business fact: the role of the contact center is beyond customer service, the contact center has revenue responsibilities. And, as the role of the contact center evolves, the transactions performed by contact centers evolve, ranging from taking orders, responding to marketing campaigns, and more interactions with customers.
Provided by: Contactual

Microsoft Dynamics® RoleTailored Interface Business Productivity
Companies excel when they empower their people to drive the business forward. Strategies, organization, motivation, and leadership all set the stage for business success. But to see results, you also have to give your people the right tools, information, and opportunities-because success ultimately comes down to your people. We call a business that fosters a winning environment a "people-ready business."
Provided by: Microsoft

Business Intelligence: The Key to Optimizing Sales, Marketing and Bottom Line Results
This white paper explores why actionable business intelligence is so critical in today's business environment and how Maximizer Software's customer relationship management (CRM) solution can be used to deliver actionable intelligence when and where it's needed most.
Provided by: Maximizer

How to Outsell the Competition: The Benchmarking Edge for Successful Sales Execution
Sales benchmarking represents a source of sustained competitive advantage for corporations today. The second largest cost item on a company's financial statement is SG&A expense which typically represents 30%-40% of revenue. This guide will help you in sales benchmark and improve your sales performance.
Provided by: Netsuite

How 5 Companies Increased Sales and Improved Productivity Using CRM Software
Learn how Senior Flexonics Pathway, Wilden Pump & Engineering, Ipsos-Reid, The Oxford Princeton Programme, and Connect Tech are winning with a customer-focused culture, redefined business processes, and CRM software tools.
Provided by: Maximizer

ERP End-User Business Productivity: A Field Study of SAP & Microsoft
In this white paper, measurements are discussed of how end users of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications describe the impact of Microsoft and SAP applications on their business productivity. This research found that Microsoft Dynamics® end users on average rated their experience with Microsoft® applications more favorably than SAP users rated their experience with SAP. These findings are based on a business productivity measurement framework developed by Keystone Strategy, working under the direction of Dr. Marco Iansiti, the David Sarnoff Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, and sponsored by Microsoft.
Provided by: Microsoft

CRM Success for Fast Growing Companies: What Every Small and Mid-Sized Company Needs to Know
This informative whitepaper discusses the technical challenges and lack of visibility that affect the creation of a successful customer experience through a seamless value chain, and how to tackle these issues. Learn how a successful value chain can be created by seamlessly integrating your business partners and implementing a customer focus.
Provided by: Netsuite

Yankee Group: Tying Order Management Is Critical to CRM
With Advanced Sales Forecasting software from NetSuite, you now have the ability to run accurate, up-to-the-second sales forecasts to address your most pressing business questions. As a result, you can manage your data, and your business with greater accuracy, speed, and confidence.
Provided by: Netsuite

Business at the Speed of Mobility: Business Drivers and Best Practices for Mobile CRM
Whether you are a frequent-flying executive or constantly on the road as a field sales or service staff, you understand the importance of getting real-time access to your customer information. Remain competitive and stay connected with the new technical advances of Mobile CRM to dramatically increase productivity, reduce downtime, and enable real-time updates regardless of location or time. Now, companies are able to take mobility to the next level - harnessing the same devices to see further business gains in productivity, customer satisfaction, and real-time updates - all linked to corporate information systems.
Provided by: Maximizer

5 Keys to Maximizing B2B Lead Conversion
Once a lead comes in the door, whose job is it to convert that lead to a sales opportunity: marketing or sales? The lead conversion black hole has long been cause for dispute between marketing and sales teams. Marketing will argue it has generated leads and passed it to sales. Sales will complain that leads aren't qualified. If this sounds like your organization, it's time to break down artificial departmental walls and work together on lead processing, qualification, follow-up, nurturing and processing so you can convert more leads into customers. With this white paper, you will learn five keys to improving lead management to win more deals.
Provided by: Maximizer

4 Steps to Monitoring Team Preformance to Accelerate Sales and Improve Customer Satisfaction
As a strategic business initiative, customer relationship management (CRM) software is designed to help companies accelerate sales while enabling staff to keep every customer satisfied. But your software is only as good as your business processes, and your processes are only good if employees are adhering to them. So monitoring your team's performance and tactical execution becomes critical - not only to the success of a CRM implementation - but to the growth and success of your business.

In this report, you will find four key steps to monitoring your sales and customer service teams in order to ensure they are on a path to success - to accelerate sales and improve customer satisfaction!
Provided by: Maximizer

3 Keys to Preparing for CRM Success: Avoid the Pitfalls and Follow Best Practices
In this white paper, Maximizer Software's consultants will share their insight, based on years of working with businesses of all sizes to successfully implement best practices in CRM. Learn how to establish project leadership, create a successful implementation roadmap, and work with staff to facilitate user adoption and positive change.
Provided by: Maximizer

Microsoft Dynamics® CRM Enterprise Performance and Scalability
Large enterprises often deploy multiple parallel CRM instances in order to meet the diverse needs of different business units or geographies. Distributed across multiple instances, a Microsoft Dynamics® CRM deployment can scale to meet the needs of the largest enterprises.
Provided by: Microsoft

On-Demand Contact Center Solutions: The Six Myths
Today, on-demand contact centers offer clear advantages over on-premise solutions. But commonly held myths about the superiority of on-premise solutions prevent many businesses from taking advantage of on-demand contact centers.
Provided by: Contactual

Win New Customers: A Four-Phase Approach to Sales Success
This CRM spotlight will help you understand specific ways your organization can adopt a four-phase approach based on sales effectiveness best practices that can be automated using Maximizer Software's customer relationship management (CRM) solution to boost your bottom line and remain competitive year after year.
Provided by: Maximizer

The Financial Realities of CRM: A Guide to Best Practices, TCO and ROI
This guide will help you gain insight into issues you need to consider before purchasing and implementing a CRM solution.
Provided by: Maximizer

Sales Forecasting for Your Business Advantage
With Advanced Sales Forecasting software from NetSuite, you now have the ability to run accurate, up-to-the-second sales forecasts to address your most pressing business questions. As a result, you can manage your data, and your business with greater accuracy, speed, and confidence.
Provided by: Netsuite

Don't Make a CRM Buying Mistake - 7 Points to Consider Before Selecting Your CRM Solution
Customer Relationship Management is one of the fastest growing sectors of the computer software industry. In order to gain a competitive edge, companies of all sizes are looking for ways to improve how they market, sell and provide service to their customers. Many are turning their attention to Customer Relationship Management software as a tool that will enable them to effectively manage their customer relationships before, during and after the sale.
Provided by: Commence

TCO of On-Demand Applications Is Significantly Better for SMBs and Mid-Market Enterprises
See why the Yankee Group says that the TCO for on-demand solutions is much better than that of traditional on-premises solutions - even when evaluated over a 3 to 5 year period. On-premises solutions require significant investments in IT infrastructure and application deployment, support and update resources.
Provided by: Netsuite

Effective Email Marketing Automation Online
Learn six effective email marketing techniques in this detailed 8-page report. Learn how you can send the right message---to the right market---at the right time, overcome the cherry picking problem and the three types leads, and more. Apply the principles in this report and get MANY more closed deals from your leads in less time!
Provided by: Infusion Software

How to NOT follow up and destroy YOUR business!
Until recently there has been no solution to help manage the complex tasks involved with multi-step, multi-media follow up. People have been forced to come up with "creative" ways to get the follow up done... and believe me, I've seen some amazing creativity. And now, just for you here are... "Six Highly Effective Ways YOU Can Effortlessly Destroy YOUR Business By Mismanaging Complex Prospect And Customer Follow Up!"
Provided by: Infusion Software

Business Perspectives - The Importance of Sales Qualification
The theme of the Workbooks 'Business Perspectives' series is sales and marketing effectiveness. That is - put simply - getting the best business result for the money you spend in your sales and marketing functions.
Provided by: Workbooks

Delivering a CRM Platform for a Flexible Workforce
Modern customer relationship management (CRM) applications have come a long way from their humble origins in the early '90s as basic contact managers that were enabled to run on a single hardware platform. The more advanced CRM solutions of today can manage and assimilate all information derived through customer interactions with the sales, marketing, service, and support teams of a business into a single repository and have been designed to run not on one, but multiple client platforms.
Provided by: Brainsell

How 5 Companies Increased Revenue and Profitability with Maximizer Enterprise
In this white paper, learn how companies in different industries were able to build their processes inside Maximizer Enterprise in order to improve productivity and in turn, meet their sales revenue and growth objectives.
Provided by: Maximizer

CRM Select Smart: Applying Lessons Learned in CRM Projects
The road to implementing customer relationship management systems is fraught with risk and littered with failure. Paradoxically, reams have been written by industry practitioners extolling the reasons "Why CRM projects fail," yet the same patterns repeat themselves over and over. While there is no magic pill, simple guidelines can help assure CRM success.
Provided by: Aplicor

Software As A Service: Changing The Paradigm In The Software Industry
In this report, we offer industry perspectives on what constitutes software as a service, including the evolving business model and the core value proposition, the overall landscape including major participants and market growth, and analysis of competitive trends. The report also includes a spotlight of the on-demand CRM sector as well as a review of some of the other software categories with specific company examples and our viewpoint on the keys for success.
Provided by: Model Metrics

Optimizing CRM Processes with e-Intelligence
The Internet has fundamentally changed the way we do business, and it has created huge opportunities for entirely new business models, from Web portals to e-commerce. Many of these new companies have succeeded, and many have failed, but this first wave of the Internet economy has set the stage for even more innovation and success throughout all sectors of business. As exciting as the dot-com revolution was, the Internet continues to provide an even greater opportunity for more traditional businesses.
Provided by: TechExcel

eCitizen Whitepaper
The C2 eCitizen solution helps Government agencies "do more with less" in an ever increasing environment where citizens are demanding better service and more accurate information for their tax dollars. Agency management and elected officials must find ways to deliver and track the success of projects and citizen satisfaction through the use of tools and by leveraging technology. The C2 eCitizen solution applies Customer Relationship Management techniques and tools perfected in the commercial sector that are proven to increase customer loyalty to the government sector, therefore increasing citizen satisfaction.
Provided by: C2CRM

CRM Defining the Value of Customer Loyalty
Before we begin our discussion ask yourself this question: What does Customer Relationship Management (CRM) mean to me and what is its value? Thousands of companies have endeavored down this same path many successful and others not. The reason may lie in the fact that CRM is sometimes viewed incorrectly and not fully understood. This paper will provide some insights to consider about the value of CRM in defining customers, increasing loyalty and increasing profits.
Provided by: C2CRM

The Payoffs of a Single View
Simply put, developing a real-time solution to feed a single view of your customer is the best way to stay relevant and effective for all customer-facing activities. In this whitepaper, we will detail the single view strategies of several global companies that have successfully applied the vision to achieve that view and the technology to enable it: Bell Canada, Turkcell, Essilor and Interval International.
Provided by: Infor

Improving Marketing Results with CRM
Marketing is not perceived as an exacting science. Many times, marketing plans, campaigns and other activities are planned from guesswork or past "experiences". As a result, money can be quickly wasted on marketing initiatives which were poorly conceived and poorly executed.
Provided by: C2CRM

An Executive View of CRM
This document focuses on key "pains" often experienced by executives in an organization and how CRM can help solve those pains.
Provided by: C2CRM

SaaS in Australia: Is it the next big thing? (AUS/NZ Specific)
To discover what is driving SaaS uptake locally, this paper introduces the SaaS Market Index for Australia. We plan to upgrade the Index each year to track the progress of SaaS adoption in the local market in terms of awareness, usage, business impact and satisfaction.
Provided by: Salesforce.com

Can On-Demand Transform CIOs Into Chief Innovation Officers?
Companies don’t want to invest in information technology merely to maintain the status quo. IT must fuel innovation so that the business can respond to new opportunities and adapt to changing requirements. Too often, however, IT departments are infrastructure mills, with most of their resources bound up in the rote exercises of maintaining hardware, patching software, tuning databases and running backups.
Provided by: Salesforce.com

Connecting Your Teams with TechExcel CRM
To stay competitive in today's business climate companies must make effective use of their customer-related information. Unfortunately, that information does not always flow easily between departments; details valuable to one group may be locked up in the departmental "data silo" of another. Implementing a customercentric business strategy requires a truly integrated CRM solution to connect teams, unlock the data silos, and enable collaboration.
Provided by: TechExcel

Leveraging an On-Demand Platform for Enterprise Architecture... Preparing for the Change
The notion of enterprise architecture is changing quickly. What was once a concept of technologies and interconnections existing within the firewall is morphing into something that’s more dynamic and valuable to those building enterprise architectures. This technology is known as an on-demand platform, a way of doing architecture that will both increase efficiencies and innovation, while at the same time reducing costs.
Provided by: Salesforce.com

The Seven Standards of On-Demand Service Delivery
The technology industry has changed dramatically over the last 10 years. Leading compnies have come to depend on on-demand servicese to perform many business functions, form sales force automation to complete enterprise CRM and beyond. With this growth in etnerprise use of on-demand applications comes a corresponding increase in responsibility on the part of on-demand vendors to provide first-class service delivery.
Provided by: Salesforce.com

What Went Wrong with B2B?
The failure of B2B companies is garnering almost as much press as the failure of B2C companies did a year earlier. As late as last summer, financial research reports touted the ability of the B2B companies to survive and excel in a troubled financial market. Since that time, high-flying B2B companies have lost as much or more value than their B2C cousins. How could this happen?
Provided by: Lisle Technology

Intellectual Property And The Entrepreneur: Make Sure You Own What You Think You Own
As an advisor and consultant to entrepreneurs I often come across the following situation: an entrepreneur has a good idea and good market, but does not own the Intellectual Property (IP) at the core of the idea. In this situation, the naïve entrepreneurs dismiss ownership as something that doesn’t matter and the clever ones think they can finesse their way around not having it. Neither approach works because both approaches will eventually cause investors to be skeptical and potentially bring unwanted legal action.
Provided by: Lisle Technology

Survey Reveals Needs of Mid-Market Companies
Lisle Technology Partners undertook a survey of mid-market companies. The survey was performed through focus groups and interviews. The objective was to find out what Information Technology (IT) issues are on the minds of CIOs and CFOs at these companies. We nterviewed CIOs and CFOs representing around 20 different companies. This paper lists the major findings of that survey.
Provided by: Lisle Technology

Continuous Customer Dialogues - Strategies for Growth and Loyalty in Multi-Channel Customer-Oriented Organizations
The continuous customer dialogue vision brings together strategic issues such as customer profiling, Customer Data Integration (CDI), and multi-channel, closed-loop, and real-time marketing into a single comprehensive framework. Learn more in this whe paper.
Provided by: Infor

Seamless Customer Conversations - Driving Intelligent Interactions in the Contact Center
Smart companies are realizing that to retain valued customers and boost bottom-line growth, they must empower the contact center, where customer-facing agents have the best opportunity to build stronger relationships with existing customers, capture higher revenue, and reduce churn. Learn more.
Provided by: Infor

CRM Decision-Maker Guide
This publication will provide an overview and guidance to a successful CRM strategy for your company. It is very important to make sure there are measurements for success to realize your business vision and take small steps before you leap into a new project. By building CRM strategy on small successes, you will mitigate your risk into a large undertaking. The buy-in from key personnel in your organization, specifically senior-management will be a tremendous help on your path to CRM success.
Provided by: Majestic

Sage Saleslogix Guidebook - Nucleus Research
Sage SalesLogix CRM steamlines the sales process and integrates customer data into a single repository for sales, marketing, and customer service, enabling compaines to better acquire, retain and develop customer relationships. Best practices for achieving value from SalesLogix include leveraging integration and customization; moving beyond sales to support, service, and marketing; and thinking strategically about training.
Provided by: Majestic

The Cost of Ignoring Aged Leads
In a recent Forrester Best Practices document, "Improving B2B Lead Management," the authors lay out a "Lead Management Maturity Model" describing four levels of lead management Maturity based on whether and how companies acquire, qualify, evaluate, and identify "the hottest leads" for sales.
Provided by: SoftVu

Sage SalesLogix - Build Loyal Relationships with Sage SalesLogix
Sage SalesLogix, an award-winning Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, provides a complete view of customer interactions across your entire organization-from sales and marketing to customer service and support-to help you acquire, retain, and develop profitable customer relationships. Whether your employees are conducting an in-person sales call, creating a marketing campaign, responding to a billing inquiry, or resolving service issues, they'll always have the information they need to perform their jobs effectively and deliver outstanding customer experiences.
Provided by: Majestic

Increasing Close Rates for On-Line Lenders
You're looking to refinance the mortgage on your home. You call your local bank, and sure enough, you can save a significant amount of money by refinancing. You’ve also seen the LendingTree, ELOAN, and DiTech ads on TV, so you check out the possibilities on-line. A Google search with key words "refinance best interest rates" returns 1.3 million pages and more than 50 paid AdWords ads for on-line lenders.
Provided by: SoftVu

On-Demand Contact Center Technology: 5 Evaluation Criteria
You have already decided that an ondemand contact center solution is right for your company; now you have to evaluate the available contact center technology alternatives. Beyond the musthave features to meet your current and future business needs, there are several critical technology criteria to evaluate.
Provided by: Contactual

Spam & The New Pony Express
Nowadays, the main thing that can go wrong with delivering email is that at some point along the trail your message may be interpreted as spam. It doesn’t matter that you know you’re not sending out spam, or that you and your recipient knows each other. As far as firewalls and filters are concerned, if it looks like spam, it’s spam.
Provided by: SoftVu

An Executive Perspective
The concept of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has been around for years, but the term is relatively new. So new in fact, there is really no one definition for what Customer Relationship Management actually is. Want to test this theory and have some fun? Ask four executives to describe what CRM means to them and you will get four different answers. The one thing that is clear, however, is that Customer Relationship Management has become one of the most talked about and fastest growing segments of the software and services industry.
Provided by: Commence

Getting Back to Basics
As an executive who has spent more than twenty years in the software industry, I often look back at several of the technologies I have been involved with and marvel at the hype, buzz, and aura that accompanised their birth and their inevitable death. Remember Artifical Intelligence (AI), one of the biggest buzz - words of the 80's? How about Computer Aided Software Engeineering (CASE)? These technologies rarely got implemented even though companies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars attempting to do so. At the time, industry analysts had us all believing that these technologies were as important as the coming of the Messiah, yet all that remainds of them are distant memories.
Provided by: Commence

Six Points To Consider
Some CRM Solutions are designed for large enterprises and have only recently been scaled down to fit the budget and simpler needs of smaller businesses. A system designed from the ground up for small to midsized companies is more likely to suit your requirements for rapid implementation, ease of use, and low cost of ownership.
Provided by: Commence

Microsoft Dynamics® Enabling Real-World SOA to connect your business vision with software
Download this whitepaper to learn more about the tools and technologies that can enable service orientation. The paper shows the value of Real-World SOA and includes success stories from our customers who have taken this approach to support their business vision.
Provided by: Microsoft

SSPA Executive Insight
In this paper, SSPA Research and Salesforce.com will explore the evolution of self-service, how Web 2.0 can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, and the role of OnDemand in enabling a new era of support: Customer Service 2.0.
Provided by: Salesforce.com