Enterprise Apps

INSIGHTS

A Good Storm

With less than a week to go, Dreamforce continues to bear down on the world like a hurricane slowly approaching from across the ocean -- in a good way, if that makes any sense. Salesforce has pumped new products into the market that will serve as the focus of at least part of the discussion in San F...

Many shoppers would be just fine if they could never set foot in a retail store again. After all, everything is available online: books, groceries, pizza, household necessities, even big ticket items like mattresses and cars. However, 15 percent of people worldwide have a disability that affects the...

EXPERT ADVICE

Utopia or Disaster? AI's Transformation of Sales

If there's one thing that can be said with certainty about artificial intelligence in the field of sales, it's this: It's coming. Solutions for sales leaders, account executives and business development reps tout various AI-enabled features and the benefits they offer to sales. Writers breathlessly...

Among the myriad of tactics that e-commerce businesses can use to pump up sales, preorders might be the most overlooked strategy. Yet preorder sales are a highly effective way to generate early buzz to gin up demand for new products. A "preorder" is the sale of a product that is not immediately ava...

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara: The Beauty of the CRM Beast

"The reality of relationships is that people buy from people they like, know and trust," said Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara. "In the old days, before we ever engaged in selling, we made a connection by looking at books, things on the shelves, that kind of thing. Today, we're doing that more and more electr...

Nowhere is the customer experience more vital to the long-term success of a business than in retail. This is particularly evident as retailers work to ensure that brick-and-mortar shopping experiences are as seamless and personalized as those offered by their digital counterparts. Nearly 80 percent ...

EXPERT ADVICE

Is Weak Data Integrity Killing Your CRM?

American companies spend an enormous amount of money on training. Spending reached more than $90 billion in 2017, an increase of over 32 percent from 2016. It's unlikely that even a small share of the billions spent on training last year were devoted to educating and motivating employees to regularl...

In technology parlance, the emotional result of a person's interaction with a website or digital app is called "user experience" or "UX" -- and the success of a business depends on it. Users who have easy, positive experiences with websites and apps likely will be drawn back to the business. On the ...

INSIGHTS

Pulling a Thread

Both B2B and B2C vendors have been back on their heels for many years because of the improved access to information allowed by the Internet. Unfortunately, conventional marketing approaches tread the same rut marketing was in before automation.

AdTheorent, which offers a machine learning platform for advertisers, has announced AdTheorent Relationship Targeting. This new product allows advertisers to harness the power of relationships with family members, cohabitants or friends to influence a consumer to take desired actions. Word of mouth ...

Shopping: It's not what it once was. Forget the long drive to the mall and countless hours of browsing. Customers now simply log in from the comfort of their own home to have the world at their fingertips. The massive uptake of e-commerce is an unprecedented shift in consumer behavior, expectations ...

Atlatl Software has unveiled its bCommerce Visual Configurator, which gives manufacturers access to the company's 3D Visual Configurator via Web browsers. B2B buyers can use it on manufacturers' websites to make selections and pass them on to the manufacturers' sales reps in real time. Customer and...

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Optymyze SVP Arturo Bentin: Give Your Salespeople Options

If you want to boost sales performance, "there are a few things to think about," said Optymyze SVP Arturo Bentin. "One is, what behaviors are you trying to drive? When you're talking about sales performance, you're talking about a lot of things. You need to think about the metrics and the tools you ...

INSIGHTS

JEDI Mind Games

During the same week it was sued by irate investors over progress moving its customer base to the cloud, Oracle protested a procurement process for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. The lawsuit will take a long time to resolve, and it's difficult to see how the plaintiffs can prove their ...

CRM Buyer Channels