Sales

Talk to any sales or marketing consultant, and you'll probably get an earful about "sales-marketing misalignment." This chronic conflict between sales and marketing is the single dumbest reason that otherwise worthy businesses struggle. The classic symptoms: Sales spends a lot of time prospecting be...

There's always been a dichotomy between the promise of CRM and the reality of CRM. The promise is something like this: CRM can become the nucleus of your business, unifying sales, marketing and support around a shared set of data about your customers. Not only will it make your relationships with yo...

Real-time bidding holds numerous benefits for mobile marketers, but there are downsides to the ad technology as well. In particular, the dominant theme to that downside is that RTB -- at least for mobile ad formats and mobile platforms -- is still in its early days. More specifically, while the tech...

With its ability to match ad-inventory supply and demand in real time against the attributes of any given viewer, real-time bidding is starting to make its way into the delivery of mobile ads. For marketers, it can be a very good thing. When it works as it is supposed to, it makes mobile marketing m...

Do you remember walking by telephone poles at downtown intersections 10 or 20 years ago and seeing them covered in fliers, placards and notices? If it was a really popular intersection, there were probably several layers of paper pinned, tacked, taped and stapled on top of each other. If the telepho...

It's no longer uncommon for marketers to customize the messages they send via email, but such personalization capabilities haven't typically been extended to Web content. Enter Silverpop, which last week released a beta version of Smart Content, a new product designed to enable just that. Smart Cont...

Real-time bidding, or "programmatic buying" as it is sometimes called, is remaking the online ad industry with its approach of matching supply and demand of ad inventory in real time against the attributes of any given viewer. Now this trend is starting to creep into how mobile ads are delivered. Fi...

Delta Air Lines has outfitted its more than 19,000 flight attendants with Windows Phone 8 mobile devices that it expects will further customer service and facilitate on-board transactions. Specifically, the flight attendants are now using Nokia Lumia 820 devices equipped with a Delta-specific applic...

The makers of the Zurmo CRM platform have released a new version of the technology, a refresh focused on third-party app integrations that allow users to streamline their various Web applications with the Zurmo software. Launched on Tuesday, Zurmo 2.2 comes equipped with Google Apps integration, all...

SugarCRM and BroadVision have teamed up to integrate their respective products -- SugarCRM's namesake CRM app and BroadVision's Clearvale enterprise social networking platform -- to give users a fuller view of what is happening in the enterprise, the companies announced this week. This is not a full...

Before they contact a prospect, smart salespeople check the CRM system to see what the customer record says. That's what CRM is there for, from a sales perspective: to give sales the background information it needs to have the best chance at closing a sale. However, the picture of the prospect paint...

A subtext to the marketing automation explosion is analytics. Having a CRM system might make you wonder why marketing automation is needed at all, but the reasons boil down to analysis and improved data collection. Let me share some information from a new marketing study. First, the data: We asked m...

When Cirruspath wanted to update its Cirrus Insight Gmail extension for Salesforce.com, it asked clients to draw it a picture. The result is what it calls a complete redesign that integrates lead tracking through Salesforce.com seamlessly into Gmail. First and foremost among the features in the new ...

Microsoft on Tuesday morning unveiled the latest iteration of its Microsoft Dynamics CRM software complete with enhancements including Skype, Yammer and Lync integration as well as extended availability of MarketingPilot. Due for widespread release this fall, the software will also bring long-await...

We all know by now that social media is important for business success. It plays a role in sales, marketing and support. Then there's the idea of social CRM -- on a basic level, the inclusion of social media-generated data in the customer record -- which can help shift the way a business interacts w...