Sales

InsideView Provides New Insights Into Sales Leads
May 17, 2013

InsideView earlier this month debuted a new marketing offering housed on its InsideView CRM Intelligence Platform. This first iteration of InsideView for Marketing focuses on automated lead enrichment capabilities, said Marc Perramond, VP of product. It was built with an eye to enhancing a company's lead records with social, media and financial information.

Bloomberg Caught With Hands in the Customer Data Jar
May 16, 2013

Bloomberg has been embroiled in scandal since news broke last week that its reporters were using the company's corporate terminals to monitor its customers' activities. The story began to unravel when news surfaced that Goldman Sachs had confronted Bloomberg over the possibility that reporters were accessing its account data.

Salesforce Communities Pick Up Where Portals Left Off
May 03, 2013

Salesforce has announced that a product it first unveiled last summer, Salesforce Communities, will go live this summer. Since its original debut, Communities has been tweaked to take into account user views and feedback. Salesforce's user community got a taste of similar functionality last month with the company's rollout of Chatter Topics and Expertise.

The Ethics of Selling the Old vs. the New
May 01, 2013

It hit me last week while attending Oracle's Analyst World briefing. We met in a conference center on the Oracle campus in Redwood Shores to learn about the company's latest developments in hardware and software, and to be briefed on its future road map. How extensive was it? Let's just say that my brain hurt when it was over, and I had to sign a five-year NDA agreement to get out of the building.

Social Savvy Beats Cold Read for Warming Up to Customers
April 30, 2013

If you're a dedicated skeptic like I am, you probably know the way a psychic's cold read works. Start by asking a broad question that fits almost anyone -- like, "Have you lost someone you love?" Allow the mark to fill in the blanks, and then ask further leading questions based on information fed to you until the mark thinks you're actually communicating with a dead relative.

PowerMap Lets Users Visualize the Lay of the CRM Land
April 29, 2013

PowerObjects has released PowerMap, a new add-on for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. "It is a way to create a visualization of geolocation in the database," said PowerObjects CEO Dean Jones. At its core, PowerMap does what the name suggests -- allows users to plot addresses of a group of entities on a map within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Hoopla: It's a Brand New Sales Game
April 25, 2013

Hoopla has debuted Game Center, a new sales performance module that uses contests to incentivise CRM software users. It typically works this way: A sales organization identifies a certain behavior or goal, such as prompting sales staff to make more cold calls or follow up with prospects. Results are published on live animated leaderboards.

Pegasystems App Susses Out Customers' Soft Spots
April 23, 2013

Pegasystems has rolled out the newest iteration of its marketing application. New or enhanced features include improved ability to perform real time event-triggered actions and new B2B recommendation functionality. The key to understanding this app is its name, "Next-Best-Action," said Steve Kraus, senior director of product marketing. "That is the concept behind our approach to marketing.

The Say-Anything Salesperson Is a CRM Killer
April 11, 2013

I was talking to a friend of mine whose company had a rough first quarter. As is often the case, both sales and marketing came under scrutiny; several salespeople were let go, and marketing is now under a microscope. In trying to perform a post-mortem on the problems, we struck upon the issue of salespeople. The sales manager held up a former employee as an example of the kind of people he wanted; this guy was a go-getter.

5 Things That Kill CRM ROI Dead
April 05, 2013

Back in the old days -- like around 2003 -- the rate of what was termed "CRM failure" was unacceptably high. You often heard it bandied about that 70 percent of implementations were failures. That was an estimate -- companies were not coming forward to confess their CRM disasters, so building a scientific sample was impossible. Still, the number reflected the general dissatisfaction.

Big Data Spawns Big Ideas for Mobile CRM
March 29, 2013

If you have been thinking lately that the chief marketing officer has been driving CRM purchases more than the IT department, you're right. "This is the era of the CMO," Larry Bowden, vice president of portals and Web experience at IBM, told CRM Buyer. The reason for that is simple: The amount of information becoming available to the CMO through new technologies and Big Data offers huge potential.

Salesforce.com's New Mobile Chatter Expands the Conversation
March 22, 2013

Salesforce.com has rolled out the latest iteration of its Chatter app designed specifically for the mobile environment. "With this version, we are taking [it] to a new level, allowing users to really drill down into accounts and take many different types of actions while in the field," said Michael Peachy, senior director of solutions marketing at Salesforce.

Microsoft Dynamics Gets Major Overhaul
March 19, 2013

Microsoft opened Convergence 2013 Tuesday morning with a keynote address from Microsoft Business Solutions President Kirill Tatarinov -- and the debut of an upgraded CRM application. With 11,000 attendees, this is the largest Convergence Microsoft has held to date, said Seth Patton, senior director of marketing for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. "The key theme for the event is uniting business and IT," he said.

FirstRain Showers Sales Reps With Real-Time Intelligence
March 12, 2013

FirstRain has debuted FirstRain for Touch, an enterprise customer intelligence application built for the Salesforce Touch Platform. "What we did was create a component version of our application that was then easily dropped into the Salesforce.com Touch platform using their SDK," said Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain.

Demandbase Tech Targeting Trims B2B Marketing Waste
March 04, 2013

Demandbase has incorporated a new filter in its Demandbase Company-Targeted Advertising platform. The filter, called "Technology Targeting," lets users target and personalize display ads based on the technology they use. In other words, users can now include the specific criteria of 'technologies used' as part of their campaign targeting requirements with the Demandbase platform.

Benioff's Social Proof
February 28, 2013

Salesforce came to New York this week for its annual winter meeting with customers. The company had two goals: test new ideas, and gather customer input. The event was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel for a relatively small group -- less than 1,000 -- rather than at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, which can accommodate the maintenance facilities for a squadron of F18s.

3 Bad Habits to Unlearn for SCRM Success
February 14, 2013

For the better part of six years, we pundits have been urging businesses to get social. Social CRM even has its own Gartner Magic Quadrant, and while the entries in that document are all over the map in terms of what they do, vendors serving aspects of SCRM are well established. Gartner itself said that sales of software for SCRM topped $1 billion in 2012.

Big Data for Marketing
February 13, 2013

The marketing funnel is not exactly a new idea. Neither are sales or customer service, though all have morphed considerably from what they were more than a decade ago when CRM began. Sales and service evolved organically, making incremental changes as markets transformed and new technologies became available.

NextPrinciples Makes Integration Paramount
February 11, 2013

NextPrinciples has launched Insight-To-Action, a social analytics and engagement product that integrates with a handful of CRM applications. The company is in talks with other vendors to expand the integration of the platform, said Ted Sapountzis, head of marketing and product management for NextPrinciples.

Cross-Domain Semantics and the End of 'Solution Sales'
February 08, 2013

Do your customers think of you as one of them? Do they think you truly understand their business challenges, their opportunities and what keeps them up at night? These are questions you should very seriously consider, because in the extraordinarily demanding B2B sales climate of our post-recession world, it's the vendor who can answer "yes" who will win the business.