064 Vendor Trustiness

Cleveland is not Detroit, prospect reactions to vendor canned responses and preset dialogs, All Turtles for natural language AI, Cirrus Insight’s coming Flight Plans, Paul Greenberg’s article on trust, trust metrics, establishing trust on your website, recording video testimonials on the cheap, Camtasia video editing for marketers, establishing credibility and website authority with HARO, the coming Starfish automated data migration tool. Continue reading →

063 Backlink Cleanse

Identifying and getting rid of toxic backlinks, The new version of Starfish ETL, the upcoming Starfish ETL partner program, LinkedIn data’s availability to Microsoft D365 customers, feedback on the Zoho’s Zoholics Sales & Marketing Conference from Steve, Zoho’s numerous apps, Sam explains the processes of becoming a bpm’online partner, bpm’online’s wide range of capabilities, divergent analyst perspectives on CRM vendors, G2 Crowd’s latest round of funding, Sam & Steve’s no-popup policy on their respective websites. Continue reading →

062 Everything Bots

Skype fail and Plan B, gated vs. ungated content, A/B testing, HTML vs. plain text nurture emails, nurture tactics, tracking with Google Analytics events, visualizing data in Google Sheets, chatbots, getting re-asked for your account number by an agent, forwarding non-www to www, Burger King okays Google, website speed and WPEngine, Arlo vs. Nest Cam, two security camera use cases. Continue reading →

061 Distant Restrooms

Unlimited Verizon data (sort of), Apple’s possible move from Salesforce to Sugar, IBM’s move to Salesforce’s Service Cloud, Salesforce’s use of IBM’s Watson to power Einstein, Marketo and Infor partnership, marketing automation system rollups, Infor CRM gets out of neutral, Windows 10 upgrade reportedly “breaks” Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, Salesforce’s ongoing Lightning push, loyalty programs, rewards and CRM. Continue reading →

060 Life Changing CRM

Changing listener’s lives, winter golf in Chicago, more detail on Simple CRM System, selling salespeople on using CRM, industries that lag in CRM adoption, what it takes to implement CPQ, getting salespeople to tag DQ’d leads with “reason disqualified”, getting around the gatekeeper, use-case-driven CRM data migration, to migrate or not to migrate custom fields. Continue reading →

058 Fictional Pipeline

Peter D’Cruz on early days sales management software, objective sales pipeline, helping salespeople, building a sales process, self-disciplined salespeople, when buyers buy, explaining yourself fully, disqualifying early, forcing a prospect to say “no”, change the prospect’s opinion, buyer self-education, beware the lonely prospect, the “don’t follow up” sales strategy explained, applying Taoism to sales, not swimming upstream and going with the flow in sales. Continue reading →

057 CRM Non-Predictions

Sam’s office party interruption, Salesforce vs Microsoft comparison update, CRM requirements for sales management, self-implementing CRM, the cost of CRM professional services, preventing scope creep on flat rate engagements, quote to order to invoice, level of detail in CRM requirements, the difference between sales and marketing, low CRM adoption by salespeople, giving salespeople more options, the Benioff and Nadella bromance is over, our past bad annual predictions, a couple of predictions for 2017, Yahoo! announces a new hack. Continue reading →

056 Movable Hazard

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Golfing in central Florida with alligators, Microsoft Dynamics rebranding and new pricing, more CRM vendors add AI, Chat and Drift, blocking the LinkedIn deal, automating drip marketing, customer journey mapping overload, simplified process mapping with Elements.cloud, CRMNext and banking, building a CRM vertical on a platform vs. building from the ground up. Continue reading →