Welcome to my Forrester blog. My career has been a blend of business strategy and technology, whether it was preparing people and processes for new technology eras as a consultant or diving deep into the technology while working in business operations and application development for a CRM vendor. What may surprise many of you reading this is although my blog is new, I am not new to Forrester; I’ve been with Forrester for close to two years working with Application Development & Delivery leaders as an Advisor with Forrester’s Leadership Boards. In that role, I worked directly with 50+ enterprise-level leaders from across all verticals to help define their customer-obsessed strategies and identify the best and next practices to give them a competitive edge. It was this connection with clients around solving critical business problems and using technology to gain an edge that attracted me to research and more specifically, diving back into the world of CRM.

 

As an Analyst on the Application Development & Delivery research team, my primary coverage area will be around the technologies that help empower and drive effective sales people, and in turn, effective sales organizations. I’ll also be working closely with Kate Leggett on more general trends of the larger CRM market (check out our recent report, Benchmark Against Best Practices To Optimize CRM Performance). CRM has long been part of the backbone that helps companies work with their customers, be it through marketing, sales, or customer service. These core applications are necessary to scale a business.  I hope that my research will provide guidance on how these and other technologies are evolving to help you power more meaningful and contextual sales interactions. These types of interactions lead to greater customer engagement, retention, and satisfaction, and collectively they will produce stronger revenue growth and increased profitability.

 

Make sure to follow my research to stay up to date with my latest thoughts and findings. If there is anything I can help you with, or if you’d like to see a particular area or topic covered, please reach out to me, tweet to and follow me @john_bruno, or leave a comment below.

 

Best regards,

John