Most of us understand how overwhelming it can be moving to a new city. Surrounded by a host of options for dining, shopping, daycare, leisure time, auto mechanics and everything else under the sun, making an educated decision on where to go involves some groundwork. So what is there to do? Many of us will turn to a new coworker or neighbor for recommendations.

Versium has announced a partnership with LiveRamp to launch artificial intelligence-powered B2B audience segments,as part of a new business-to-business data management platform. The partnership will let companies perform online targeting of offline business professional data that often is housed within their own CRM systems. LiveRamp customers will get access to Versium's modeling engine.

Freshworks has secured $100 million in funding from Accel and Sequoia Capital India with the participation of CapitalG. That brings the total amount of capital raised since the firm's 2010 launch to $250 million. "The new funding will be used to invest in our platform and to continue scaling internationally," said Arvind Parthiban, Freshworks' director of marketing.

"Everybody's using technologies like artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, marketing automation tools, search engine marketing and lead analytics tools," said Michelle Cirocco, head of global marketing for Televerde. "We're using all these tools and technologies to identify who we should communicate with, and we use them to set the stage for our marketing and demand-generation efforts."

EverString, a San Mateo, California-based startup that offers artificial intelligence software for business-to-business sales, marketing and operations teams, hasy released FIRE, a four-point strategy to improve sales performance. The FIRE methodology is designed to unite and simplify the goals of sales and marketing teams. "FIRE" stands for Fit, Intent, Recency and Engagement.

Gamification is one of the hottest trends in the business world. Incorporating game elements can be a great way to engage customers and employees alike -- using an activity that has appealed to humankind since its beginnings. "Humans have been playing games for thousands of years. Some argue that games predate culture," said Brandon Marsala, creative director of content and strategy at Mindspace.

Openprise has announced new partnerships and a new service designed to streamline marketing automation and account-based marketing operations. The new partners offer capabilities such as reverse-IP lookup, business-to-personal-email address lookup, business data in the UK, and more in-depth business-to-consumer and business-to-business data capabilities.

Photo-hosting service Photobucket in May quietly restored third-party hosting of photos, reversing its unpopular year-old policy that required users to pay nearly $400 for hosting privileges. Many irate users claimed their photos were "taken hostage." Hosted photos on blogs, forums and other sites were replaced by an image of a dial indicating the hosted data quota had been surpassed.

Sonobi and LiveRamp have partnered to help marketers improve targeting. The partnership will let brands and agencies build media packages using the Sonobi JetStream multichannel ad platform and LiveRamp's identity resolution system. "Sonobi has a forecasting and planning engine that understands the visitation patterns of an individual user across the open Web," said CEO Michael Connolly.

Salesforce has inked a deal to acquire marketing analytics company Datorama. The acquisition will give Marketing Cloud a power boost by expanding data integration and intelligence, according to Salesforce. The newly acquired tech will give marketers the ability to unlock insights across channels and data sources, providing a unified view that can help companies make smarter decisions, it added.

MaritzCX has unveiled preconfigured B2B CX templates that monitor key financial indicators; metrics for customer touchpoints, including NPS and OSAT; business-specific outcomes; and overall account performance. Integrated into the MaritzCX Technology Platform, "the dashboards become a hub that aggregates all of the data being monitored," said Jennifer Rubin, MaritzCX associate practice leader.

The close of Q2 ends the first wave of vendor customer events. Still to come this fall are Salesforce Dreamforce and Oracle OpenWorld -- and others -- but mercifully, we have the summer to digest all the information absorbed this spring and re-sync with our native time zones.For starters, CRM doesn't appear to be slowing down. As an industry, it's rated at about $35 billion in revenues.

Before I was a parent, I was a youth leader. As individuals, teens had unique personalities, skills and stories, but one thing that was universal was the effect that parental communication had on them. Whether it was a criticism, a suggestion, or merely a bit of helpful information, the teens tended to look down on it, or even become hostile toward the messenger.

If you operate an e-commerce company, the world is at your fingertips, and global markets offer the enticing promise of increased visibility and sales. "International expansion is a great way to mitigate risk and reliance on a single market for all your sales," noted Chris Vincent, global CEO of Practicology. How to get started may seem murky, though.

A good way to understand what Salesforce articulated at Connections 2018 is to recall the direction it set a few years ago, when CEO Marc Benioff said the company would develop most apps for the small screen first. Translated, that was a concession that handheld devices -- phones and tablets -- would become the primary devices we'd all use in business. So far that's been a good bet.

Newsletters are one of the primary means of communicating with both existing and potential customers. For small e-commerce business owners, however, putting together a regular newsletter may seem daunting. It might seem that creating and sending out a newsletter would involve spending more time and energy than you have, taking valuable resources away from sales and marketing.

Salesforce has announced integrations between its Marketing Cloud and Google Analytics 360 that equip marketers with a broad range of new capabilities. Marketers now can view consumer insights from both Marketing Cloud and Analytics 360 in a single journey analytics dashboard. If they see a high rate of browse abandons, they can create a tailored journey to re-engage them, for example.

HubSpot has rolled out platform integrations with Shopify and Workplace by Facebook, which are designed to support the marketing and sales efforts of SMBs. The Shopify integration lets e-commerce marketers sync specific merchant sales data from Shopify into HubSpot for use as a marketing signal; segment users based on products, deals and order history; and follow up on abandoned shopping carts.

For some time, it has been my impression that in the CRM market, all -- or at least most -- of the good ideas have been taken. It's been a long time since we've seen a new systemic approach to front-office business. It's even been a long time since we've seen a major innovation at the department level. CRM itself was a systemic innovation in the last decade of the last century.

Lattice Engines, a provider of account-based marketing tools driven by AI, has announced the launch of Lattice Atlas, calling it the first customer data platform for ABM. The new platform synchronizes all customer data across a single, integrated view, making it easier for customers to see their data, no matter the source. Customers often have to view data across multiple tools and workflows.

Companies that aim to upsell their existing customers should develop a hybrid message that reinforces their existing relationships while providing an incentive to break the status quo, suggests a new study. Corporate Visions previously has commissioned studies on how to shake prospective customers' status quo bias to persuade them to consider your products or services.

Demandbase officially announced ABM Analytics during its annual ABM Innovation Summit. The new tech, part of the company's account-based marketing platform, leverages its account identification technology to help marketers analyze performance from advertising to pipeline and revenue figures. "AI gives B2B marketers a clear view into the behavior of their target accounts," said CMO Peter Isaacson.

Facebook reportedly has developed a new advertising service designed to predict the future behavior of consumers. The service uses FBLearner Flow, an artificial intelligence prediction engine the company introduced in 2016. The technology enables companies to target people based on decisions they haven't yet made. The data the new service taps is aggregated and anonymized.

A number of trends have taken hold in the CRM space, according toHubSpot Sales Exec Brian Signorelli. "One of the first things that stands out to me is that, ironically, despite all the money that is spent on CRM overall, sales reps aren't spending that much time there," he said. "Instead, reps are using all these tools that are connected in some way to CRM, like email or sales acceleration."

"The rise of artificial intelligence, for sales teams both internally and externally, is the biggest trend in the industry," observed Rodrigo Vaca, vice president of marketing for CRM at Zoho. If you think of CRM as the centerpiece for your company, and you marry that with the escalating amount of data that each company is gathering each day, ... you can do any sort of analysis on it."

Salesforce has launched Salesforce Essentials, a collection of intelligent apps targeting SMBs. Built on the Salesforce Lightning framework, Essentials offers a consumer-like experience optimized for any device. Relevant information is displayed on one unified console, with drag-and-drop customization. "Essentials is easy to try, set up, use and maintain," said Salesforce SVP Marie Rosecrans.

Adam Smith famously referred to "the invisible hand" of the free market in his landmark book The Wealth of Nations, and with that made himself one of the very first political economists. Smith's observation was so on point that most of us assume markets run through the agency of individuals pursuing their enlightened self-interests, which helped drive the evolution of CRM as a tracking tool.

AdRoll has announced RollWorks, a new division that will provide business-to-business marketers with highly targeted, personalized marketing at scale across multiple channels and devices. The result of a corporate restructuring, RollWorks will focus specifically on B2B marketing, while the AdRoll business unit will focus on the company's legacy products for e-commerce SMBs.

FutureProof Retail aims to redefine the in-store checkout experience. "From the consumer point of view, when you go shopping you have people who help you and service you, and you walk away happy," said President Di Di Chan. "What we're doing is bringing the online offline, to centralize that service. It's not just the top VIP shopper who can enjoy that experience -- everyone can."

Broken corporate processes have been contributing to negative customer experiences, a recent survey suggests. One thousand employees in U.S. companies with a workforce of 500 or more who work on a computer or mobile device for more than five hours a day responded to the online survey conducted by Nintex. Overall, 54 percent observed broken administrative processes within their organization.