Crm News & Articles

Are you in the loop? Do you really know what your customers and partners are talking about and how to quickly engage them on those topics? Saleforce thinks it has an innovative new way to do just that, and the new Communities release is the CRM powerhouse's way of making social interactions easier and more productive. 

Online application provider Zoho is launching Zoho Campaigns, a campaign management app for reaching out to customers via email or social media.

When businesses engage in customer service, there is a unique thing that happens: science and art collide. Satisfying customers and creating ongoing loyalty is a true art form, while ensuring that call center representatives are highly efficient falls more on the scientific side. Blending both of these worlds can be very challenging.

Sales enablement is a hot topic lately, with an increasing number of CRM and sales/marketing automation vendors providing sales enablement solutions. However, according to Dan Schleifer, senior director of marketing for enterprise sales collaboration software provider SAVO Group, the full potential of sales enablement lies in revealing what happens in the middle of the sales process.

It’s the middle of the holiday period, so it’s a little bit surprising to see Gartner release another one of its Magic Quadrants. This time it’s the Sales Force Automation quadrant that features quite a number of the vendors we've seen in the customer experience management space, except this one has a slightly different focus.

Oracle continues to snap at Salesforce’s heels in the CRM space, this time with an upgrade to its CRM on Demand product. Release 20 adds industry-specific functionality for the financial, automotive life sciences and insurance sectors.

Despite the popular image of a salesperson relentlessly pursuing prospects and then closing deals with their charm and persuasion, the reality is buyers avoid salespeople until they have already educated themselves through publicly available data and online networking with peers.

In the first part of this examination of Forrester’s Wave: CRM Suites for Large Organizations, Q3 2012 earlier this week we saw that organizations are struggling to define a CRM strategy for their organization. Even still, the CRM market is one with seven companies making it into the Leaders section.

For many companies, content marketing is a direct way for getting new leads. Before they allow you to read or download e-books, white papers, videos or any other content, they present you with a form.

Through forms, companies get personal information about people reading their content. While this approach is absolutely legitimate, in many cases if done wrong, it may lead to an opposite result by losing potential customers. Let's go through the five most common errors companies do in getting the leads through content marketing.

UpSync has released version 3.0 of its cloud-based software, with new tools for creating mobile presentations, managing content and delivering HTML5 apps.

Despite investment in, and deployment of customer relationship management applications in close to 75% of large organizations, it seems that many enterprises are struggling to clarify, or even define, a distinct and lucid customer relationship strategy.

Customer relationship management (CRM) provider SugarCRM is taking a larger role with the OpenSocial Foundation, boosting that organization's focus toward the enterprise. The company announced that two of its executives have taken leadership positions to further the development of social business open standards.

 Last month, a poll by the SAVO group revealed that more than 60 percent of companies have not realized a positive ROI with their CRM system. Recognizing the work left to be done by marketing teams to facilitate better social collaboration and the achievement of measurable gains, SAVO group has released a new social collaboration application designed to accelerate sales cycles and increase win rates by examining the social behaviors of sellers.

Actiance is integrating its Socialite social media management platform with Salesforce.com through a new connector. Socialite provides granular control for social networking sites, including the specific ability to manage access and content shared across 200 features on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Building business relationships means solving problems, but solving the little problems that pop up while solving the bigger problems is what companies like Kana and Sword Ciboodle do best.  Luckily for companies who do business with either, they'll now be doing business with both because Kana has now acquired Ciboodle.