Exclusives

"There's a gap in performance across B2B selling, because buyers are innovating faster than sellers are getting better at selling," said Miller Heiman CEO Byron Matthews. "Sales enablement's function is to try to close that gap. It's not sales operation ... . It's more strategic, in terms of trying ...

One of the top current trends in the CRM space is that AI offers "the ability to gain insight, and the most important example is visitor tracking," said Dimitri Ahkrin, president of CRMDialer. "That's a big component -- knowing how in real time to react to something a prospect is doing on a site. It...

"There's this notion that software is primarily something you have to work for," said Jon Lee, CEO of ProsperWorks. "There's a lot of data entry, a lot of navigating screens and moving between different windows. Software as it was designed in the 1980s was a database for recording information. The t...

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 ...

"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 ...

"We're seeing a digital transformation take place, where companies are moving their contact centers to the cloud," noted Dan Burkland, president of Five9. "There are two key criteria for a contact center -- there's the CRM and the contact center infrastructure, and those two really go hand-in-hand.

"The customer journey is the journey that e-commerce customers go on when they come to a site, and hopefully it ends with buying a product," said Chemi Katz, CEO of Namogoo. "Hijacking interferes with the customer's journey. It can be a pop-up that the company didn't put there, or something that wil...

A digital customer journey "has to be a full end-to-end cycle," said Diego Tartara, Globant CTO Latin America. "It starts from the actual need and goes all the way to the usage of the product or brand. The journey is not only the touchpoints with the digital tool. It has to do with the end-to-end re...

Content management is all about making sure that a product item page "has all of the information that a customer needs to buy an item or have a good experience with it afterwards," said Kenji Gjovig, VP of partnerships and business development at Content Analytics. "What goes into content management...

"As services are getting more and more mobile, service needs to get mobile as well," said Tushar Makhija, vice president of revenue at Helpshift. "If you look at customer service over the last 10 to 15 years, first it was all about average handling time. If you grew quickly as a business, you needed...

"Channel data management is about providing high-tech companies with all the data and information they need to effectively manage their distribution channels, sales and marketing," said Zyme CCO Ted Dimbero. "Traditionally, companies have relied on managing the channel fairly blindly. They may get m...

"When you provide service, it can be either completely general, or contextual -- which means it's different for different demographics," said Nanorep CTO Amit Ben. "Personalized service means that you get to the most fine-grained resolution possible. It's self-service that can be catered and adjuste...

"There are groups within companies that don't want to interact with a full-blown CRM application," said John Oechsle, president and CEO of Swiftpage. "They want it running in the background, but they want to access it based on the functions they want it to perform. These small purpose-built apps are...

"We think of 'subscription' broadly," said Matt Darrow, VP and general manager of product at Zuora. "It's when companies do business with customers with whom they have a known relationship, and those relationships are sticky. The subscription model is great for engagement because companies know that...