It's been hard for independent decision engines to survive, even though it seems an independent product should make it easier for marketers to unify their customer treatments. Business process technology vendor Pegasystems announced on Monday that it was purchasing Chordiant , which offers a central decision engine for customer interactions. If you’re not familiar with the Chordiant decision engine, its primary function is to apply business rules that guide real-time customer treatments. In particular, Web interactions are often managed outside of the CRM system. MORE >>

company Find New Customers shares an important marketing lesson using wit and humor. In this episode, he shares a key business initiative at Find New Customers “ Always Be Helping &# and discusses the fame that his company has accrued from a “gift-giving&# approach and recommends other companies think the same way. Jeff Ogden ( @fearlesscomp ) is President of the B2B lead generation consultancy, Find New Customers. Contact Find New Customers by calling (516) 495-9350 or sending an email to sales at findnewcustomers.com. Jeff Ogden. MORE >>

Summary: thinkAnalytics provides a robust decision engine to help make optimal recommendations across channels. Its most common applications, churn reduction for telecommuncations companies and content recommendations for video-on-demand services, are in situations where customers explicitly identify themselves, so this is not an issue. Factors can include the channels and applications, number of data mining users, and customer volume. Tags: demand generation marketing automation customer experience management optimization decision engines MORE >>

Imagine walking into a sales meeting and explaining that as a marketer you are not going to help them promote your products. And they do this by putting the customer first. They identify their customers’ buying stages. Help Your Buyers. Get More Customers. When you do this math, you can clearly see that if you have content that answers the more general or bigger questions in your product category, then you will have at least the opportunity to convert more of these visitors to qualified leads and ultimately to more customers. Is the chart helpful? MORE >>

In 1993, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersma published their seminal article in the Harvard Business Review about the three value disciplines (operational excellence, customer intimacy, product leadership) that outstanding companies practice. Customer intimacy is most closely tied to marketing; and within that, tied closely to demand generation and marketing automation. Do our current best practices hurt customer intimacy or enhance it? To answer that question, it’s important to understand what customer intimacy means. Or is it a wash? More referrals. MORE >>