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The future was looking bright for Entellium as revenues continued to show dramatic increases from year to year. Millions of dollars in investment money was already secured and business appeared to be booming. Entellium, a provider of CRM software for a number of small and medium-sized businesses, was on track to take on the bigger CRM Software giants such as Netsuite and Salesforce.com in the competitive CRM software market.

The company’s fortunes took an abrupt turn as the truth behind Entellium was uncovered. Everything came to a sudden end as the CEO and CFO of Entellium abruptly resigned as the secrets these two executives were keeping were revealed.

Paul Johnston appeared to be a respectable hard-working man. He had previously worked for Apple and had started Entellium in 2000 in Malaysia. He has two sons and a wife whom he had met in Asia. As the company grew, he was able to eventually move Entellium headquarters back to the United States. The company was doing well and the number of employees at Entellium continued to increase. He even took the opportunity to secure funding from a number of VCs to help fund his rapidly growing company.

However, things took a rapid turn for the worse as the truth behind Paul Johnston and Entellium was uncovered. Apparently, Paul Johnston tricked VCs into investing in Entellium with a number of false financial statements that overestimated revenue by millions. Although much of this money appears to have gone into the business, it was also noted that Paul Johnston used company funds and credit cards to fund family vacations all over the world. In addition, he provided himself with a number of six digit bonuses and personal loans that were all taken out of the company money. Now authorities are trying to track over 9 million dollars that was wired to the company office in Malaysia. However, the presence of an office in Malaysia is now being questioned as well.

Johnston’s fraudulent activities also were uncovered outside his business. Over the years, he had accumulated numerous material items due to the comfortable salary he paid himself. He had a million dollar home, drove a porsche and made over 1 million dollars in his time as Entellium CEO. Yet, with all this, he still reported fewer assets than a homeless person living on the street.

The many employees who relied on him were let down as they abruptly lost their jobs. Also, his family will lose a father and husband as well. as he is now facing 20 years behind bars as well as a substantial fine for wire fraud.

For more information on this previously unknown, but now infamous CRM Software CEO, you can find articles about him here and here.

SAP and RIM have come together in order to tap into each other competencies and in the process develop mobile CRM applications that can be made available to an increasing population carrying portable devices.

Mobile professionals with the new “Crackberry” handheld device can access SAP software from anywhere in the world. SAP says that it expects its CRM application to be integrated with the device over the next few months, with more of its business applications, such as enterprise resource planning and supply chain management suites, to follow suite afterwards.

CRM is supposedly on a comeback trail with a vengeance, hot on the heels of the last post I made regarding CRM’s comeback, here’s another one. This time it is from the UK and it says that faced with recession, companies are caught between trying to conserve finances and trying to get the best out of their CRM solutions in an effort to at least latch on to their existing customers if not get more customers for their customers base.

In the face of the economic slump, driving ROI is harder then ever. Paul Winters, managing director of CACI’s new customer management group, Marketing Solutions Division, says: “The world is changing in terms of acquisition, the days of mailing the Electoral Register three times is getting expensive and not working. There is now much more of an emphasis on driving value from your existing customer base.

“Retention is critical, you should do more with the customers that you already have as it’s from them that you are going to get the most from your revenue in hard economic times. It’s also tough to recruit new customers in the current climate.”

An article on the website Customer Strategy titled CRM: The comeback kid has an element of humor for me. I mean it’s becoming so regularly monotonous to hear that CRM is going strong/will make a comeback inspite of so many deployment failures. I guess if there is one technology that is making its vendors and promoters millions more on promise and less on delivery of promises, its CRM.

The enticement of a vendor pitch backed with figures, charts, graphs, promises, and maybe a success story would be too strong for a company to resist. More than that, it is the desires inherent with every business, which CRM purports to fulfill and the confidence that “we will do it right, god willing” is what drives companies to flirt with CRM. That’s my guess.

Gartner has issued some sage advice for CIOs who wish to target, attract, and retain new customers. It is the outcome of a worldwide survey of 1,500 CIOs by Gartner. The research firm has outlined seven initiatives that organizations should focus on to build customer loyalty and satisfaction. 

The suggestions stress those aspects that are actionable without losing sight of the broader business objectives. The suggestions include – 

1. Acting on customer feedback.
2. Design processes keeping customer experience in mind instead of working on operational efficiencies as the prime objective.
3. Keep a single window for interactions with the customer at every channel to ensure that there is no mismatch of information provided.
4. Work hard at being more open and approachable which may imply working extra hours and explore channels for greater interaction with the customer.
5. Try to offer personalized service and products but do consider the costs involved.
6. Recruit the right type of people and train them properly; their conduct is a powerful influencer of customer opinion.
7. Work on the entire customer experience, it should be systematic, events should not happen accidentally.

Oracle has stated that the growth prospects for its CRM and on-demand CRM solutions are looking good in the Asia Pacific region. The company’s partner base in the Asia Pacific, consisting of Siebel CRM On Demand resellers and implementation experts, has increased to more than 48 in the short span of 12 months.

A little unsurprisingly the company sees itself as the CRM market leader, though SAP, Salesforce.com and even Microsoft may have their own definitions of a CRM leader. Here’s Will Bosma evangelizing on how Oracle is the CRM Holy Grail for companies in the Asia Pacific. I wish, though, he had said something a little more original than exceeding customer expectations. 17% of the CRM market in the AP region is under Oracle’s control.

An interesting interview of David Peterson — CEO of PowerHouse Consulting at VoIP-News throws light on the process of integrating CRM with call-center telephony. David talks about the issues that crop up when integrating a CRM solution with a call-center. These include selecting the right intermediary server for converting the proprietary language of the telephony system into one which the CRM system can understand.

Systems Integrators and consultants are useful as they speed up the deployment process. This is because they already have integration modules for major CRM vendors already in place. David also talks about the importance of management tie-in, on-demand and on-premise CRM, as well as the risks of shoddy integration.

CRM is becoming an increasingly collaborative phenomenon in which businesses are being forced to take increased cognizance of their customer’s wishes. This turnaround has been orchestrated to a large extent by the Internet which has enabled customers to have a say in the designing and developing of services and products. Customers are even choosing the mode of communicating amongst themselves and with the vendors; these include user-generated content, blogs, podcasts, social networks, user communities, and other various and other such Web 2.0 properties.

Mycrmcareer.com is a site that leverages web 2.0 and tries to bring customers and CRM companies closer.

A new report, this time from Forrester Research, has found that companies that companies that have implemented CRM need to do a rethink on their strategy processes if they are to realize more benefits from the solution implemented. Factors necessitating a change in strategy include the growth of SaaS and a consolidation of vendors. Basically, the report says that companies need to continue investing in CRM in a selective manner and at the same time focus on optimizing their front-end customer-facing processes.

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This is an aspect of CRM that is indeed worth a thought by industry worthies – how to align CRM and manufacturing. CRM focuses on the customers and aims to make the entire process customer-centric whereas most manufacturers belong to the school of thought that extols lean manufacturing where emphasis is placed on productivity and performance. CRM projects succeed only when the CRM philosophy is embraced across the organization and measurable customer-centric process are in place across the value chain.

The difficulty is in balancing lean manufacturing where the emphasis is on cutting costs with a customer-centric approach. CRM companies are finding it difficult to sell the concept of CRM to manufacturing companies. One of the issues that CRM vendors find discouraging is the trend of treating CRM as a desktop application with no strategic backing or accompanying changes in the thought processes of the company. Commence which provides on-premise as well as hosted CRM, has come up with a detailed list of forty best practices for industrial marketers that will help them to sell more effectively and obtain ROI more quickly.