Building a small to medium sized business today has changed dramatically thanks to the “Amazon effect,” said Brent Leary, Partner of CRM Essentials in an interview at the CRM Evolution 2012 conference in New York City.

Before Amazon started offering web services, companies had to concern themselves with so many company-building issues that were not core to the company’s offering, such as software, hardware, capacity, and people who could manage all these technologies. Once Amazon started offering web and order fulfillment services that small businesses can take advantage of, it freed business owners from thinking about all this technology, said Leary.

While Amazon was one of the pioneers, there is now a slew of other companies offering these “in the cloud” and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. As a result, small businesses are building businesses and services much faster than ever before, Leary continued.…

Traditional marketing is seen as a necessary expense. It doesn’t need to be that way. The goal is to view marketing as a direct driver of revenue, said Bruce Culbert, Chief Services Officer for The Pedowitz Group, in his presentation, “Revenue Marketing Transformation and Marketing Automation for B2B Marketers,” at the CRM Evolution 2012 conference in New York City.

In his presentation, Culbert showed how companies can move their marketing department from just being seen as a cost center to a driver of revenue.

What is Revenue Marketing?

Culbert defines “Revenue Marketing” as marketing and sales working together to deliver more qualified leads to the funnel while increasing the speed and conversion rate they move through the funnel. If you’re doing it right it should be repeatable, predictable, and scalable.

Traditionally, the funnel starts with marketing.…

There is an endless number of CRM applications, and while we at Zoho always recommend choosing Zoho CRM, we thought we’d hand off the advice on how to choose a CRM vendor to a few consultants, Jim Berkowitz, CRM technology Coach for CRM Mastery and Eric Pozil, Managing Director for CRM Northwest.

The two led a discussion on “How to Select a CRM Vendor” at the CRM Evolution 2012 conference in New York City. They broke down the decision process into five stages: discovery, evaluation, vendor interaction, selection, and negotiation. Here are their guidelines for each stage.

Stage 1: Discovery

Form a CRM selection tiger team
Review effectiveness and efficiency of current processes
Determine needed functional requirements
Document current IT infrastructure and skill sets – Where is all your knowledge and data currently?
Determine preferred CRM delivery platforms – Cloud or on premise?…

“CRM applications are very data centric in nature, but if you’re actually going to use one you need to be process centric,” said Bill Band, VP and Principal Analyst Serving Business Process Professionals for Forrester, in our conversation at the CRM Evolution 2012 conference in New York City.

“While a CRM is great at collecting and storing customer information, it’s not so good at connecting business process from end to end,” said Band.

To be able to handle a case from beginning to end and deliver a great customer experience, Forrester’s clients are trying to add business process capabilities on top of their CRM systems.

While it’s key to have process, it’s often not necessary for a simple customer interaction into the CRM. Overloading the CRM with unnecessary processes is one of the key pitfalls Band sees with adding business process management.…