077 How Suite It Is (For SugarCRM)

Accel KKR makes a 9 figure investment in SugarCRM. Some of the other potential compatible AKKR companies. Sugar’s redesign and re-architecture. Sugar’s one-clickedness. Mitch Lieberman‘s take on the investment and his advice, including going all in on the cloud. How the sales team needs to be more consultative and real. The idea of conversational engagement. The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation and some of the positional changes since last year. A close pack in the Leader quadrant. bpm’online is alone in the Challenger’s quadrant. ProsperWorks rebrands to Copper. Copper’s win percentage vs Salesforce. Salesforce and Google are cozying up. Will Google acquire a CRM vendor? Google’s Hangouts Meet as a viable online meeting app. Continue reading 077 How Suite It Is (For SugarCRM)

076 ERP Implementability

Sam and Steve talk with Joel Schneider, president of Liberty Technology Advisors, about what should be behind proper ERP selection and implementation processes.

Joel answers the question, “is cloud-based ERP as easy as the vendors would lead you to believe?”

Joel also addresses many of the factors that people within any organization need to consider before making a decision on an ERP vendor—whether the vendor’s offering is cloud or on-premises.

The approaches to strategy, selection and implementation for ERP and for CRM are contrasted. Continue reading 076 ERP Implementability

075 CRM Investments & Acquisitions

Sam and Steve test-drive Zencastr, Pipedrive raises $50 million, should smaller vendors be “taking on” the big CRM vendors or is there a better strategy?, Nimble’s approach, Swiftpage’s investment and their focus on “the easiest product on the market to use”, Act! Connect, the Collabspot plugin for Office 365 and G Suite, contact enrichment, marketing approved email templates vs. empowering salespeople, TIBCO buys Scribe Software, data lakes, a deep dive on integration methods.

074 Artificial Reservations

The GDPR is in effect, Salesforce earnings, CRM industry growth, data augmentation, CRM and AI, GDPR and ABM, un-gating content, conditional CTA visibility by country, the ultimate objective comparison between Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365, image size and SEO, website conversion actions, the FBI’s instruction to reboot your router, Alexa privacy fail, bpm’online’s conference and roadmap, their 15 use cases for AI, AI’s potential for sandbagging detection and for booking travel.

072 Vanishing Best of Breed

Sam’s new hip parts, his plan to #DeleteFacebook, messing with Facebook’s algorithm, cleaning up LinkedIn letter by letter, Salesforce’s purchase of MuleSoft, what acquisitions mean for the Salesforce ecosystem, vanishing best of breed in the CRM industry, Salesforce’s small business moves, Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 strategy of combining acquisitions, product groupings, Microsoft’s impressive seasonal release documentation, Microsoft Office 365 upgrades to Dynamics, Sam’s GDPR webinar series, the need for a public documented & auditable processes, GDPR policy statement template, recording GDPR related transactions in CRM, how to change your outbound emailing procedures.

Webinar: GDPR & Your CRM Webinar
Wednesday, April 4th, at 10am CDT
Register here

Bonus Episode: Lars Helgeson of GreenRope

Lars Helgeson of GreenRopeThe email marketing origins of GreenRope, the transition to an all-in-one platform for managing long term relationships, sharing multiple methods of customer communication around an organization, the high cost of integrating disparate systems, the many components of a customer relationship, creating a more collaborative company culture, turning clients into advocates, getting your emails to stand out in recipients’ inboxes with timeliness and relevance, email as one part of an omni-channel strategy, the benefits of modeling the sales process, Continue reading Bonus Episode: Lars Helgeson of GreenRope

Bonus Episode: Ian Gotts of Elements.cloud

Ian Gotts of Elements.cloudCRM administration, the high demand for businesses analysis skills, what it takes to become a skilled business analyst, creating a basis for process improvement, the soft skills needed for eliciting business process flows, the limitations of traditional diagram tools, how to distill complex processes down to an easier to absorb hierarchical model, making the technology available to the Fortune “5 Million”, Continue reading Bonus Episode: Ian Gotts of Elements.cloud

067 Extensible CRM

California wine country fires, upcoming CRM vendor interviews, G2 Crowd Grid for CRM, Pipedrive vs. Pipeliner CRM confusion, CRM systems that allow for extending the database schema and those that do not, normalizing repeating sets of fields, ProsperWorks raises an additional $53 million. Sugar’s Hint add-on product for data augmentation and prospect/customer alerts, three or four major annual product releases vs. continuous improvement (micro-releases), open source CRM, companies that still deploy CRM on-premise, cloud security vs. corporate network security.

Bonus Episode: John Rounseville of Saxa Solutions

John Rounseville of Saxa SolutionsA conversation with John Rounseville, co-founder of Saxa Solutions. Saxa is a Salesforce partner that specializes in the Healthcare and Life Sciences industries. John discusses some of the challenges facing healthcare providers, physician recruiters, medical device sales reps and specialty providers who are looking for more referrals. We talk about how CRM can help with Physician Relationship Management, patient engagement and tracking data about and from medical devices — whether the devices are located in provider facilities or with patients.

065 The Big Sam Sick

Sam gets sick and infects conference attendees plus his employees, Steve’s guest appearance on “Our Love Hate Relationship With Sales”, Infor CRM’s integration to LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator, the high price of standalone Navigator, the value of connecting CRM to multiple big data sources, Nimble’s capabilities, Infor CRM’s Marketo integration, what doesn’t sync from marketing automation to CRM, tracking sources from Lead to Order, Contour mapping, Coleman AI, Infor’s vertical market strategy, integrating acquire companies’ products, the CRM beasts that will not die, companies moving back to ACT!, Google My Business for B2B companies, the sale of Endeavor Commerce to Vendavo, Zoho’s new Zoho Sign digital signature app, Zoho’s alternative to QuickBooks.