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EXPERT ADVICE

Refocus Your Sales Strategy on the Phone Call

Getting a prospect on the line and talking to them directly matters. It's the ability to deliver the pitch with the right content, cadence, and care for your future clients' needs that makes a voice call so effective. It's not just salespeople who prefer a call -- 92 percent of all customer interact...

As traditional gyms, fitness centers, and health and wellness studios shutter during COVID-19, technology has kicked in to provide a replacement or an alternative for growing numbers of online shoppers. Digital at-home exercise sessions and sales of home exercise and health equipment purchased onlin...

RESEARCH

Improving Company Performance

A recent study found that businesses across North America are led well and staffed with people who are engaged in what they're doing. But technology is barely adequate -- and because of this, managers should devote their attention to improving systems whenever they think about how to improve overall...

Oracle's new offerings, really packaging of existing recent high-performance products for the enterprise market, enable companies to continue running their data and datacenters on premise while still benefitting from gains made by its autonomous database like eliminating most forms of routine mainte...

Somewhat surprisingly, to those who suspect that enterprises have more resources available than SMBs, Fortune 500 companies responded 1.4 times slower than smaller firms. The average response time for Fortune 500 companies was nearly 47 hours, while smaller firms responded within 34 hours on average...

One of the e-tail world's most pressing questions is: When will Amazon have its Prime Day sale this year? Perhaps a better question is: Will Prime Day happen at all? Amazon so far is not telling. If Prime Day 2020 takes place in the fall, the biggest deal days of the e-commerce industry could happen...

INSIGHTS

The Trail to the Platform

Some years ago, Marc Benioff told me he was not interested in developing back office apps that would compete with SAP and Oracle in the ERP and finance market. Many people, myself included, looked askance at that idea and wondered out loud how the company would continue to grow because, hey, there's...

The heart of the manufacturing world was the first region to feel the effects of the pandemic. While we have seen some stabilization, many challenges remain in terms of pricing, reliability, and the supply chain itself. Let's take a closer look at these challenges to better understand how best to na...

Marketers at B2C companies realize that personalization is key to business, but they are having problems implementing personalization strategies, according to a recent survey by Adweek Intelligence in association with IBM Watson Advertising.

If you search for "why CRM fails" you get over three million results. Analysts report that close to half of all CRM projects fail and about 40 percent of CRM software purchased goes unused -- because sales teams don't want to use software that makes them glorified data entry clerks and still doesn't...

INSIGHTS

Time to Beef Up Your Algorithms

In a CRM situation, an algorithm that gets the right answer is accurate and nice (we got the deal!), but if the business process supported by CRM has a lot of returns or unhappy customers, it's not very precise.

Despite the challenges, remote working has accelerated the pace of customer service transformation to digital, expanding opportunities for staff to work from the comfort of their living room (or kitchen!) -- and it will occupy a permanent place in the call centers of the future.

Building a successful global business is a never-ending juggling act. With what can seem like an unlimited number of moving parts, compromises feel inevitable. Efficiency is traded for simplicity. Optimal long-term solutions are traded for quick and dirty fixes. These tradeoffs can be especially pro...

A pandemic, economic uncertainty and social distancing -- what a kerfuffle we are in right now. As marketing leaders, it's an incredibly difficult time to direct our teams. Everyone is struggling to navigate our current situation. Yet, while we're all figuring out how to juggle emotions, families, d...

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