CRM News Feed

Siebel Systems Inc., which has agreed to be acquired by Oracle Corp. ,

On Friday the
Personalized Account Review was sent out to all Salesforce.com Administrators
and those opted in to the Admin Newsletter. If you didn’t receive
the Personalized Account Review and want more information on opting in, click here.

This Month’s Personalized Account Review included a new Success Benchmark for Custom Reports. Click here to learn more about the benchmark and how you can drive adoption of custom reports within your organization.

We’d
also like to find out how we can improve the Personalized Account
Review. What do you find most helpful? How do you use it? Are there
data points you’d like to see
us add? Post your ideas in the comment section below.

The latest gold rush is on. It’s the Chinese broadband market, and just like the award-winning film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” the market is a labyrinth made up of many plots and lessons, accented with plenty of action. China is emerging as the world’s manufacturing center and a sourcing magnet for American auto manufacturers. One of the Big Three’s sourcing managers regularly makes the trip to Beijing and then out to the interior provinces looking for everything from axels, transmissions, and tire rims to mechanical door assemblies.

Effective marketing is crucial to the success of any business. But simply understanding your market is not enough. You need to build on your marketing plans, turning theory into profits. A good sales strategy will help you identify and take advantage of the best opportunities. This paper covers clarifying your sales objectives, deciding how to reach target customers, planning and supporting your sales effort and monitoring and improving effectiveness.

Many enterprises are increasingly adopting ‘customer-driven’ approach to derive maximum customer value. Enhanced knowledge on customer behavior enables a more confident sales and marketing perspective. Integrated customer information in all departments, branches and channels across different geographies represents an enterprise’s ability of unified customer vision. Maintaining complete and accurate information throughout all divisions, at any time, is however, challenging. This white paper details how an SOA enabled Customer Data Framework can overcome the customer-related challenges.

Efficient Frontier provides paid search engine marketing solutions. Efficient Frontier was using Salesforce.com to support its sales team’s contact management, opportunity management, deal staging, and pipeline management activities, and wanted to expand the solution to support outbound marketing and client services initiatives. However, as the company grew, it found that providing more than five users with access to Salesforce.com was too expensive to be effective. In August 2005 Efficient Frontier migrated its customer records from Salesforce.com to iRadeon. Migrating from Salesforce.com to iRadeon’s on-demand services for Sugar open source CRM enabled Efficient Frontier to provide users with access to an on-demand CRM solution with lower annual cost per user, supporting further sales team growth and improved cross-departmental visibility while reducing software costs.

Many organizations perceive their current knowledge gap as a key inhibitor to CRM implementation. Many call on CRM vendors because although they collect “all the data they will ever need,” they still find it difficult to grow their markets and businesses. They also understand their organization lacks real knowledge about markets, customers, prospects, products, competitors, and others. Maximizing the issues for most managers is the general belief that there is plenty of industry/market data available from external sources to supplement what data they may not have. However, they have been unsuccessful in delivering the information necessary for “optimizing” marketing and sales investments.

An Internet accounting system, where transactions are entered on the spot and business data created by transactions are distributed to appropriate staff of the company, becomes more important for companies operating worldwide. The Internet accounting system described in this paper consists of a three-tier structure: Web, application and database servers. The accounting system provides complete accounting functions including general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, purchase order, sales order, inventory management, fixed assets, temporary payment, multi-users, multi-currencies, multi-companies and multi-languages allowing customer relation management, partner relation management, supply chain management and performance analysis.

The U.S. government, it seems, has a bit more digging left to do on Oracle’s planned US$5.85 billion purchase of Siebel Systems. Late Monday, Siebel disclosed that the Justice Dept. asked for more data on the proposed takeover. Siebel got what’s known as a “request for additional information,” which gives Justice officials more time to kick the tires on the deal and figure out whether it poses a threat to competition. Oracle observers weren’t surprised.

Sage has launched a hosted version of its CRM package. Based on the company’s Mid-Market Edition, SageCRM will cost 50 per month and is available in a number of versions.

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Mircosoft releases CRM 3.0 betaby Friday 28 October 2005Microsoft has released the public beta of Microsoft CRM 3.0 which is more tightly integrated with the Microsoft Office collaboration suite.

Exclusive White Paper: Learn the technology and methodologies you need to fight Internet access abuse. For a limited time, download a new complimentary white paper addressing the Internet risks of inappropriate content, spyware, IM and P2P.

Gig-E and Fast Ethernet point-to-point, outdoor wireless bridges from LightPointe. No recurring lease charges. Connect remote facilities. Eliminate monthly access charges. Replace low-bandwidth RF bridges.

Tighter integration with Microsoft Office and improved customization tools are among the new features in Microsoft CRM 3.0, which the company released to public beta this week.

In a drive to enhance the quality of service provided to its housing tenants, Sheffield Homes has successfully completed a 1million overhaul of the IT Infrastructure supporting its core housing system.