Sales

Within a few years, 1 million B2B sales roles will be eliminated, according to a recent Forrester Research report. That's 20 percent of them gone, thanks to the evolution of technologies like self-service and customers' increasing desire to avoid the hassle of speaking to sales reps. Personally, I t...

It is subtle, but in the spring conferences I see a pattern emerging around the importance of process. Admittedly, my analysis in this case is less than scientific, and I have no statistics to support my idea, but I my instinct says a trend toward process is beginning. Two conferences that support m...

There's a lot of devalued sales jargon out there, but the phrase that makes me wince the most is "sales enablement." First, it's misleading -- there are lots of things that equip sales people to close deals, but when people say "sales enablement" they usually mean content, portals, playbooks and on-...

I was doing a little reading about the concept of the customer journey. I have distinct opinions about it, and I was looking for things that might challenge or validate those ideas when I stumbled across a blog post from a major CRM vendor that got my goat. The post proclaimed that 2015 was "the Yea...

Customers are changing the rules of business. They are well informed and well connected, and they have high expectations. Whether making a purchase, booking a restaurant, or searching for information, they demand intelligent digital interactions.

Marketing continues to heat up as the next big thing in CRM. It's so big, in fact, that I can see it splintering in multiple ways to accommodate all the permutations that are suddenly possible, thanks to big data, analytics, and a determination to get beyond using marketing technology as a glorified...

Oracle did some smart things at last week's Oracle Modern CX Conference and user meeting in Las Vegas. The company has been making strides in organizing its messaging and products around customer experience in the wake of its RightNow Technologies acquisition a few years ago. It's been taking on the...

Oracle last week trumpeted a set of new Marketing Cloud features designed to improve the customer experience. Oracle ID Graph, Rapid Retargeter and AppCloud Connect aim to boost sales by aggregating data from multiple sources and reacting to it in near-realtime. However, they fall short of the cutti...

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...

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...

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...

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...