Enterprise Apps

It was just six months ago that we saw what beacon technology could do on a wide scale. For Super Bowl XLVIII, the National Football League installed wireless transmitters in Times Square and at MetLife Stadium to send simple yet specific messages to smartphones: "bathrooms to the right," "snacks to...

Take a look at almost any sales software on the market, and you'll find the vendor's claim that the product accelerates the sales process. It's a given. For years, we've been trying to achieve this acceleration, and we've been succeeding. The only problem with this approach is that it can't go on fo...

Qstream, which has developed a gamification-based app to help sales reps learn complex sales-related content, has broadened and deepened its functionality so the platform can be used in a number of new scenarios. It has expanded the types of situations in which a company can use its Qstream license,...

I was impressed by the announcement by Salesforce.com last week of a new product combination it calls "Sales Reach." It's supposed to be a mashup of sorts between Sales Cloud, Pardot and Communities functionality that helps reps run micro-campaigns, perform nurturing and develop communities. As some...

Tellwise, a two-and-a-half year old startup, has introduced a new collaboration platform for sales reps to target prospects. Called "Smart Messages," the multichannel platform comes equipped with such tools as intelligent notifications, behavioral analytics and mobile functionality. Smart Messages i...

Your company has a CRM system that employees love and use regularly, and marketing automation tools to help streamline and automate all of your online marketing activities. That's a great start, but did you know that most marketing qualified leads -- more than 94 percent by some estimates -- don't c...

Attentive.ly recently released its application on the Eloqua platform, digging a deeper foothold for itself in the CRM enterprise space. Attentive.ly provides social marketing automation functionality in the form of a plug-and-play toolset that works with a CRM overlay. Using its tools, companies ...

SAP and its long-standing partner Esri have developed a native product integration that debuted this week at the at the Esri User Conference currently under way in San Diego. The companies have been collaborating on projects since 1999, due to the significant overlap in their respective customer bas...

It's general practice to have multiple sales forecasts, and that typically means low and upside potential as well as what's committed -- but the idea of teasing those threads apart only at forecasting time might be old school and no longer applicable. Long before you compile a forecast, you have a g...

Salesforce.com will shell out $350 million in common stock for RelateIQ in a deal expected to close by October. It will provide another $40 million dollars in stock for its cash balance. RelateIQ will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Salesforce, according to an SEC filing. Many of Salesforce's pa...

As much as we may wax on about engaging, enchanting and delighting our customers, most of them are not expecting such an experience. In most cases, their purchase is prelude to something else pleasurable, in the case of B2C -- or profitable, in the case of B2B. They want to get what they need and go...

Despite their financial burdens -- unconscionably high levels of college education debt and a lackluster job market -- everyone wants to know what millenials want. Where will they live? What will they buy? Automakers shake in fear that they won't develop the same obsession for the automobile-oriente...

Blackbaud recently upgraded its cloud-based eTapestry fundraising application with tools addressing what seems to be a perennial problem in CRM -- dirty data. The ultimate goal of the upgrades for the application, which is designed for nonprofits, is to improve the quality of donor information. The ...

Zendesk has rolled out a new analytics and data visualization tool that sits on top of its flagship customer service platform. Called "Zendesk Insights," it is available to the company's Plus and Enterprise users. "One thing we have been hearing from our customers is that they want more access to th...

Not that the shows ever end, but as I regain my spot on the ground, I have a few observations from the many shows that I have been to or read about over the last eight weeks. First, if you think that cloud platforms are simply a nice alternative to software licenses, you should think again. It's hum...