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: 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 →

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.

Bonus Episode: Brandon Bruce of Cirrus Insight

Brandon Bruce of Cirrus InsightBrandon’s run for Knoxville city council, persistent CRM adoption problems and what to do about them, where salespeople actually build relationships, CRM as a management reporting tool, meeting users where they work, bringing CRM data into the inbox, updating CRM in the inbox, saving salespeople time and helping them make more money. Continue reading →

Bonus Episode: Jon Ferrara of Nimble

Jon Ferrara of NimbleA discussion with Jon Ferrara about managing relationships where you can have conversations.

Jon’s passion is to build relationship platforms that help other people achieve their goals. Since starting GoldMine in the late 1980’s, Jon has believed that the more people you can help grow, the more you’ll grow. Continue reading →

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 →