Sales

Salesforce.com is a top provider of CRM software in large part because its application is intuitive and easy to use and deploy. It is interesting, therefore, that many Salesforce.com users are opting for Salesforce.com Mobile because it is even easier and more intuitive to use than the desktop versi...

As companies continue their search for the elusive "360-degree view" of their prospective clients, harvesting all the scattered information from social networks and other content providers about these prospects can potentially be beneficial for the purposes of deploying more finely targeted sales an...

Aberdeen research conducted for "B2B TeleServices: The 2009 Buyer's Guide" has shown the end-user value of deploying external, customer-facing teams to source, nurture and convert the most highly qualified leads on behalf of an internal, B2B-focused field sales organization. Additional findings in ...

The revolutionary changes in the buying process mean that the sales process seems to be shrinking while the marketing cycle is growing. How do we then stay engaged and determine when the time is right to strike? We need to get involved early -- when the buying process begins -- by providing educat...

As a marketer, you need a control panel to make decisions. The world is moving faster and faster every day, enabling literally billions of interactions about your company and products around the globe. What you need is real-time intelligence. The term "real-time" used to only apply to Wall Street an...

The last two years have been rough for many sales and marketing departments: Head counts have been cut, goals have increased, and the emergence of technology has boosted expectations. Those are recent issues, but the issue that persists is that sales and marketing are still too often working at cros...

Enterprise sales organizations are under increasing pressure, often both from internal and external stakeholders, to provide more accurate sales forecasts of top-line revenue in order to better predict, and improve, the long-term health of their company. The upcoming Aberdeen benchmark report, sche...

I had the pleasure of attending two events last week: Microsoft Convergence 2010 in Atlanta and the Salesforce-VMware VMforce.com announcement in San Francisco. Each event was useful and informative in its own way, and I am pleased to have witnessed each first-hand. I have written exhaustively -- ...

As sales organizations endeavor to escape the constricted economy of the 2009 recession, one of their most significant barriers is stagnant progress regarding bringing their sales cycle under control. Recent Aberdeen research published for "Inside Sales Enablement: Let Them Drink Coffee!" reveals th...

Salesforce.com's buy of Jigsaw is the latest, most indicative market mover in the transition to a lead generation economy. Twitter's forays into a sponsored tweets business model announced last week at Chirp is another. Yahoo selling its soul to Microsoft for Bing is another. And just about everythi...

Salesforce.com has launched ChatterExchange, an app marketplace for Chatter, the enterprise collaboration platform it introduced earlier this year. It is built on "Cloud 2" -- the company's name for the next generation of cloud computing: social, collaborative, and capable of delivering real-time ac...

The old cliche is that CRM is supposed to give you a 360-degree view of your customers. I debate that -- I think it gives, at best, a couple of overlapping 270-degree views, and 30 degrees will always be hidden. However, that's all geometric digression. My real point is this: Having a 360-degree vie...

As sales organizations endeavor to escape the constricted economy of the 2009 recession, one of their most significant barriers is stagnant progress in terms of bringing their sales cycle under control. Recent Aberdeen research published for "Inside Sales Enablement: Let Them Drink Coffee!" reveals...

Salesforce.com has rolled out a private beta program for Salesforce Chatter, a real-time enterprise collaboration application and platform. Positioned by Salesforce.com as an alternative to such collaborative software applications as SharePoint and Lotus Notes, Chatter enables employees to stay conn...

Although service is gaining in importance as the economy is forcing customer retention to the fore, sales has long been the dominant leg of the CRM stool. Many CRM efforts were spearheaded by sales, and in many organizations, the SFA functions of CRM software remain the only features that actually g...