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It's mud season here in New England -- that time of year when everything merges into an amorphous mess. The gray sky merges with a gray landscape made into slop by continual rains and dirty gray melting snow. It's hard to tell where one thing ends and another begins. Eventually the sun comes out and...

AWS has announced Amazon Connect, a self-service contact center solution based on the same cloud technology used by Amazon customer service associates worldwide. It offers phone numbers throughout the U.S. and 18 countries in Europe. "The opportunity for cloud contact centers is significant," said R...

When the U.S. Department of Labor issued its fiduciary rule last year, it set financial advisers, insurers and agents into a mad scramble to meet an April 10, 2017, implementation deadline. The rule elevates all financial professionals who work with retirement plans or provide retirement planning ad...

LinkedIn Enterprise Edition lets users send 50 emails on LinkedIn a month, adds Single Sign-On and other management features, and introduces TeamLink Extend, a tool that pools the networks of all the Sales Navigator users in an enterprise.

We've seen a parade of technologies coming into the front office since 2000, including browser-based cloud computing, social media, mobile technology, workflow, journey mapping, and big data and analytics. It's typical that at first there's only a tenuous relationship between the technology and CRM'...

Making sales account-based is "the ability to take an account and use a holistic approach when dealing with it," said Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach. "You use a combination of marketing and sales to get to that account," he continued. "It's giving a name to something people already do, and it creates...

ProsperWorks, which provides CRM for Google's G Suite business tools, last week announced the addition of in-app cloud communications functionality. The new features are available through a custom integration with RingCentral, which provides enterprise cloud communications and collaboration solution...

McDonald's has begun testing new mobile ordering and payment functionality at 29 of its restaurants in Monterey and Salinas, California. It will expand the pilot to another 51 restaurants in Spokane, Washington, on March 20. The company will run multiple pilots to gather customer feedback, work out ...

There's a big difference between B2C and B2B analytics that no vendors seem to be addressing, and it involves the consumption model. I recently spoke with K.V. Rao, founder and chief strategy officer of Aviso, an analytics company focused on sales, and his unabashed opinion is that "if you're trying...

OpenMethods on Tuesday announced integration with Next Caller's Advanced Caller ID database. The integration will let contact centers on the Oracle Service Cloud use real-time contextual data for more than 500 million landline, mobile and VoIP numbers to personalize and simplify their agent and cust...

IDG has introduced Pipeline Activator, a global subscription-based service pinpointing verified projects and active sales prospects for those selling to enterprise IT. Pipeline Activator, the latest addition to IDG's ABM360 suite of account-based marketing services, provides sales and marketing team...

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff invited a select group of press, analysts and customers to a fiscal year kickoff presentation overlooking San Francisco and environs. It was held on the 23rd floor of one building that the company monopolizes, just across Mission Street from another that it is building an...

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty on Monday announced a global strategic partnership to deliver joint solutions leveraging artificial intelligence. Einstein, the AI that powers Salesforce applications, will be connected seamlessly with IBM's Watson AI platform. The integration is...

CallidusCloud on Thursday launched ServiceMotivate, a call center sales performance management, or SPM, solution. ServiceMotivate is tightly integrated with Salesforce to track and reward call center agents based on key performance indicators of their service center, such as quick issue resolution a...