E-Commerce Blog

As sales organizations endeavor to escape the constricted economy of the 2009 recession, one of their most significant barriers is stagnant progress in terms of bringing their sales cycle under control. Recent Aberdeen research published for “Inside Sales Enablement: Let Them Drink Coffee!” reveals that not only did under-performing companies see a year-over-year increase in their sales cycle of 12 percent, but even the Best-in-Class, or top 20 percent of performers among over 500 companies surveyed, experienced a slight lengthening of their own bid-to-win time frame.

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Automated Bid-to-Win: Shrink the Sales Cycle, Seal More Deals

Salesforce.com has rolled out a private beta program for Salesforce Chatter, a real-time enterprise collaboration application and platform. Positioned by Salesforce.com as an alternative to such collaborative software applications as SharePoint and Lotus Notes, Chatter enables employees to stay connected to designated people, documents and applications. It comes equipped with the usual features found in social networking apps: feeds, status updates, custom app updates, profiles, and content-sharing functionality.

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Salesforce.com Aims to Make Office Chatter Productive

Practically every business has a dirty little secret: It’s called customer attrition. Rarely can a company claim someone as a customer for life. There will always be pressure from the competition — and as a result, there will always be customer attrition. Certainly, businesses do everything they can to retain their current base, but retention isn’t enough. It’s essential for any organization to continuously grow revenue. From moving van companies to travel agents to software providers, every business struggles to obtain the most valuable of assets: customer leads.

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Outsourcing Lead Generation: Who Do You Trust?

I just finished reading The Black Swan, a book that has been on my list since it came out in 2007, and I highly recommend it, though it is not easy reading. There is a great deal of set up before you get to the whole point of the book in the last 50 pages. The Black Swan is about uncertainty in the real world, and the subtitle explains it all: “The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” It’s something that I can see affecting CRM and its users on many levels. Highly improbable things happen frequently, and they have deep and unpredictable impacts on our world.

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Black Swans and Blue Birds

Sales force automation — nimble, lightweight and usually mobile — seems to have little in common with its staid parent, enterprise resource planning. Until you consider this: After years of widespread adoption, SFA has also become mature. Yet the space is not remaining static. There have been changes over recent months — primarily in client demand — that are likely to usher in new pricing models and a more conservative approach to Web 2.0.

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SFA May Be Mature, but It’s About to Have a Growth Spurt