“Are you spending more on acquisition or retention? If you said ‘acquisition,’ you’re wasting time and money. The fierce battle for new business is stressful, expensive, and often unrewarding. Unless you’re an emerging start-up, stop wasting precious resources to attract new customers until you optimize profitability from existing relationships.”

“The unfunny truth is that CEOs and CIOs too often act as though they are partners in an enormously uncomfortable marriage. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been some improvement, even significant improvement, in this relationship in recent years. In fact, at an increasing number of companies, there has been a growing emphasis on integrating IT operations into the most vital aspects of the business and on ensuring that technology plays a key role in future success.”

“The unfunny truth is that CEOs and CIOs too often act as though they are partners in an enormously uncomfortable marriage. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been some improvement, even significant improvement, in this relationship in recent years. In fact, at an increasing number of companies, there has been a growing emphasis on integrating IT operations into the most vital aspects of the business and on ensuring that technology plays a key role in future success.”

“A Web site has two sets of constituents: The customers who use it to get things done, and the employees of the organization that builds it. As site complexity grows, so does the difficulty of the task each group has to accomplish.”

“You say you’ve tried Hawaiian shirt days and pizza party Fridays, and your IT department’s morale is still in the pits. Forget gimmicks and lead.”

“We’ve talked often enough about the five steps of the sales process; it’s a mandatory structural element in the persuasive architecture of your site. But at the same time you’re ’selling,’ an activity you largely control, your visitors are ‘buying,’ an activity they largely control.”

” In a perfect world, no one would ever make a mistake. Fortunately, though, most people are willing to forgive human error. I’ve certainly made my own share of them. I once wanted to send a gift to a customer at FedEx to thank him for his business. It was a nice gesture on my part-except I sent it to him by UPS. It was a careless error, but the client got a kick out of it, and sharing the joke actually strengthened our relationship.”

“Can you share any guiding principals or ‘best practices’ in the presentation of Key Performance Indicators to the senior executives of a corporation?”

“Sit in on any conversation between support staff and sooner or later the issue of users, and their often questionable technical knowledge, is likely to come up. As well as exchanging ‘the worlds worst user stories’, you’ll often hear general gripes about the user who couldn’t create a table or send an email with an attachment. The problem is, while the story might seem funny when told between tech’s over coffee, from a business perspective there really isn’t anything amusing about it. Here’s why.”

“Quris (pronounced CURE-iss) is the integrated email agency designed to help Fortune 1000 businesses maximize relationships and increase the lifetime value of their customers. As email specialists, we partner with clients to provide strategic planning, creative and product development, data analysis and proprietary technology solutions.”

“An exclusive study of the world’s 2,500 largest companies shows CEO succession has increased by 53 percent in just the last six years. The reason: Shareholders want returns now.”

“The only thing that really matters is whether or not the people who run this business perceive that something needs to be changed. Businesses buy something when they recognize that a change needs to occur to fix or avoid a problem, or to realize a vision for the future.”

“CIOs, of course, are not the only ones bemoaning the current antipathy toward enterprisewide systems like ERP and CRM. Vendors privately acknowledge that very few companies are in the market for a large integrated suite from SAP, Oracle or Siebel, no matter how broad their functionality or how glittering their promises of eventual efficiencies.”

“Two unlikely destinations far from Microsoft’s Seattle-area headquarters are becoming increasingly important to its future: Fargo, N.D., and Vedbaek, Denmark. Those are the respective locations of Great Plains Software and Navision, which Microsoft acquired in one of its most important initiatives in years. The two companies, which make accounting and other software, form the core of Microsoft’s long-planned move into enterprise applications — complex programs designed to help companies do such things as close books, process orders, manage inventory, and track customers, suppliers and employees.” Related articles: Open source closes in on Microsoft, Microsoft’s risky Web services bet, Its own worst nightmare?

“As every savvy financial investor knows, managing risk is imperative for success… One way to manage risk in advertising and marketing is to subscribe to a tried-and-true ‘methodology.’ This type of process allows you to learn from the successes (and mistakes) of those who have gone before you. What follows is one such successful methodology, one whose tenets have helped me tremendously.”