Biz360® Inc., a company that specializes in compiling and analyzing customer-related information for various businesses, has welcomed Puneet Arora as the newest addition to their company. He will be working directly under Biz360’s chief executive officer, Brad Brodigan.

“We are excited to add Puneet to our team,” said CEO, Brad Brodigan. “He has built successful sales teams to develop strong relationships through customer relationship management. His unique perspective will help our clients gain even more value from their social media programs. He has a track record of success at Salesforce.com and other SaaS companies. We look forward to applying Puneet’s abilities towards further accelerating the market release of our latest generation social media monitoring and engagement platform (Community Insights) as well as the rest of our global media analysis services.”

Mr. Arora’s work will revolve around services provided to various clients, paying particular attention to enhancing sales to businesses of different sizes.

With 16 years of experience to his name, Mr Arora is well-known for his work in the sales division.

His previous workplace was Salesforce.com, a brand name in customer relations management. Under his leadership as vice president of the corporate sales division, their sales team achieved a 30% increase in sales every year.

Before that, he worked for BlueRoads, a company that focused on client-based service software.

Responsible for overseeing customer satisfaction and programs aimed at providing tailored solutions for both big and small companies, he helped double the profits in his three years of employment there.

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Recently, CRM manager, one of the foremost players in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry, announced a rapid increase in client figures, stating that their customer base was now twice that of their 2008 figures.

Found and CEO, Andy Atkins, attribute this surge to an increasing awareness of the significance of cloud computing.

He said: “As companies of all sizes become more versed in the immediate value of cloud computing, we are consistently depended upon to deliver smart, innovative, and appropriate solutions that go beyond traditional sales and marketing solutions.”

Thus, he notes that the company has started to offer a variety of solutions, most of which are customized to suit the specific needs of the client. A lot of these services are joint collaborations with other companies like Salesforce.com

To this effect, one of their services with the company include integration solutions as well as support and portal services.

They are also working together with Google to offer support and installation tips for Google Enterprise Apps. This is a bundle of applications that ease online communication through email and other collaborative programs.

Due to such innovative business tactics, CRM manager now boasts a clientbase that includes a wider variety of customers. Hence, their current list includes folks from different fields like technology-based businesses, the chemical industry as well as health-related companies.

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As more businesses are becoming interested in the microblogging platforms called Twitter, Gartner, Inc., a prominent player in the information technology research field, has come up with a useful guide for corporate users.

Divided into four different categories, their suggestions incorporate unofficial interaction rules of the platform. These also act as a guideline for creating an official company-wide social networking policy.

All these tips are are molded to suit the workings of Twitter. Thus, they kept in mind the post limits (140 characters per post or tweet) of the microblogging platform.

Furthermore, they noted the various ways in which users were encouraged to talk about their ideas or upcoming news.

As for the four categories or methods of usage themselves, they are direct, indirect, internal and signaling.

Gartner states that direct messaging basically means that a company tweets using their official twitter persona. Thereby, such posts will include company news, new achievements and product promotions.

According to them, indirect is more subtle. Using this method, company employees strike a balance between personal and business-based tweets.

In such cases, other Twitter users are attracted to the persona created by the user, who in turn represents various aspects of their company.

As for internal, it refers to company-wide usage of Twitter as a means of communicating with each other.

Finally, there is signaling. This method simply collects testimonials or feedback from others about the company itself.

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As businesses start exploring various ways to counter losses incurred in recent times, many are considering the resale of CRM as a profit generating service. Many in this industry are optimistic about this trend whilst others have their doubts.

Folks like Gretchen Mann, CRM practice manager at Olsen Thielen Technologies Inc., point out that there is certainly a demand for client-side information.

To this effect, Mann alludes to various applications, like Microsoft Dynamics CRM, that provide a variety of contact information about businesses.

In a lot of cases, these applications compile information from sources that are already accessible to the public, like a profile page on LinkedIn that is viewable by everyone.

On the other hand, Mann also states that there aren’t many instances where folks actually purchase or sell such lists.

Others are equally skeptical about the value of such CRM data.

According to Lori Feldman, a database marketing consultant at The Database Diva, such lists have passed their heyday.

“The practice of selling customer information to third parties such as email lists, marketing info, etc, is dying,” says she.

According to such critics, the biggest problem with such data has to do with their vagueness in relation to the target audience.

Such data contain a number of details and a company must further analyze this data to pinpoint a specific customer-base.

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