Analysis

Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Closing the Deal With Electronic Signatures

As sales organizations endeavor to escape the constricted economy of the 2009 recession, one of their most significant barriers is stagnant progress regarding bringing their sales cycle under control. Recent Aberdeen research reveals that even the Best-in-Class, or top 20 percent of performers among over 500 companies surveyed, experienced a slight lengthening of their own lead-to-win timeframe.

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Salesforce.com’s Jigsaw Buy: The End of Advertising? - Story From: CRM Buyer

Salesforce.com's buy of Jigsaw is the latest, most indicative market mover in the transition to a lead generation economy. Twitter's forays into a sponsored tweets business model announced last week at Chirp is another. Yahoo selling its soul to Microsoft for Bing is another. And just about everything that Google does is but another. And everything that Facebook does? Ditto.

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How Hoover’s Users Clean Up Inside-Sales Performance - Story From: CRM Buyer

Companies seeking to steer highly qualified leads to their "closers" are faced today with a combination of competitive threats, information overload and hesitant buyer behavior requiring new strategies and tools to succeed. The never-ending economic pressure for sales organizations to increase productivity, while "doing more with less," often results in organizational emphasis on segregating responsibilities.

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Hop On the Social CRM Express - Story From: CRM Buyer

There's a huge discussion raging on the Internet started by a provocative question from Bob Thompson: Can you do social CRM without social media/networks? I find it curious that I am not in agreement with much of the discussion or, more to the point, I might agree with the conclusion but not the underpinnings.

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The Season of Sustainability - Story From: CRM Buyer

Over the last couple of weeks, I have maintained radio silence, hardly blogging as I tried to prepare a manuscript for publication. This piece is not the usual analyst fare with charts and graphs and interpretations. It's a simple book of my writings from the last year and a half.

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Here Comes Google to Save the Sale - Story From: CRM Buyer

Google has introduced a feature that gives advertisers another bite at the apple -- that is, it gives them another shot at potential customers who interacted with their company somewhere on the Google Content Network but didn't make a purchase. Google is calling the feature "remarketing." Introduced last year in a beta test, it is now available throughout its advertising network.

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Voice of the Customer: Tim Minahan, CMO, Ariba, Inc.* - Story From: Recent Ideas

This month's Voice of the Customer post comes from Tim Minahan.  Tim is the Chief Marketing Officer for Ariba, Inc., the leading provider of on-demand spend management solutions.  Tim talks about the challenges many CMOs face today and how he use...

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Readiness Assessment Description:

Using survey measures and interviews, experienced change management consultants determine the status of staff and management related to computer use, work processes, and change management. The two-day on-site visit focuses on determining the preparedness of staff for the broad scope of change resulting from the transition to a new system. In addition, staff is provided the opportunity to engage in the project, identify expectations and concerns related to the project, identify their roles within the project and provide suggestions for the consideration of the leadership within your organization. Potential redundancies in documentation, discrepancies between work practice and policy and unclear or undefined processes are identified.

This process allows for the necessary corrections, improvements, or clarifications in work processes and documentation to be managed before training staff on a new computer information system. Specific guidelines are provided to establish the internal mechanisms to address the change processes and the observations made during the site visit. Early preparations can then be undertaken to expedite the implementation process. An overview of the implementation process provides staff and management with the perspective to establish the internal structure to manage the change process and engage the staff affected by the change process related to the new system.  A written summary following this visit identifies pertinent observations related to the existing culture and skills within your organization and provides individualized recommendations for your consideration.

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Marketers, Take a Leaf From Sales’ Psy-Ops Playbook - Story From: CRM Buyer

Anyone who has worked in sales or indirectly worked closely with sales has experienced those curious times when deals that seem to be moving along perfectly suddenly go cold. Was it something you did, something you said, something you failed to do? Inevitably, the question always gets asked "What could we have done differently to make the sale?"

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