Articles by Chris Bucholtz

This week, Salesforce used its annual Dreamforce mega-show to make a host of announcements, ranging from contact center partnership with Amazon to a smart speaker tool for sales. For the most part, the keynote featured practical applications of Salesforce technology. Some Dreamforces focus on the highly aspirational; others focus on the ways to at...

It's easy to take things you see every day for granted. We take the sun rising and setting for granted, for instance, and that's a good thing because it helps us organize our lives However, in business, taking things for granted is a hazard. Change is everything these days, and that means the concepts you take as constants may not be as constant as...

Recent events have resulted in many people learning about a long-understood rhetorical tactic called "Gish galloping." Named after creationist Duane Gish, it is the technique of confronting an opponent with a rapid-fire series of arguments -- including half-truths, misrepresentations and outright lies Confronted with such a BS barrage, the opponent...

A depressing number of people think that the be-all and end-all of CRM is the CRM application. While CRM software is a vital tool, CRM itself is really a discipline: It's the cultivation of the customer relationship and the management of customer data to create better experiences for the customer and to generate better results for the business The ...

The customer experience battle is being fought in the contact center. Whether it's a service line or an inside sales call, making first contact, the phone is often the medium that matters in moments of truth When customers are speaking with an inside sales representative or an agent in a support organization, the ideal interaction is often describe...

Top CRM Blogs of 2018: Countdown, Part 1 The Top 10 blogs on our top 20 list are written by people well known to CRM professionals. There's a reason for that: In order to understand and appreciate the discipline of CRM, you must be a person who values other people, and part of valuing people is being able to communicate with them....

After several years of instability on this list, 2018 saw things settle down a bit. In past years, blogs would make the list for a flurry of great posts one year, then fizzle the next. Sometimes, bloggers would change careers and their CRM content would dry up. Once in a while, a great blogger would get hired by a major vendor and see his or her output bent to fit the corporate line.

Sales talent for a long time has been broken up into three groups: A-players, B-players and C-players. Everyone loves the A-players -- they're the ones who bring home the bacon, after all. The B-players show promise and, with the right training and motivation, could become A-players. The C-players? Well the less said, the better This simplistic met...

Before I was a parent, I was a youth leader for high school-age young people. As individuals, they had unique personalities, skills and stories, but one thing that was universal was the effect that parental communication had on them. Whether it was a criticism, a suggestion, or merely a bit of information that might prove helpful, the teens tended to look down on it, or even become hostile toward the person delivering the message.

Where does the discipline of CRM begin? We have a good idea where the software fits, but where does its impact end? With a sale? With a customer saying good things about your company to other customers? With a repeat purchase? And does CRM contribute to these events alone, or is there a web of other activities that help drive these relationships -- and do we ever consider these things to be CRM?...

"Customer experience" is the great watchword of 2018 -- and it was a great watchword in 2017 and 2016, too Eighty-five percent of executives stated that customer experience (CX) was important to their companies' strategic priorities, according to an Accenture survey....

Sales talent for a long time has been broken up into three groups: A-players, B-players and C-players. Everyone loves the A-players -- they're the ones who bring home the bacon, after all. The B-players show promise and, with the right training and motivation, could become A-players. The C-players? Well the less said, the better This simplistic met...

I have never been a big fan of the term "360-degree view of the customer" for a couple of reasons, but mostly because you never can have a complete view of your customers. It's simply impossible. Things happen that you don't capture in the data, as CRM at the Speed of Light author and all-around smart guy Paul Greenberg has pointed out. They get d...

Much of the discussion around sales and artificial intelligence has been outwardly focused. It's exciting to think about using AI to examine leads, sift through data, and help deliver answers that allow salespeople to close more and bigger deals. However, the excitement over using AI to organize customer information overshadows another use of AI t...

Before I was a parent, I was a youth leader for high school-age young people. As individuals, they had unique personalities, skills and stories, but one thing that was universal was the effect that parental communication had on them. Whether it was a criticism, a suggestion, or merely a bit of information that might prove helpful, the teens tended to look down on it, or even become hostile toward the person delivering the message.

Much of the discussion around sales and artificial intelligence has been outwardly focused. It's exciting to think about using AI to examine leads, sift through data, and help deliver answers that allow salespeople to close more and bigger deals. However, the excitement over using AI to organize customer information overshadows another use of AI t...

Automation. Robots. Technology taking our jobs. I defy you to pick up a business magazine and avoid this topic -- it will be in there somewhere. However, there's another theme you won't be able to avoid: the need to focus on the customer experience. These two trends are in tension much of the time. They don't have to be, but due to most businesses...

The Top 20 CRM Blogs of 2017: Countdown, Part 1 Where does the discipline of CRM begin? We have a good idea where the software fits, but where does its impact end? With a sale? With a customer saying good things about your company to other customers? With a repeat purchase? And does CRM contribute to these events alone, or is there a web of other a...

Something very interesting is happening in the world of CRM blogs: CRM is becoming less and less of a subject. Oh, it's in there -- it's just being elbowed to the back of the stage by a whole host of other related disciplines and technologies. Customer experience, customer engagement and content marketing are vying with artificial intelligence, In...

If you're in sales, there are people in your organization you want to talk to, and others you may go out of your way to avoid. You might be excited to talk to the CMO -- or not so excited -- based on the leads you recently worked. You might avoid the people from finance who bother you with questions, but you might enjoy conversing with your comp plan administrator -- which would make sense, since many of us have a fondness for the people who hand us our checks...