Reviewing 2012 and Preparing for a Successful 2013
Happy New Year! After a longer than normal holiday break, I’m taking this opportunity to reflect on 2012 and provide my early thoughts regarding investment activities in 2013. During 2012 50 companies went public, the most of any year since 2007, but only 8 venture-backed companies during 4Q12, the lowest number in any quarter since [...]
Roundup of CRM Forecasts and Market Estimates, 2012
Showing signs of growth through 2013 and beyond, the latest round of CRM forecasts illustrate how quickly behavioral and predictive analytics, greater usability, integration with social media and mobility are transforming this market. Even with the most usable, easily learned CRM systems, enterprises at times struggle with adoption rates however. That problem has venture capitalists [...]
SaaS Adoption Accelerates, Goes Global in the Enterprise
In working with manufacturers and financial services firms over the last year, one point is becoming very clear: SaaS is gaining trust as a solid alternative for global deployments across the enterprise. And this trend has been accelerating in the last six months. One case in point is a 4,000 seat SaaS CRM deployment going [...]
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social CRM and the Social Enterprise
The best CRM systems change a company and its relationships for the better. Implemented well, CRM systems can take a business into entirely new markets while solidifying leadership in existing ones. Add in the easy-to-use nature of social networks, and the potential value of CRM accelerates even faster. The Social as defined by , heavily [...]
Lessons Learned at Stanford’s Digital Marketing Program
Given how important digital marketing, social media and big data have emerged in defining and implementing customer-centered strategies, Stanford’s first-ever Digital Marketing Program looked worth attending. I look at education like an accelerator; it can propel both individuals and entire organizations to their goals faster, with greater insight and clarity. Stanford’s Graduate School of Business [...]
Customer Centricity Requires CMOs to Drive Data and Channel Integration
In a post last March I wrote about how Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are starting to drive the corporate application agenda. I had concluded that as corporations become more customer-centric, they are looking for, or starting to use, a new generation of data-driven applications to help them extract insights about their customer behaviors so that they can improve their interactions with customers and prospects regardless of the communication channel. Technologies such as big data, mobile, social and cloud are at the core of these new applications that are being aggressively embraced by CMOs. Since I wrote that post I continued…
CMOs are Starting to Drive the Next-Gen Application Agenda
A couple of weeks ago my partners and I hosted a meeting of our SaaS advisory board. This is one of our firm’s four advisory boards. I had written about the role of these boards and the value our firm and portfolio companies derive from our advisors’ insights, feedback and help. Our SaaS advisory board includes executives from SaaS application vendors, CIOs and CTOs of companies that are heavy users of SaaS applications, and leading SaaS consultants. One of the most interesting insights that came out of our meeting was that the Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are starting to drive…
3Q11 Was a Solid Quarter for our SaaS Portfolio
Against a continued volatile world economic environment that was dominated by the European debt crisis, and the persistent 9% unemployment here at home, SaaS companies had a very good quarter. We were particularly concerned this quarter because around July we started to read about the deteriorating sentiment and buying behavior among consumers and small businesses. [...]
In Search of the Obvious – cutting through the marketing mess
When I first tweeted that Jack Trout’s new book “In Search of the Obvious” had arrived from Amazon, my mate @euan suggested his (excellent) blog is actually easy to find. He called it “The Obvious” because when he started writing about the application of new technology and social media in organizations, he felt that, actually, [...]
