Sales

Virtually every CPQ -- configuration, price and quote -- software vendor on the planet has a credible solution for the processes from which the category gets its name. That's the good news. Unfortunately, the world has moved on. Most CPQ is effective for helping promote transactions, especially the ...

Periodically, a blatantly silly idea gains currency, spreading throughout society, and it has one of two effects: Either it scares the heck out of people, or they become enraptured with its seeming plausibility. Last week, The New York Times published a piece titled, "A Future Without Jobs?" I thoug...

One of the biases inherent in CRM is its orientation toward new business. This might sound strange to most people, but really, I think of it as the startup echo chamber. It's a bias in part because CRM was invented by new companies for new companies. However, the "C" part, customer, involves more th...

In sales, A-B-C does not simply refer to the Alec Baldwin scene in "Glengarry Glen Ross." It's the system that sales managers (and salespeople themselves) use to categorize performance. A players smash their quotas on a regular basis; B players battle to deliver results, and usually do; C players ha...

It has been fun watching the rapid improvement of the marketing function over the last decade. The advance was in no small part due to the advances in marketing automation, and the marketing revolution is not over by a long shot. However, I think we're bumping up against a ceiling, and the improveme...

Nearly every generation sees the birth of what, for it, will define modern life going forward. As uncertain as the twenty-teens have been, in retrospect economists may point to this decade as being as important as the tipping points of the 1870s and 1920s. If so, there may be no better event to symb...

We're almost a quarter century removed from the coining of the phrase "sales and marketing alignment," a concept that dates back another 30 years. Businesses have been wrestling with the idea of coordinating two teams of people with different skill sets, ideas, personalities and goals ever since the...

Almost a decade ago, the first edition of this list was tough to compile. There simply weren't that many CRM blogs that were consistent (we set the annual minimum number of posts at a mere eight), vendor-agnostic and -- most important of all -- high quality. That number has increased over the years,...

What makes a great CRM blog? Generally, the same things that make a great CRM implementation: good planning, thoughtful responses to a changing market, consistent posting, the right technology, and people with the right personality. It's the classic "people, processes and technology" trilogy, really...

Temkin Group on Tuesday predicted 2016 will be the year of emotion. That's one of 11 customer experience trends to watch for in the coming year, managing partner Bruce Temkin wrote in a blog post. "Emotion is the component of customer experience that has the largest impact on loyalty, but it is also...

This year we traded in terminologies going from big data and analytics to digital disruption as the market-moving meme. I am not sure either one hits the spot, but they give me something to write about. Other things happened in 2015 too, but I'm just going to focus here. It seems to me we focus on t...

The end of the year brings out some interesting goodies from various workshops competing with Santa for big kids' attention. Some of it is pretty good stuff. Here's a sampling of the best end-of-year product announcements from the cloud community designed to put you in the post-holiday, already-back...

Customers always do what they're supposed to do. If it's not what vendors want them to do, then it's likely because vendors haven't figured out how to ask the right question.