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The deal is worth about $582 million, according to a Salesforce filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Quip provides a chat feature that's built into every document and spreadsheet. It lets users direct-message team members and comment directly on any piece of content.

Dealing with customers in context can equate with personalization, as many define it. Also, it can refer to enabling customers to jump out of a largely automated customer-facing process to deal with a company representative. Additionally, it can mean getting down in the weeds of some hyper-specific ...

Oracle has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire NetSuite -- the company its former chief marketing officer, Zach Nelson, cofounded in 1998 -- for $9.3 billion. NetSuite offers various software packages as cloud-based services, including ERP, accounting, CRM and sales force automation. What...

It's important to recognize that "CRM is growing up," said Xactly CEO Christopher Cabrera. "It's becoming more useful to the CRM user, who is predominantly the sales rep or whoever is managing the customer relationship. The sales performance management, or SPM, space is on a collision course with CR...

When gamification was just starting to catch on several years ago, I recall sitting next to the CMO of my then-company at a Gartner conference session. The presenter walked the audience through the concept of using ideas borrowed from gaming as a motivational tool, and about two-thirds of the way th...

LinkedIn this week announced three updates to Sales Navigator. One is deeper integration with Salesforce CRM data, allowing leads and accounts to be imported into Sales Navigator automatically. More than 20 LinkedIn customers already are using this feature. The second is direct integration of Sales ...

The platform land rush is definitely on. You can't swing a dead cat, as the saying goes, without finding an announcement about some new platform or some established vendor's attempt to enhance its existing platform. Some sorting out seems to be in order. What's not a platform these days? Well, if it...

CRM often is described as a discipline and a technology that will transform the entire business. Sales and marketing can get on the same page, support will have visibility into what sales and marketing are doing, and every interaction can be captured and used to create a complete and comprehensive v...

Lots of CRM vendors talk about personalization, but their idea of how to do it leaves much to be desired. They address personalization very late, using a just-in-time approach to accessing customer data to support a sales or service encounter in the moment. This certainly is important, and it achiev...

The most important trends in CRM right now are "the rise of the millennials, the rise of the promoter economy, and the rise of the conscious consumer," said Matt Price, Zendesk's SVP of emerging businesses. "The 'R' in CRM is relationship, and all of these things impact how we develop relationships ...

Salesforce on Monday announced it had completed its $2.8 billion acquisition of e-commerce cloud software platform Demandware. The deal "gives Salesforce the e-commerce piece to compete against Oracle, which already has e-commerce capabilities, as well as SAP," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president...

This summer has started out to be anything but a somnolent day at the beach. The Brexit vote for the UK to leave the EU is enough to disturb your slumber, and that's not the only thing on the plate. To be frank, it appears we are at one of those major historical transition points that might happen a...

As I see it, there are four basic capabilities, or attributes, needed to build better customer loyalty. I learned about them from two McKinsey researchers. Those attributes, according to David C. Edelman and Marc Singer -- and I agree -- are the following: automation, proactive personalization, cont...

Salesforce VP Lynne Zaledonis drives product marketing and sales enablement for Sales Cloud. In order to succeed in the age of the customer, companies need to understand that the new cloud, mobile and social world we find ourselves in "has produced trillions of pieces of customer data, and it's tota...