Sales

Ask salespeople and they'll tell you: They don't have enough time in the day to sell. That's not because the laws of physics cause salespeople to move through time faster than the rest of us -- it's because salespeople are pulled in many directions over the course of a day, cutting into their sellin...

Salesforce has announced the Sales Cloud Lightning PRM app as a replacement for partner portals and electronic data interchanges that lack modern features such as built-in mobile, social analytics and AI capabilities. The PRM app has an interactive Guided Setup Wizard that lets channel managers conf...

I don't know why more subscription vendors don't do this. Subscription companies collect mountains of data from their customers, and analyzing the aggregations can deliver profound insights virtually for free. Yet too often, subscribers are reluctant to let their data be stripped of identifying char...

Mobile technology has delivered a lot of useful functionality that enables vendors and their customers to be on the same page more frequently. However, the screen size has an inherent drawback: It shows a very narrow slice of a reality -- typically one idea at a time. The problem is especially acute...

SugarCRM on Wednesday announced the general availability of Sugar 7.9 with a new quote-generation and management feature that helps users turn opportunities into closed deals. The upgrade provides next-generation reporting capabilities, plus enhanced advanced workflow, which lets users trigger a pro...

E-commerce brings together several themes that relate to our current fascination with artificial intelligence, machine learning, bots, mobile technology and the like. It's actually more than that, because it represents an underserved part of CRM. Until fairly recently, there were few tools that reta...

AI is a trend, and it's always nice to be trendy, but as great as CPQ is, it's still only one source of data. Without sufficient data, AI is extremely limited. It's like allowing your toddler to learn only about colors: The kid might be a whiz with colors, all right, but without context -- in other ...

Veeva Systems earlier this week announced Veeva CRM MyInsights, a new cloud-based data visualization capability producing tailored insights within Veeva CRM. MyInsights lets users of tablets or other mobile devices access, analyze and visualize information in real time. It includes fixed reporting f...

"CRM was originally created for the managers and bosses to report on the pipeline, and it was sold as a value proposition to the manager," noted Nutshell CTO Andy Fowler. "What's changing now is that CRM is becoming much more about supporting the rep -- giving them the tools they need to improve the...

More than a quarter of marketers went into marketing because they wanted to be creative, researchers have found. So why do so many B2B marketing efforts seem exactly the same? The reason, in part, is that some things work well. In nature, convergent evolution leads different kinds of organisms to ...

They say it can take a product idea 10 years to go from concept to mass-market appeal but that might be only an optimist's viewpoint. Some of the best ideas in CRM right now have been marinating for at least that long -- and some for much longer. Two great examples are analytics and CPQ, which compa...

"If there's anything true about B2B service, you have to do it in the context of the customers themselves in order to be successful. That's our philosophy," said CloudCraze EVP Andrew Witherspoon. "What is the purpose of CRM and marketing? It's to reach out, find and engage prospects, and to move th...

SugarCRM has announced the latest version of its app for iOS and Android, Sugar Mobile 5.0. It includes a redesigned user experience based on customer feedback; support for Apple's Touch ID; a new Sugar MACS service that lets users customize login, splash and loading screens to support their organiz...

Salesforce this week announced Financial Services Cloud Einstein, an artificial intelligence-based CRM tool for financial advisors. It gives users a holistic view of each client's household and wealth ecosystem and lets them leverage Salesforce's AI technology to seek out new business opportunities....