CRM administration, the high demand for businesses analysis skills, what it takes to become a skilled business analyst, 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.
066 Gartner Totality
Bonus Episode: John Rounseville of Saxa Solutions
A conversation with John Rounseville, co-founder of Saxa Solutions. Continue reading
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”, Continue reading
Bonus Episode: Brandon Bruce of Cirrus Insight
Brandon’s run for Knoxville city council, persistent CRM adoption problems and what to do about them, Continue reading
Bonus Episode: Jon Ferrara of Nimble
A 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
059 DIY VDSA
Sam’s birthday, Steve’s trip Down Under, six levels of CRM expenses, the cure for low CRM adoption by salespeople, Sam’s DIY Virtual Digital Sales Assistant (VDSA), a commentary on Gartner’s Todd Berkowitz’s 10 fearless predictions for 2017. 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
055 The Internet of Boats
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Sam’s European river cruise & other adventures, Podcasteasy.com, Dreamforce ’16 report, Salesforce Einstein, MVPs, Twitter pass, DCLeaks and acquisition targets, government email security. Continue reading
054 Autonomous Upselling
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Cheap MacBook upgrade, Apple’s port reduction, Yathit for Sugar and Gmail, Microsoft’s big win over Salesforce, Wells Fargo’s sales compensation plan “glitch”, autonomous selling, AI-powered CRM. Continue reading
053 Integrable ERP
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Quickbooks to CRM integration, data driven digital marketing, Oracle acquires NetSuite, salespeople’s first CRM impression, Best CRM advertising site, the $14B CRM debacle, SugarCRM’s channel award, sales & marketing alignment. Continue reading
052 Popup Free Experience
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Using Uber for business travel, LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration with Microsoft’s top competitors, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce closes DemandWare deal, Chat popups and exit intent popups. Continue reading