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INSIGHTS

Salesforce FY18 Kickoff

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff invited a select group of press, analysts and customers to a fiscal year kickoff presentation overlooking San Francisco and environs. It was held on the 23rd floor of one building that the company monopolizes, just across Mission Street from another that it is building an...

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty on Monday announced a global strategic partnership to deliver joint solutions leveraging artificial intelligence. Einstein, the AI that powers Salesforce applications, will be connected seamlessly with IBM's Watson AI platform. The integration is...

CallidusCloud on Thursday launched ServiceMotivate, a call center sales performance management, or SPM, solution. ServiceMotivate is tightly integrated with Salesforce to track and reward call center agents based on key performance indicators of their service center, such as quick issue resolution a...

OPINION

4 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

I recently received an email from my health club that said, in part: "Dear Chris, We've noticed you haven't been in as regularly in recent weeks. I understand there may be many reasons for not being able to make it in, but I just wanted to send a quick note to check if you're happy with the service ...

INSIGHTS

Social Marketing Grows Up

Before there was experimental data to support various contentions, it made perfect sense to believe that the likes and endorsements posted to friends on social media would drive more business. After all, didn't we all subscribe to the idea that a disgruntled customer would tell many more people abou...

Salesforce this week announced new features and an expanded partner ecosystem for its Health Cloud at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in Orlando, Florida. The new features are lead-to-patient conversion, risk stratification and advanced segmentation. Salesforce a...

The United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has come under increasing fire from Republican lawmakers who now have the Trump administration to back their efforts. Long-time critic Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R.-Texas, who chairs the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee, comp...

INSIGHTS

Oracle’s DB Dilemma

Seeking Alpha is an online outfit that offers investors good research and analysis on tech vendors, and it is especially well versed in Oracle. Its writers' expertise involves matching technologies to investment attractiveness. I am sure you are familiar with the type. XYZ company's product does thi...

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Oro CEO Yoav Kutner: Getting a Sense of Your Customer

One of the most noticeable recent trends in CRM is that "there are a lot more companies looking for tools to centralize data," noted Oro CEO Yoav Kutner. "We're seeing multichannel businesses that interact with customers both through a brick-and-mortar and through multiple touchpoints.

INSIGHTS

Output vs. Outcomes

How many times have we been lulled into complacency over getting a project or a product done but not necessarily well received, because it was someone else's gig? This is a great reminder that the job isn't done simply because we produce something and shove it out the door. It's also a cue to pay cl...

SaaS solutions firm Gong has released the findings of a study on sales phone conversations, including an analysis of gender speaking patterns. Women delivered slightly longer sales monologues, averaging about 9-12 seconds longer than those their male counterparts gave, but men generally spoke faster...

Quip Adds Serious Muscle

Salesforce has announced new integrations for Quip, the collaboration startup it acquired last summer for $582 million. Quip, which operates independently, also added new capabilities to its product's existing feature set, which includes smart notifications, chat built into every document and spread...

Had a hard time hiring sales talent lately? You aren't alone. And guess what? It's only going to get worse! There are a lot of headwinds confronting sales recruiters these days. Among the strongest: The number of sales jobs is projected to grow 18.8 percent between 2010 and 2020, so you're facing st...

Is Avaya on the road to financial recovery? What will happen to business partners and customers if it is not? The company last month filed for Chapter 11 protection for itself and some of its United States subsidiaries -- a move that makes it "the first major established technology company that's dy...

Googling for a Facebook customer support phone number may connect users with fraudsters. A fraudulent number reportedly appeared not only as top result in a Google search, but also as a featured snippet -- that is, highlighted in a box at the top of the search results. An investigator who called the...


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