Sales

Sales and service are tightly related for the simple reason that they center on the newness of a category or product type and thus neophyte customers. When a product or its category are new it takes great effort to explain how something works and demonstrate the benefits.

Some of the technology that drives modern selling is really helpful, but too much seems aimed at scratching the itch of lead generation with no thought to what one does to process a lead.

Recently McKinsey & Company did a deep dive on supply-chain planning -- which you might think is a long way from CRM -- but you might be surprised. The shocking finding to me, and the connection with CRM, is the statistic that 73 percent of respondents said that spreadsheets are their primary supply...

Knowing which software works better than other solutions can give business leaders a leg up on growing their company's efficiency and bottom line. To that end, venture capital firm Bowery Capital published in its annual Startup Sales Stack Report.

It's time -- past time, really -- to reevaluate sales force automation and maybe consider a new path. That's not as dire as it sounds though. We did a study recently in which we asked over 500 experienced sellers about everything from lead quality to support in the form of resources and even their m...

The new scalable CRM bundle helps startups personalize marketing to generate pipelines, deliver omnichannel service, and grow faster at a price point that is easy to deploy and manage.

Sales managers and their managers have had to make peace with the reality that they might not be able to get reps to use technology. But methodology alone or with technology is a more-or-less lost cause. Fortunately, the technology has improved consistently over the last two decades. Even more fortu...

A sales process is a set of protocols that an organization uses to conduct selling. One's process needs not be complex, many organizations settle on processes that have around seven steps. But a sales process that everyone in the organization adheres to is fundamental to that organization's success....

With the recent completion of the Slack acquisition, Salesforce can look forward to improving the quality of the customer-facing business processes that it supports with more and better collaboration. However, the presence of Slack may now highlight the reality that while vendors operate at the spee...

First, cloud-based CRM democratized business information, then it erased the distance between customers and vendors. Now it is poised to expand into other areas with similar democratizing opportunities. I am speaking about how we work -- at least those of us in the knowledge economy -- but there's a...

The economic implications of Covid-19 have been devastating for many sectors and individuals. As we head into the summer of 2021 anticipating that most places in the U.S. will be fully open for business, many industries are looking at what the post-Covid recovery will mean for them. For sales profes...

There is budding optimism about the future. COVID-19 cases and deaths are in decline, financial indicators are decent and trending up, and forecasters are predicting a booming economy. This involves a lot of buying and selling at both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer ends of the spe...

Both marketing and loyalty had delayed starts in the CRM world, and both exhibited traits of confusion among those charged with their rollouts; strongly evidenced by a lack of specificity in the early applications that carried their badges. Loyalty is back in the spotlight now; as multiple vendors h...

Live chat and conversational platform technologies have made significant advancements in recent years. Thanks to AI and machine learning, these implementations have gone beyond just being a customer support tool, to a crucial component of an e-commerce revenue engine.