Thursday - July 2, 2009
There are dozens of webinars, seminars, research reports, whitepapers, and blog postings on the topic of sales and marketing alignment. Despite the endless flow of resources and suggestions, sales and marketing alignment continues to elude many organizations. Misalignment is often a byproduct of a lack of process and a natural result of traditional marketing and sales roles. Think about it -- sales is perhaps one of the most measured functions in an organization. In sales, performance is measured by tangible results.
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Thursday - May 28, 2009
The proliferation of customer relationship solutions presents an interesting challenge for small-business owners. How does a small organization looking to control spending decide between common productivity tools, such as Microsoft Outlook or Excel, or a more robust solution? This decision is made more difficult by the emergence of free customer relationship management and contact management solutions.
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Monday - March 16, 2009
Some vendors stand out from their peers because they were the first to commercialize a particular application; some because they were the most successful in evangelizing or educating a potential user base of the application's merits. Some -- like Zoho -- stand out because they are dirt cheap.
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Monday - February 23, 2009
When Christopher Cabrera, president and CEO of Xactly, says his Software as a Service sales performance management company began 2009 with a big bang, he didn't -- as one might assume in this economy -- mean it in a bad way. In January, the company acquired Centive, its primary competitor. In February, it lured a new CFO on board -- Steve Cakebread, former CFO of Salesforce.com.
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Monday - February 16, 2009
Sales are down. You don't even need to add a qualifier to that sentence -- such as industry or name of company. Across the board, corporate and consumer sales are down.
Enter firms like Demandbase, which promises the latest in lead generation functionality. The company debuted last year with Demandbase Central, a Software as a Service platform.
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Wednesday - February 4, 2009
The two biggest dogs in the CRM fight are Salesforce and Oracle. You could debate that, but not with me. Salesforce has had a good run lately with announcements about its platform technology, its community of developers and its new foray into social media and social networking. Oracle has been plowing the same field, but you might notice the companies' approaches are very different.
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Wednesday - January 28, 2009
What a week. Xactly bought Centive, Salesforce.com introduced the Service Cloud, and the gridlock in Washington looks the same as ever but with new players. If you parse the Xactly-Centive deal, you might be tempted to say, "So what?" After all, the deal was a stock swap, and the strike prices of the respective companies' stocks were not disclosed.
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Tuesday - January 27, 2009
Perhaps the new slogan in this merciless economic downturn should be "All Hail the Salesman." For it is the salesman that brings home the bacon upon which all other jobs will feed. It is key, then, to see to it that salespeople are equipped with the very best technologies and that they are supported without restraint.
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Friday - December 26, 2008
There is little doubt that these are increasingly uncertain times for managers. In 2008, U.S. businesses cut nearly 2 million jobs -- amounting to 11 straight months of shrinking payrolls -- and some economists predict that we could lose another 3 million jobs in the next two years. In the past four months, we've seen continued triple-digit fluctuations in the Dow.
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Monday - December 8, 2008
SugarCRM has released Sugar 5.2, which packages some existing Web 2.0 features with new technologies. The company is also introducing Cloud Services -- a framework for developers to build links to third-party data sources such as LinkedIn or JigSaw. In a way, SugarCRM has been a cloud company since its beginnings, said Martin Schneider, vice president of product marketing.
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