| Recent
Articles |
SalesForce's
Future Looks Bright
SalesForce stock jumped $1 a share today after an SG Cowen analyst commented that
he expects the company's shares to beat the rest of the market by 40% over the
next year.
Forum
Perils for Customer Relationship Management
In my previous article (Using Forums To Improve Customer Relationship Management)
I covered the learning/information aspect of forums, as well as how you can use
forums to positively impact your lead generation efforts and customer relationship
management initiatives.
Life
Cycle Contact Relationship Management
Technology and communication advancement has opened the corridor to new markets,
providing for a cost effective approach to expanding your customer base while
building new relationships.
Leveraging
CRM Insights to Improve Demand Generation Effectiveness
Nearly 30 years have passed since Ted Leavitt, a noted Harvard Business School
professor, extolled the virtues of focusing on customers as fundamental to building
and growing profitable businesses in his book, The Marketing Imagination.
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10.13.05
Hosted CRM: What Is It?
 By
David Cowgill
When hosted CRM was first introduced, concerns were voiced about its drawbacks:
the lack of customization, integration with other applications, support, third
party storage, control over data control and the performance of service reps -
not to mention the all-important security issue.
Hosting's biggest drawback is that your most important data is in a third-party's
hands.
Although CRM, as hosted solutions are also known, are not as difficult or as costly
to install as packaged solutions, they still require an infrastructure, significant
IT resources, and time to deploy.
Application integration has been another challenge for ASPs. Since ASPs unilaterally
update their code bases, this opens the possibility that an integrated business
process could be broken by a change that you don't control.
Privacy and privacy laws are another concern: you must investigate what safeguards
an ASP offers to protect your data. As you can see, hosted CRM isn't perfect.
Aberdeen researchers found that when considering these problems, support for hosting
dampens. One way around this might be a hybrid approach: rent now, buy later.
It Does Not Have To Be Either-Or
Another emerging trend is that companies adopt hosted solutions as a low-risk
way of evaluating a CRM solution's capabilities before they buy into an in-house
set up. This approach allows companies to mitigate risk and experience the benefits
of rapid time-to-value. Once companies see a ROI, then they can choose to bring
the solution in-house.
The decision between an in-house implementation and a hosted solution is based
on many factors. It is important to evaluate your business plan, technology strategy,
risk profile, IT budgets, IT resources, opportunity costs, customization requirements
and industry-sector requirements.
About the Author:
David Cowgill is a Senior Marketing Manager in San Francisco. His coverage area
focuses on the technologies that facilitate managing CRM analytics and lead generation.
For further information contact: David Cowgill CRM Blog Founder http://crm.blogs.com |
