| 12/6/2007 - The Best Database Marketing Discoveries for B2B Companies (84 kb) |
| Database marketing helps companies identify trends, plan and execute targeted, trigger-based campaigns and create a closed-loop marketing and sales environment. The best B2B companies have not only discovered how to effectively analyze and discover customer opportunities, but they also know how to generate better conversion rates which significantly impacts marketing ROI. This white paper illustrates how implementing specific B2B database marketing tactics improved the results and effectiveness of each company’s overall marketing spend. |
| 10/23/2007 - Developing Better Data To Support Decision Making (171 kb) |
| Let’s face it, customer data, in all its forms and permutations is the lifeblood of any company. Without current, complete,
and accurate customer data companies are flying blind. Analysis is suspect, campaigns are poorly targeted, and marketing
and sales are constantly at odds. For B2B companies in particular, data issues often dominate marketing’s thinking—or at
least they should. |
| 3/15/2007 - 6 Problems With CRM Support (50 kb) |
| If you were involved in the selection and implementation of your company’s CRM solution, then you are well aware of the critical importance of these decisions to your company’s overall CRM success. The problem that exists in many typical CRM initiatives is that not as much emphasis is given to the method and processes for future enhancements and ongoing support. Support is typically a side item to be dealt with post-implementation. What many companies discover after they go live is that by engaging with the standard support vendors (both application and third party), they have signed up for patchwork support that is inefficient and costly. |
| 2/23/2007 - Extraprise CRM Support Center (60 kb) |
| This data sheet describes Extraprise's newest CRM offering, an onshore CRM Support Center manned by senior-level consulting resources. |
| 12/5/2006 - Achieving Closed-Loop B2B Marketing (105 kb) |
| What do CRM and Database Marketing have to do with one another?
Everything. No development could change the database marketing industry more than customer relationship management. Over the last ten years CRM initiatives have generated as much change and sparked more debate than any other corporate concept. Companies have realized (many through failure) that CRM is only one step in the path to customer optimization.
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| 7/21/2006 - B2B vs. B2C Marketing (401 kb) |
| Where does the marketer turn to sort through these challenges? Increasingly, they work with a database marketing company to help them understand their customers better and execute more targeted acquisition and retention programs. For B2B marketers, the search for the right database marketing firm has been particularly frustrating becausetraditional database marketing companies developed systems and techniques that are usually B2C-centric. |
| 11/1/2005 - CMO Survival Guide (208 kb) |
| "I’ll have the sizzle please. Medium rare.” The reason that you’ve probably never heard these
words uttered is because no one eats sizzle. They eat steak. Strategy, brand, advertising, design,
public relations and all the other sizzle in marketing are only as good as the real meat that
supports them. This support comes in the form of clean and complete data, efficient business
processes, accurate and integrated systems, and, of course, intelligent people to make sense of
it all. Accepting the importance of these four items: data quality, business processes, systems, and
people is vital. In fact, it will help you keep your job. This report offers a four step approach
that can help arm CMO’s with the tools necessary to learn from prior practices, prove ROI,
embrace accountability, and create and implement programs necessary to increase the
effectiveness of their entire marketing organization."
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| 6/1/2005 - The Realities of Achieving the Single View of the Customer (1001 kb) |
| "Achieving a “single view of the customer” has long been promoted by software vendors as one of
the fundamental reasons for investing in customer management technology.
The concept has an intuitive appeal and the thinking behind it is: “Use a system to record each
interaction with a customer and make this data visible to all employees so they can leverage
organisational memory to maximise the value of each subsequent ‘moment of truth’…”"
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| 4/1/2005 - Achieving the Vision of a Truly Customer Centric Organization 2004 (245 kb) |
| "Most CEOs by now have a customer centric vision of the future where CRM is fully embedded in
their organisation. Delighting the customer is every employee’s raison d’eˆtre and, for shareholders,
there is a demonstrable link between investment in CRM and increased profits. However, whilst
aspirations may be clear, the migration path between today’s reality and tomorrow’s envisioned
future is harder to discern. Although the majority of organisations claim to have experienced some
success with CRM to date, the journey has been far from smooth. The technologists, meanwhile,
have evolved a tantalising new array of analytical applications that promise to turn the latent
potential of all the data we’ve been gathering into piercing business insight. However, senior
executives, still reeling from the tribulations of their first implementation and aware of the work
yet to be done, are understandably reluctant to rush into another round of spending without a
clear idea of where next and why. This paper is intended to help bring that clarity by revisiting
the fundamental logic of CRM, identifying practical next steps to move the discussion forward
and questioning whether, in the age of the customer, companies can afford to wait." |
| 12/31/2004 - Marketing Transformation: How to Lead the Revolution (487 kb) |
| "Marketing is in the midst of its most significant transformation in the last thirty years. Strategy has
reached an inflection point as the profession undergoes a revolution, not simply another step in its
evolution. External drivers such as globalisation, privacy legislation, technology changes, and the
saturation of traditional marketing channels have caused many companies to take a step back and
rethink their traditional approach to customers. Internal company pressures to demonstrate that
marketing spend is having a measurable impact on the bottom line are also pushing the
transformation agenda to the top of many companies’ list of priorities."
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| 5/1/2004 - Transformation: How to Change Behaviour and Embed CRM into your Companys Culture (1 mb) |
| "Unless your company has achieved the exalted (and decidedly rare) position where products and services
virtually sell themselves, then you have probably invested in some kind of customer relationship
management initiative over the last several years.
Still, if your company is like most organisations, then you may have failed to make the most of
this investment. Six months after the system was deployed or the new process was implemented,
your Chief Executive, Sales Director, or CRM owners are left wondering: “Was it all worthwhile?”
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| 3/1/2004 - Making the Most of Market Automation (299 kb) |
| "The functions of marketing were traditionally captured by the simple mnemonic “The Four Ps”: product,
price, promote, place. Marketing organizations have always been involved in defining new products
and services, pricing them, promoting them to the market and in many instances, selling them to
customers directly and through channels. As business has become faster, more complex and
increasingly global, this summary appears at best incomplete, and at worst simply quaint."
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| 12/31/2003 - Living Through the New CRM Life-Cycle (478 kb) |
| "The marketplace for customer relationship management (CRM) solutions is undergoing what the
financial markets term a “triple witching hour.” Three trends are converging to make fundamental
changes in the buying cycles at major corporations. First, while recovery signs are in the air, the
economy in the U.S. is in recession and business has slowed in the E.U. The second trend involves
technology. While it is perfectly possible to implement a major customer initiative without using any
new technology, in practice this is the exception, not the rule. Today, CRM software products are
maturing as they move from early adopters into mainstream, technology-adverse companies. Finally,
portions of the market are moving through a downward phase in what Gartner Group calls the “the
technology hype cycle.” This model describes the journey most major technologies take from initial
announcement, through a rapid (and excessive) buildup of expectations, to a radical downward
correction before they finally find a productive place in the technology bazaar. CRM as a concept
is in a descending phase of this cycle as the press tallies the number of seemingly failed initiatives."
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| 12/31/2003 - Managing Customer Relationships in Difficult Times (65 kb) |
| "“May you live in interesting times,” goes the old Chinese curse. Our times are more than interesting.
They are troubling. Despite the current climate, the economies in United States and other G7 nations
will continue to flourish over the coming years. What exists in the immediate future is uncertain and
there may be an understandable reluctance by executives of global companies to invest too heavily
in the future. This is particularly true of investments in information technology, especially in areas
that are perceived as discretionary or without an immediate return on investment."
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| 12/31/2003 - Maximizing the Effectiveness of Your Siebel eBusiness (175 kb) |
| "You’ve made a significant investment in Siebel eBusiness Applications and all systems are up and
running. However, you feel you can get more out of your investment – more efficiency, better
usage, more business impact, more revenue, lower costs – but how?
You don’t have to spend a fortune to maximise the effectiveness of this investment. This report
covers our approach to identifying the symptoms of ineffectiveness, uncovering the ultimate root
cause; and offers practical advice on how to quickly apply remedial action. It is based on nearly
five years of experience in hundreds of engagements working with major corporations and midmarket
companies to define their CRM strategies and implement Siebel solutions.
With a small amount of effort, you can identify what’s wrong and what you need to do about it."
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| 12/31/2003 - Maximizing the Return on Siebel Software (121 kb) |
| "Paul Strassmann (www.strassmann.com) is one of the most famous iconoclasts of the information
age. He was chief information officer at Xerox, Kraft Foods and the U.S. Department of Defense.
He has since become a prolific writer on the impacts of information and computing. One of the
central themes of his work is that there has been a productivity paradox in corporate computing:
There has been no correlation between spending on information technology and traditional
financial measures like profit, return on assets or return on equity."
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| 11/1/2003 - Meaningful Measurement - Using Key Performance Indicators to Drive CRM (2 mb) |
| "The old truism “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” has encouraged many organisations to
adopt a “measure everything” approach to CRM.
The amount of data afforded by new channels (e.g. data-rich web journeys vs. anonymous store
visits) would seem to facilitate this approach and yet, for the abundance of data available, and the
number of measurements taken, there seems to be a dearth of insight forthcoming. For instance,
how many CRM implementations have you come across which are able to produce credible ROI
statistics?"
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| 10/1/2003 - Call Center Outsourcing 2004 (336 kb) |
| "The last several years have been difficult ones for most of the developed economies. Growth rates
have been down, stock indices have been turbulent, and both corporate confidence and capital
investment have stalled. In such an environment, it is understandable that cost cutting has become
a primary focus of corporate executives. Many have either chosen to or been forced to shed
unprofitable businesses, cut staff, and face unhappy stakeholders. Even as these economies begin
to rebound, there is constant pressure to focus on essential operations and either cut, divest, or
outsource other business functions." |
| 6/1/2003 - Enterprise CRM: Software or Service (74 kb) |
| "Warren Buffet, one of the world’s most successful investors, summarized his method of evaluating
companies in a sentence: “When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business
with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.” Replace
“management” with “technology” and there is an equally important aphorism in the making.
Every five to ten years some new technology enters the software industry promising to
revolutionize its economics. Each in turn has become the victim of the bad economics of the
overall software development and licensing model. We discussed the potential impact of the latest
such technology, Web services, in an earlier report (“CRM, Web Services, and Siebel’s Universal
Application Network”)."
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| 5/1/2003 - Life After Do Not Call (67 kb) |
| "Consumers hate them. Companies have generated billions in sales from them. Anytime a
telephone rings at dinnertime, anywhere across the United States, the cry reverberates: “%#&!@
those telemarketers.” Most such calls are simply an annoyance, some are more pernicious. The
FBI estimates that there are 14,000 illegal telephone sales operations focused on consumers. The
U.S. Department of Justice and other agencies estimate that fraudulent telemarketing activities cost
the American economy as much as $40 billion a year."
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| 5/1/2003 - To Spam or not to Spam (93 kb) |
| "Ray Tomlinson, we are told, sent the first electronic mail message at Bolt Beranek and Newman
(BBN) in 1971. Tomlinson was working on the predecessor to the Internet (ARPANET) modifying
an existing messaging system on the TENEX operating system composed of two operations
SNDMSG and READMAIL. At the time, “e-mail” was available exclusively on time-sharing systems
and only capable of handling messages among the various users of individual computers.
It could not transmit messages from one computer to another."
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| 4/1/2003 - Leading a Customer-Centric Organization: Time for Honest Introspection? (494 kb) |
| "Try naming a few exemplar customer-centric organisations and you’ll quickly conclude that
nobody’s perfect. Whilst most companies have derived some value from their approach to
Customer Relationship Management (CRM), not everyone feels “richer for the experience”.
Today’s leaders typically have some visionaries in their teams who are keen to press on with
their CRM journey, whilst others, who have emerged a little battered and bruised from first wave
CRM, want to rest, consolidate their position, (lick their wounds?), etc., before making the next
push forward."
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| 3/1/2003 - Best Practices for Leads Management (294 kb) |
| "No business meets its financial targets by selling to existing accounts without an infusion of
business from new customers. New opportunities at existing customers and at new prospects
are the lifeblood of commerce. Generating leads and developing them into qualified business
opportunities is a critical success factor everywhere. Unfortunately, according to Gartner Group,
as many as 70% of all leads are never acted upon.† The primary reason for this lack of action is
that the lead fails to get to the right person or organization at the right time."
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| 3/1/2003 - CRM: Past, Present and Future (210 kb) |
| "The last six years of the customer relationship management (CRM) market have been a near
perfect expression of the Gartner Hype Cycle. This model charts the explosive popularity of any
new technology, followed by a precipitous decline as companies adopt it and realize its limitations
and ultimately a gradual rise in popularity again as mainstream companies begin to understand
its true value. Fundamental technologies like Java and XML can experience the complete roller
coaster ride in less than a year. Applications of enterprise scope, like ERP and CRM, often take
a ride that lasts several years."
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| 12/31/2002 - Analytical CRM - A Worthwhile Investement? (169 kb) |
| "Analytical CRM is being heralded as the next wave of customer relationship management (CRM).
First wave CRM focused on operational activities in sales and service (such as Sales Force
Automation, Call Centre applications etc.). Software vendors confidently assert that this latest
technology will deliver the demonstrable financial benefits that have been so conspicuous by their
absence from CRM to date. However, in cost-cutting times, the business community is approaching
the offer of analytical CRM with considerable caution – what, precisely, is analytical CRM? Why is it
(suddenly) the hot topic? What are the benefits (to business and customer)? Is it likely to be as
problematical (and expensive) as first wave CRM? And, if I buy the answers to the above, where
do I begin? This white paper considers each of these questions in turn, allowing the reader to decide
if analytical CRM should be on their “to do” list. An evaluation of different approaches to analytical
CRM, and of different software vendors, is beyond the scope of this paper."
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| 12/31/2002 - Analytical CRM - Technology Options (169 kb) |
| "We described the evolution of the customer relationship management market in an earlier Report
(“Living Through the CRM Life-Cycle,” Vol. 4, No. 6.). A frequent refrain among commentators
on this market has now become the unmet promise of sales, marketing and customer support
systems. Many analysts point to a number of major initiatives that have failed to achieve their
financial or operational objectives. A few in the press now decry CRM as a failing concept."
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| 12/31/2002 - The Impact of Organisational Climate on the Successful Implementation of Customer-Centric Vision (595 kb) |
| "It’s often claimed that happy employees make happy customers and numerous academic
studies cite the strong correlation between organisational climate and customer satisfaction.
If only the cause and effect relationship were so simple! Whilst all will concede that an
employee’s attitude is affected by the climate in which they work, “organisational climate” itself
is hard to define, harder to measure and nigh-on-impossible to assign an accurate monetary
value to. Consequently, initiatives with “improvement of the organisational climate” as their
sole raison d’être have tended to lose out in prioritisation wars between internal projects."
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| 12/31/2002 - Extending Customer Relationships to the Back Office with Siebel Software (124 kb) |
| "To develop a complete picture of their customers, organizations often need visibility into a wide
range of corporate information, including order history, customer service requests and financial
transactions. This is true of B2C businesses that must understand the buying patterns of their
customers to better manage inventory and new product development. It is true of B2B companies
that must track compliance against contractual commitments and volume purchase agreements. It
is true of government agencies that must link to citizen information stored in local or national
database applications. In short, it is true of all organizations that need an understanding not just
of client aspirations and forecasts, but of the hard reality of their purchase and service histories."
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