In order to deliver superior customer experience, companies should combine human talent with technology, including much-needed digital expertise, to turn their current revenue and growth strategies into customer satisfaction. The companies that truly succeed engage their customers and strengthen their brands. Technology has changed consumer and business needs and expectations.

The world of paid digital advertising is changing fast. Over the last year alone, marketers have had to adapt to big changes on Facebook's platform. They now have to reckon with the continued growth of Amazon, which is taking an ever-larger bite out of online advertising budgets. Even Google, long the alpha dog in digital marketing, is altering its approach with the changing times.

More shoppers. Increased sales. Larger orders. This year's five-day stretch between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday left echoing "cha-chings" ringing through the retail atmosphere. A record 190 million Americans shopped during Thanksgiving weekend, and they're not done yet. This will be the first year that every day in November and December will surpass $1 billion in online sales.

Consumer packaged goods, or CPG, are the everyday items consumers use, such as food, beverages, clothes and household products. These products are ones that require regular replacement or replenishing. Due to the frequency of purchases and the low cost of switching brands, this market is extremely competitive. E-commerce is now a popular channel for purchasing these types of products.

B2B marketing is evolving -- and it's not just the industry itself. Vendor marketing efforts with customers can and should evolve as well. When you see a vendor selected repeatedly, or it officially earns a designation as a preferred vendor, it's a sign of marketing evolution. Most B2B marketing efforts begin from a cold start. Either a vendor is new or it is entering a new market.

If Black Friday is the biggest sales day of the year, is it necessarily the best? For many small merchants, it seemed Black Friday was more beige than black. Black Friday is the biggest sales day of the year, but it's often dominated by massive merchants. For smaller businesses, there are other peak sales days that might be better suited to their unique positioning.

There were more than 170,000 people at Dreamforce a couple of weeks ago, and many more watching from afar. Also, there were well over 2,000 sessions. Numerous announcements sprang from the big Salesforce event. Some announcements and sessions, like the Tim Cook fireside chat, stand out. Of the top six, I reckon that five were more about integration and working across vendor boundaries than CRM.

Now is the time when growth-minded organizations and their sales leaders begin to evaluate this year while looking ahead to the next. It's a time to identify opportunities for improvement, anticipate industry changes, and solidify a sales strategy that will align with the evolving expectations of business-to-business buyers, emerging technologies, and the company's business goals.

This week, Salesforce used its annual Dreamforce mega-show to make a host of announcements, ranging from contact center partnership with Amazon to a smart speaker tool for sales. For the most part, the keynote featured practical applications of Salesforce technology. Some Dreamforces focus on the highly aspirational; others focus on the ways to attain those aspirations. This year is the latter.

In today's highly competitive B2B software industry, it's not enough to staff a call center and sit back and wait for customers to reach out when they need you -- it's imperative that you take the initiative. When customers have so many solution vendors to choose from, service becomes a strategic differentiator to set your company apart from the crowd.

Direct-to-consumer commerce, or D2C, is on the rise. Increasingly, consumers are expecting to interact directly with the companies that market and manufacture products. "Direct-to-consumer commerce has been enhanced by the explosion of the Internet. E-commerce provides a more convenient and frictionless buying experience," said Peter Edlund, chief solutions evangelist at DiCentral.

Sales and legal need to maintain a united front. This means being on the same page when it comes to contracting, as a significant portion of their work together is creating, negotiating and sending contracts. However, whereas legal wants to double- and triple-check that the terms are suitable, sales wants to send a contract off as soon as possible and shorten the time to closed-won.

With Dreamforce approaching, it's no surprise that Salesforce is making a flurry of announcements. What is surprising are two big ones involving partnering with other vendors, mostly on infrastructure -- announcements that I believe make the idea of an information utility more real with each passing day. I see evidence of an information utility forming.

Dreamforce is next week. Once again, the sold-out show will be headquartered at San Francisco's Moscone Center and overflowing to neighboring hotels. Over the years Dreamforce has become the Las Vegas of trade shows in one important respect. Both are famous for being bastions of excess. Vegas has excesses of the sensual kind, while Dreamforce offers a business and technology equivalent.

The amount of data we create each day is astronomical. The digital universe likely will reach 44 zettabytes in 2020 -- 40 times more bytes than there are stars existing in the observable universe. To say that's a lot of data is a colossal understatement -- but is this truly surprising? After all, we can take phone calls from watches and stream music from refrigerators.

We're just a few short months away from the California Consumer Privacy Act going into effect. The regulation brings privacy rights to residents in California and gives them control of their personal information and how companies can use it. Any business that sells to a California resident needs to be CCPA-compliant. Nearly every brick-and-mortar store nowadays has an e-commerce site.

Many businesses have been using secret scores created by data brokers to determine how much to charge consumers, whether to allow purchase returns, and what level of service to offer, among other things. "Most consumers will never know when they are the victim of a secret surveillance score," noted Laura Antonini, policy director at the Consumer Education Foundation.

Consumers increasingly are shopping by voice rather than typing on a keyboard or searching on a phone. People are growing more comfortable with voice assistants, as the tech becomes smarter and more conversational every day. "Consumers appreciate the simplicity of using voice to shop," said Shilp Agarwal, CEO of Blutag. "Users can express their purchasing intent much more quickly over voice."

The tools you work with have a lot of impact on what you can accomplish, and the more sophisticated the tools the better -- especially in software. Beagle Research just completed a study into the use of a DevOps strategy with the Salesforce Lightning Platform. DevOps is a strategy for building, changing and deploying enterprise software that can be used with Scrum, Agile, and other methodologies.

Each person interprets an image in countless subjective ways, based on individual biases. However, when searching for a product on the Internet, most people prefer accuracy over multiple interpretations of a single object. Putting the appropriate tags on images ensures better searchability for users. Doing this manually, though, can be inefficient and prone to errors.

In manufacturing, margins are everything. In fact, if you're like most manufacturers, your business operates on such tight margins that even a small change in the price list can have an enormous impact on your bottom line. So what happens if your sales team inadvertently uses an old price list and the cost of steel actually has gone up a quarter since that price list was made?

The FTC announced settlements of a series of fraudulent marketing charges against two high-profile firms. The actions taken make it clear that anyone who engages in similar illegal behavior will face enforcement action, the FTC said. In the first case, Devumi agreed to settle the FTC's first-ever complaint challenging the sale of fake indicators of social media influence.

Mobile phones have come a long way since Zack Morris lugged his brick of a cellphone around the halls of Bayside High School in Saved by the Bell. If Zack had one of today's smartphones, he'd be texting Kelly on WhatsApp, posting pictures of himself and A.C. on Instagram, and trolling Screech on Twitter. Today's smartphones have become essential to human communication.

Not so long ago, marketing usually meant gathering some demographic data, placing ads in selected print and broadcast media, stuffing mailboxes with direct mail, plastering the countryside with billboards, and more recently, bombarding the universe with spam. Marketers no longer can focus on delivering static messages, regardless of how "targeted" or "multichannel" they may be.

I have been writing about Salesforce for 20 years. That's incredible for me because aside from marriage, there's nothing in my life I've done so consistently for so long. Perhaps like a marriage, the thing that's been attractive about Salesforce is its constantly changing nature. The company went through a typical adolescence for a startup but it always had a sense that it was changing the world.

I'll admit it, it was love at first sight when I purchased my first MacBook. It was my iPhone that prompted my decision to give up years of PC efficiencies and dive head first into learning a new operating system, but familiarity had kept me complacent for too long. Still, I remember the excitement of unpacking my new laptop. It struck me then that Apple knew me better than I knew myself.

Artificial intelligence is arguably the most disruptive technology to emerge over the last few decades. Consumers are producing data at record levels. It's estimated we'll produce 463 exabytes per day by 2025. Yet humans aren't equipped to process that complex information. We're starting to rely more on AI to interpret massive amounts of consumer and third-party data in real time.

Digital marketing was the firstborn child spawned from the invention of the Internet. It quickly became the major focus of businesses interactions -- and transactions -- both online and in person. Digital marketing now is fundamental to the success of your business. Why is digital marketing so important? Simply put, it is the last remaining channel for content that consumers can trust.

Your new salespeople have very specific expectations of how their workday should flow. These 20-somethings want to sign a contract poolside, then post about it on Instagram -- #workingpoolside, anyone? They want to approve a purchase order on the go as they head to post-work Pilates and pizza. They want zero bumps in the road as they go from meeting to mixer.

The software development lifecycle reminds me of the proverb of the three blind people confronting an elephant. One grabs the trunk and says it's a snake, another touches a tusk and says it's a spear, while the third feels its side and calls it a wall. The moral of the proverb is that perception has a lot to do with perspective. For a long time, the perspective on software was that it was a cost.