Archive

Quosal earlier this week announced a new feature that lets salespeople record a personal explanatory video to go with their quotes and proposals. Videos can be posted directly to Quosal's proprietary Order Porter purchasing experience delivered to clients. "People love to watch the small screen, and...

I was having dinner the other night with friends, telling them about some of the ideas in my book, Solve for the Customer. One of my friends was interested in my emphasis on process and my belief that customer science has evolved from a general emphasis on process in business, especially in the back...

Tens of millions of American consumers use consumer financial products or services governed by predispute arbitration clauses that may put them at an unfair disadvantage, suggests a United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report released last week. In some cases, the arbitration clauses...

Transaction systems have all the fun but systems of record do all of the work; at least it seems that way. Maybe you've never thought of it this way but unless both kinds of systems are working well -- and working together -- your results will suffer. Record systems can tell you what happened, but b...

One of the pitches sales reps selling CRM make the mistake of dropping into conversations is that it's easy to use. "Users can practically train themselves, it's so intuitive! Just start clicking! And did we tell you -- we just introduced a new UI to improve the UX!" It's a line of discussion that r...

The United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has made great strides in carrying out its mission, which is to ensure consumers are fairly treated in the financial marketplace, Director Richard Cordray said Tuesday in delivering the bureau's semiannual report at a House Financial Services he...

Partner Relationship Management gives a lot of attention to the vendor and partner relationship, and it should. But it's worth remembering that as important as this relationship is, the one that really counts involves an end customer. So what does the end customer need from a channel partner that a ...

Configure, price, quote software was once a barely thought about branch of CRM, falling under the heading of sales enablement. But lately, it's been getting a lot of attention. Last month, Salesforce Ventures, Salesforce's corporate investment group, swung into action. It led a Series B round of fun...

If you dislike your insurance company, you are not alone: Worldwide, less than 30 percent of consumers have positive experiences in dealing with their insurers, according to Capgemini's World Insurance Report 2015. North America saw the largest decline in satisfaction -- 8.3 percentage points. Capg...

One of the most disconcerting phrases I hear these days whenever someone proposes a new business process is, "our system won't let us do that." So, at least in some cases, legacy systems are preventing businesses from evolving. If only there was a way to evolve while keeping the legacy systems in pl...

The idea of using incentives to drive business behaviors is not a new one. It happens in all areas of business, but it's most obvious in sales, where compensation is tied to performance. This is the most basic type of incentive, and it's used to get people who sell for a living to sell. However, oth...

You might remember Garry Kasparov, the last chess grand master to beat a computer. That was about 20 years ago when he went up against Deep Blue, the IBM megaframe that is the direct ancestor of Jeopardy-winning Watson. A rematch between Deep Blue and Kasparov a year later did not go so well for the...

For all the breakthroughs in technology and process, and for the vast amounts of money invested in making sales and marketing both more productive and better aligned, we still face a staggering adoption problem. Sales and marketing pros answered a lot of questions in a recent survey. One of them was...

For companies such as Cisco, the IoT represents a wealth of untapped riches. The company, which recently reported a 7 percent year-over-year jump in revenue for the quarter ending in January, attributed some of its growth to the Internet of Things -- or as the CEO John Chambers referred to it, the I...

Roughly a year after it acquired Parature, Microsoft last month unveiled the Spring '15 release of Parature from Microsoft. The new application, the first major release since the acquisition, adds to Parature's self-service and knowledge management functionality. The feature set focuses on increasin...