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The budget cuts and spending freezes resulting from the current economic downturn have reduced the number of legitimate opportunities for sales representatives; therefore, organizations are placing a renewed emphasis on cutting costs and customer retention to combat certain economic realities. ...

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, and in November the Supply Institute announced that the Factory Index was down to the lowest point since 1982. If this wasn't bad enough for business, it was confirmed this month that we've officially been in a recession for over a year.

As the advent of new customer-facing technologies (such as social media platforms) changes the way consumers gather information about a particular company's products or services, sales representatives are challenged to sell to a customer base that better understands the competitive landscape. As a result, companies realize that they must enable their sales force to work smarter, not harder, to acquire and retain customers. ...

Despite progress made against key warranty chain improvement initiatives, service and warranty management executives still wrestle with post-sale customer satisfaction issues and escalating warranty costs. ...

In an effort to gain a competitive edge in the market, companies are implementing customer self-service solutions to address two distinctly separate business challenges -- improving the customer experience and cost reduction ...

"We need more leads!" cries the sales manager. "What happened to the ones we gave you last month?" replies the marketing manager. "Those leads were lousy" retorts the increasingly frustrated sales manager... and so goes the never-ending lead "quality vs. quantity" debate in many organizations ...

Today's sales manager is faced with a myriad of challenges in an increasing hostile selling environment -- deals stuck in the pipeline, frequently missed sales "commits," sales people not hitting quota, and high sales employee turnover are just a few of the issues that the beleaguered sales managers must tackle day in and day out ...

Poor data quality can impact an organization in a myriad of ways: Employees wasting time checking and rechecking their work, the unnecessary cost of redoing mundane tasks and dissatisfied customers screaming at the other end of the phone are just a few of the data quality challenges that customer-facing managers must deal with every day ...

In an effort to gain a competitive edge in the market, companies are implementing customer self-service solutions to address two distinctly separate business challenges -- improving the customer experience and cost reduction ...