E-Commerce Blog

Minutes after DHL announced Monday it was ceding the U.S. express mail market, UPS’ sales force — more than 3,000 strong — swung into action. 1-800-PICK-UPS — the call center for Sandy Springs, Ga.-based UPS, the largest U.S. air and ground carrier — lit up. And the “Welcome Center for DHL customers” on UPS’ Web site started popping. “We saw quite a boost this morning in the new account area,” Alan Gershenhorn, senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing, said Monday. “We’ve been well-prepared for this. Just now we’ve kicked our sales efforts into a higher gear.”

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UPS’ Customer Acquisition Scramble

For the second time since its acquisition of Siebel, Oracle is rolling out a major upgrade of the iconic on-premise suite. Version 8.1.1 has rehabbed many of its features — as well as lavished a great deal of attention on the loyalty functions. The company is also introducing Oracle CRM Gadgets for Sales — five mini-applications that provide enterprise data and service leveraging Web 2.0 content. In this version, Oracle has updated Siebel Self-Service, including Siebel eSupport and Siebel eCommerce applications, with industry-specific customer self-service applications.

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Siebel Suite Gets Major Overhaul

Anyone who has reviewed their 401(k) statements lately has received a very personal and immediate measure of just how the last four weeks of financial turmoil have affected them. Take that urgency you may have felt about wanting to catch up as quickly as possible, multiply it by the number of companies that use distribution channels, and you get a sense of the angst and frustration over the lack of sales through retailers, dealers, distributors and channel partners today.

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Don’t Manage Your Channels by Crisis

As more buyers and sellers look to the Web and as other parties in the real estate value chain move to Web-enabled business software platforms, the real estate industry has begun to embrace CRM as a sales tool. While enterprise-level leaders such as Oracle and SAP don’t have specific CRM offerings for real estate agents, they do offer real estate management tools for their clientele. Meanwhile, development and growing use of Software as a Service CRM solutions is beginning to change the competitive landscape, and the way real estate agencies manage their sales and work forces.

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Real Estate Discovers CRM, Part 2: Trying Out the Tools

In few other industries is the need for a good CRM system as great as in real estate — a business that employs large sales forces with a need to build lasting client relationships and processes lots of documents. Add to that the need to track property listings, sales leads and referrals, and it becomes clear that CRM is the name of the game in real estate. Yet for a variety of factors — the franchise nature of the business along with the traditional autonomy of agents and agencies’ traditional hiring and compensation models prominent among them — real estate agencies typically haven’t been big users of centralized CRM systems.

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Real Estate Discovers CRM, Part 1: Embracing the Idea