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.

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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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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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 →

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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 →