Sales

PRODUCT PROFILE

SalesLogix: The Papa Bear of Sage's CRM Portfolio

Sage offers companies a choice of CRM options for sales automation, including Sage ACT, Sage CRM, and SalesLogix. The company currently has about 3.6 million users and serves about 80,000 businesses. "Sage has a portfolio of CRM solutions," said Joe Bergera, executive vice president and general mana...

PRODUCT PROFILE

SugarCRM - Not Just the Open Source Alternative

With an option for open source development, SugarCRM offers a sales automation system that encompasses pipeline management, social CRM, and the entire lead-to-cash process. "The SugarCRM core sales automation functionality includes lead capture and lead distribution, opportunity and account manageme...

In the Aberdeen benchmark report "Sales Intelligence: Preparing for Smarter Selling," the research among 528 end-user sales organizations revealed that the most frequently used delivery models for sales intelligence were limited to remarkably traditional, if not predictable, applications: email, sea...

In a first for the product line, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer debuted the cloud version of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 release. "Sales professionals are at the heart of almost every successful business," Ballmer said. Microsoft Dynamics CRM gives them a familiar user experience, enables greater c...

In April and May 2010, Aberdeen surveyed 422 executives from a variety of different industries, and the results were clear: Rapid forecasters -- companies that collect and prepare reliable sales forecasts in less than half an hour -- significantly outperform slow forecasters in terms of their curren...

CONFERENCE REPORT

Benioff Foresees New Clouds on the Horizon

Salesforce.com has added 50 new features to Force.com, which it will roll out on Wednesday, company chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said. He disclosed the information during his keynote speech opening the Dreamforce 2010 conference in San Francisco's Moscone Center Tuesday. Benioff also described what...

Among the many announcements that will no doubt be emanating from Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference next week will be this: TreeHouse Interactive, a SaaS partner relationship management provider, will join AppExchange. When it does, it will provide the first independent PRM offering on the site...

PRODUCT PROFILE

Nutshell Takes a Crack at Mid-Market

Nutshell CRM officially launched earlier this month. It is, like many startup CRM applications, focused primarily on the sales piece. Nutshell is quite different from other CRM startups in one respect: It is focusing on a long-ignored niche -- the mid-sized company. "There are different consideratio...

OPINION

A Winning Sales Pitch for CRM Adoption

When it comes to the broad topic of "CRM failure," you often hear the same tales: a too-complicated integration, an incompetent integrator or inflexible technology. The reality is that technology is usually not the problem, nor is it integration or integrators. If you push, you'll find that the most...

EXPERT ADVICE

How to Get Out of Lead Purgatory

Best-in-class sales organizations that leverage B2B teleprospecting stand out. How? They consistently achieve 90 percent of their sales team quota; they experience at least a 10 percent year-over-year increase in average revenue per sales rep; and they gain an average 7 percent year-over-year improv...

ANALYSIS

Sales Mobility: Quotas Untethered

For years, the promise of the truly mobile salesperson has enticed reps and sales operations professionals alike, yet a true pay-off has often been elusive as interface and bandwidth limitations conspired to lower industry expectations of success. With the lines now being blurred between handheld an...

PRODUCT PROFILE

Mobile App Helps Home Builders Close Weekend Deals

Sales Simplicity Software, a sales automation, CRM and e-marketing application for the builder, developer and senior-living industries, rolled out the first mobile version of its application about a year ago. The way the new home sales process works is that builders show prospective plans to custome...

PRODUCT PROFILE

RhoLogic Mobile for SugarCRM Is No Tease

RhoLogic, a division of Logic Appeal, an integrator of SugarCRM software, last month released RhoLogic Mobile for SugarCRM. The app is now generally available for download at the iTunes App Store and Android Market. The company is working on a BlackBerry version, as well as versions for Windows Phon...

FACT: 80 percent of leads generated by marketing are never contacted by a sales person. What a frightening statistic, and what an enormous waste of time, money and resources. "The problem is not that marketing departments are delivering such high numbers of leads that follow-up is impossible. And ...

Sage SalesLogix's OnTheGo is the first iteration of a new CRM application it developed with business partner Net@Work using a new cloud-based mobile platform. It is a new mobile paradigm for the company, said Dave Wallace, Sage SalesLogix director of product management. "The point is that the data i...

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