The Customer Economics Forum

The Metrics Reloaded In performance management, consistency is king. The simple sounding steps—identify and focus on value drivers, and align the organization to drive results—beg the question: What's the best performance management framework? In this exclusive white paper from Oracle, read how Oracle’s Strategy-to-Success management framework provides that critical framework context.

Simplifying the Reporting Landscape With all the attention surrounding dashboards and other attractive delivery methods for business intelligence (BI) content, classic report generation and production is often overlooked. However, at the heart of every effective BI strategy is a solid reporting solution, and in recent years innovations in reporting technology make this topic worth reviewing again. Read this whitepaper to learn the latest best practices and innovations in production reporting. The paper will cover the background of today's reporting situation and look at ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of reporting processes.

Making One from Many: Standardized BI and best practices help Ingersoll Rand become a single global entity Ingersoll Rand Co. has a history of more than 100 years of industrial production and services, of growth and diversification. Today it is a global company with approximately 60,000 employees and some 100 manufacturing facilities around the world. In the global marketplace it isn’t easy for a company to maintain overall goals and values while allowing business units to work effectively in their local environments. By deploying Oracle BI Applications, Ingersoll Rand has been able to balance these factors and gain competitive advantages. Read this Profile in Success by Ventana Research to learn more.

Choosing the Best CRM for Your Organization CRM buyers have a wealth of deployment options available to them, providing unprecedented flexibility, costefficiency and business value. This white paper describes and analyzes the four most popular deployment scenarios, then offers a guide to choosing a hybrid approach that best matches the needs of the business while delivering superior performance, application integration and functionality.

Connect and Empower Mobile Salespeople Welcome to CRM in the era of mobility. It is an evolution that is just getting started, but which, its advocates say, stands finally to extend the value of CRM from the management suite down to the field salespeople to whom it was previously an annoyance. The best of the new mobile CRM applications don’t try to get smartphones to serve up every tab and view and list that exists on companies’ traditional desktop CRM applications. Instead, they allow specific pieces of data to be viewed in ways that make sense given the small form factor of a smartphone.

Managing Risk and Uncertainty: An Executive’s guide to Integrated Business Planning Traditional budgeting and planning is a straight jacketed and hierarchical exercise. Goals and budgets are set at the top of the organization and cascaded down, yet plans on how to reach the goals are created per department and are then rolled up. Often, this tension creates a game of ‘ping pong’ that takes many months to resolve and the outcome rarely reflects the dynamic reality of business. Although this approach may help organizational control and accountability, it highlights the gap between how the business is traditionally managed, and the actual business model.

Seven Tips for Profiting from Lean Times with CRM Long before recessionary pressures gripped the U.S. economy, businesses were struggling with the challenges of an increasingly competitive sales environment. As more companies vie for the attention of demanding and information-empowered customers, the ability of sales, marketing and service organizations to improve the efficiency of their customer-facing teams becomes a competitive essential.

Sales 2.0: How Businesses are Using Online Collaboration to Spark Sales A new set of business practices are slowly but steadily starting to creep into the way companies sell their wares to customers. This new trend in selling is being called “Sales 2.0” by some. It’s an unsophisticated, yet appropriate, moniker for this phenomenon, since many of the tools and methods that are fueling the Sales 2.0 trend have their roots in the Web 2.0 movement.

Keeping Customers in a Crummy Economy - by David Bogoslaw
With recession expectations growing, some companies are taking extraordinary steps to hold on to customers. Read »

Five Ways to Win Over Customers
Small gestures can help turn new clients into regulars. Here are a handful you can put into practice within your own business. Read »

Consumers and Businesses Rebalance the Books
Both are fast wringing out past excesses. Those efforts, plus the government stimulus, offer hope that the economy will begin to stabilize soon. Read »

Smart Management for Tough Times
Breakthrough management ideas for a world in which the game will never be the same. Read »

Customer Service in a Shrinking Economy
How companies are struggling to maintain customer service amid sinking sales and declining employee morale. Read »

Driving the Bottom Line from the Front Line Driving the Bottom Line from the Front Line is a new CMO Council thought-leadership initiative that addresses the challenges facing global companies in their quest to develop world-class go-to-market capabilities. The study represents a "scorecard" that highlights an alarming trend among multinational companies: marketing and sales leaders give themselves decidedly poor marks when assessing their own go-to-market effectiveness.

Routes to Revenue A milestone research initiative to benchmark the state of customer revenue realization, encouraging the adoption and the uses of technologies, solutions and professional services that drive deeper interaction and communication with customers. Centered around Customer Revenue Optimization (CRO), this report, sponsored by InfoPrint Solutions Company, drills into targeted strategies and solutions that significantly impact customer acquisition, monetization and ROI while exploring new developments in database, customer insight and print technologies.

Marketing Outlook The 2009 Marketing Outlook Survey, the largest independent assessment of senior marketing executives today, is an annual global benchmarking initiative undertaken by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council. Given the economic challenges and market pressures worldwide, this year's review of '08 performance and '09 challenges and intentions is far deeper and wider than before. The results of this study will be extremely valuable to all participants seeking peer-level input and consensus on critical issues and priorities.