aheadCRM

For the longest time, companies have been trapped by enterprise software vendors. First by shrink-wrapped software packages. Then by SaaS offerings.  Both situations led to what one even in a SaaS world can call shelfware – although thes e days the shelf is a virtual one instead of a physical one. Buyers still get enticed to purchase more capabilities than they need, which leads to them paying more than necessary while often using software packages that offer overlapping capabilities. One of the promises that SaaS started with, was to end this. Sadly, it looks like this promise was not kept. And this is no wonder; after all vendors want to be sticky. And they need to have increasing revenues. This means that they need to offer an ever-increasing number of capabilities, aka features, to warrant their pricing and eventually regular price increases. Combined with the frequently used strategy of offering related capabilities, i.e., seats for an adjacent software that is not yet needed ...

The Lost Strategy: What CRM Was Supposed to Be CRM at its very origin, was a strategy. With the advent of systems that support the execution of this strategy, the term more and more got shifted to describe a system. This shift can get seen in the words of CRM Godfather Paul Greenberg . His pre-2009 definition of CRM was “ a philosophy and a business strategy , supported by a system and a technology designed to improve human interaction in a business environment. ” This changed to " Customer Relationship Management is a technology and system that sustains sales, marketing and customer service activities. It is designed to capture and interpret customer data, both structured and unstructured, and to sustain the management of the business side of customer related operations. CRM technology automates processes and workflows and helps organize and interpret data to support a company in engaging its customers more effectively " in acceptance of this change (emphasis by me). These...

Zoho aspires to deliver the operating system for businesses with the goal of driving customers' margins by unifying business operations on one single technology platform. The most important part for delivering this vision is Zoho One.  Zoho One is Zoho's premier bundle of business applications. Currently, Zoho One consists of around 55 applications that support sales, marketing, email and collaboration, helpdesk and customer support, finance, HR, analytics, and business processes. Of these, customers use on average 22.  Zoho One can be licensed as an all-in-one platform but also be part of a journey that starts at first licensing one application, then more and then moving to Zoho One directly or via licensing one of the other suites (such as CRM+, Projects+, Finance+, or Workplace, and others). The most used applications in Zoho One are CRM, Analytics, Books, Meeting, and Workdrive. At the time of writing this, Zoho One has around 75,000 customers, which makes it Zoho's mos...

These days, we are drowning in conflicting information about the value of generative and/or agentic AI. I, myself am researching for good studies that dive into the ROI that is generated by this technology, with limited success. Most information is anecdotal, or comes from success stories, which cannot get used too literally.  Two major 2025 reports from MIT and Wharton, respectively, paint starkly different pictures of AI adoption and adoption success. While the meanwhile often quoted MIT NANDA “report” on the state of AI in business often gets quoted with 95 percent of all businesses not getting any ROI from their gen AI initiatives, a recent study by the Wharton Business School shows a very different result with 74 per cent of enterprises showing a positive ROI. Why is one so pessimistic and the other so optimistic? As I have written before , a closer look at the data reveals the 95% "failure" narrative is a myth, or even a scare, and the real story is probably a differe...