Sales

Most of us have been approached -- gingerly, aggressively, desultorily -- by a sales clerk in a retail store at one time or another as we made our way empty-handed out of the door. What one application -- UpSellit, a virtual chat e-marketing and e-commerce application -- has done is mimicked that la...

The proliferation of marketing channels represents a key challenge for every CMO seeking to optimize return on marketing investments. Today, the marketing department is tasked with maximizing return across dozens of marketing channels. The use of multiple technologies results in silos of valuable in...

Alltel has joined the ranks of service providers offering mobile CRM functionality to their business customers. The wireless company has introduced SalesNOW, a contact, activity and deal management Web app designed for the BlackBerry mobile device. Most of the application's features relate to contac...

One of the most complex areas of online advertising -- what happens when a prospective customer clicks on an ad -- ironically happens almost entirely outside of the customer's awareness. The ubiquitous dancing Santa, robot or alien that we see on so many mortgage refinancing ads actually is only the...

OK, I get it. I went to the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week and there was a lot to like about it. In my career, I have seen some major back and forth changes in selling, and I have to say that these changes relate more to what is being offered than who we are selling to. Every salesp...

To many, sales is an art form, one that takes years or even decades to master. If you head to your local bookstore or search Google for "sales," for example, you'll find a myriad of books, training classes and podcasts teaching sales techniques "guaranteed" to help you make your quota. Some stress t...

I'd like to continue on the idea of modernizing our sales processes. Part of this modernization has been the focus on de-spreadsheeting selling. As we all know it started with sales force automation, or SFA, but the trend is alive and well and, if anything, gaining momentum. It's hard to believe th...

Although in its infancy, the market for on-demand application systems, including Software as a Service, is taking root and growing rapidly in East Asia, as was seen in Part 1 of this series. Springboard Research sees SaaS revenues in the region growing 80 percent annually between 2006 and 2010 from ...

Software as a Service, also known as "on-demand software," is making inroads across East Asia as organizations large and small become comfortable enough with Web services and network application delivery to risk using them for a variety of business functions. The regional SaaS market will grow more ...

I had meetings last week with each of the big three on-demand CRM vendors -- Salesforce.com, RightNow and NetSuite -- and made some observations. Sometimes I get complaints from some of them when I mention more than one in an article because they like to pretend that they are unique. My grudging con...

Of all the CRM subsector technologies, sales force automation is the most mature. Expecting dramatic change in this category, therefore, would be akin to expecting the radical realignment of a general accounting ledger package. Yet, over the last year or so, dramatic change is exactly what has oc...

The service revolution in CRM -- and, in fact, throughout customer-facing strategies -- is well underway in many companies. The reason the remainder of the industry doesn't see it yet is because many CRM vendors' responses to the revolution are so slow that they make lagging economic indicators loo...