CRM Talk

A bad technology day, how we can collectively put an end to call center cold calls, a review of CRM Magazine's 2018 CRM Market Awards winners , The ascents of Microsoft & Zoho, how long it really takes to become a CRM leader, how little separation there is among the top ranked vendors in point scores.

Accel KKR makes a 9 figure investment in SugarCRM. Some of the other potential compatible AKKR companies. Sugar's redesign and re-architecture. Sugar's one-clickedness. Mitch Lieberman 's take on the investment and his advice, including going all in on the cloud. How the sales team needs to be more consultative and real. The idea of conversational engagement. The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales F...

Sam and Steve talk with Joel Schneider, president of Liberty Technology Advisors about what about what should be behind proper ERP selection and implementation processes. Joel answers the question, "is cloud-based ERP as easy as the vendors would lead you to believe?" Joel also addresses many of the factors that people within any organization need to consider before making a decision on an ERP ven...

Sam and Steve test-drive Zencastr, Pipedrive raises $50 million, smaller vendors be "taking on" the big CRM vendors or is there a better strategy?, Nimble's approach, Swiftpage's investment and their focus on "the easiest product on the market to use", Act! Connect, the Collabspot plugin for Office 365 and G Suite, contact enrichment, marketing approved email templates vs. empowering salespeople,...

The GDPR is in effect, Salesforce earnings, CRM industry growth, data augmentation, CRM and AI, GDPR and ABM, un-gating content, conditional CTA visibility by country, the ultimate objective comparison between Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365, image size and SEO, website conversion actions, the FBI's instruction to reboot your router, Alexa privacy fail, bpm'online's conference and roadmap, t...

GDPR will take effect in just over a month. Ian Gotts of Elements. Cloud returns to discuss GDPR with Sam and Steve.

Sam's new hip parts, his plan to #DeleteFacebook, messing with Facebook's algorithm, cleaning up LinkedIn letter by letter, Salesforce's purchase of MuleSoft, what acquisitions mean for the Salesforce ecosystem, vanishing best of breed in the CRM industry, Salesforce's small business moves, Microsoft's Dynamics 365 strategy of combining acquisitions, product groupings, Microsoft's impressive seaso...

Sam's upcoming body parts replacement, CRM Switch named a Top 10 CRM Blog for 2017 by CRMBuyer, the CRM Switch multi-year CRM cost calculator , GDPR compliance in the context of CRM and marketing automation, blockchain and GDPR compliance, chat & leads, incorporating sales tax in CRM quotes.

A discussion about the various CRM review sites. How they work and how to use them.

Brandon Bruce of Cirrus Insight makes his third guest appearance on CRM Talk. This time, he talks about the Cirrus Insight Platform, which is no longer only for Salesforce users. We also discuss the recent acquisition of Attach .

Sam and Steve deconstruct some of the common questions that are included in CRM RFPs and RFIs. They suggest some ways in which a better outcome can be achieved for the CRM buyer.

In this episode, we're joined by Daryn Reif of CRM Switch , who specializes in vendor independent CRM planning and selection. We are also joined by Craig Andrew Smith of Liberty Technology Advisors , whose company provides vendor independent ERP selection services. We discuss the respective recommended selection processes, including differences and similarities.

The email marketing origins of GreenRope, the transition to an all-in-one platform for managing long term relationships, sharing multiple methods of customer communication around an organization, the high cost of integrating disparate systems, the many components of a customer relationship, creating a more collaborative company culture, turning clients into advocates, getting your emails to stand...

CRM administration, the high demand for businesses analysis skills, what it takes to become a skilled business analyst, creating a basis for process improvement, the soft skills needed for eliciting business process flows, the limitations of traditional diagram tools, how to distill complex processes down to an easier to absorb hierarchical model, making the technology available to the Fortune "5...

California wine country fires, upcoming CRM vendor interviews, G2 Crowd Grid for CRM, Pipedrive vs. Pipeliner CRM confusion, CRM systems that allow for extending the database schema and those that do not, normalizing repeating sets of fields, ProsperWorks raises an additional $53 million. Sugar's Hint add-on product for data augmentation and prospect/customer alerts, three or four major annual pro...

Sam's arduous journey home from the path of totality, a multi-year analysis of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation, commentary on the movement of various CRM vendors within the Magic Quadrant, newcomers and the drop-offs, the Niche quadrant appearance of Xiaoshouyi CRM, a discussion about GreenRope , Fireflies.ai , and Node.io

A conversation with John Rounseville, co-founder of Saxa Solutions . Saxa is a Salesforce partner that specializes in the Healthcare and Life Sciences industries. John discusses some of the challenges facing healthcare providers, physician recruiters, medical device sales reps and specialty providers who are looking for more referrals. We talk about how CRM can help with Physician Relationship Man...

Sam gets sick and infects conference attendees plus his employees, Steve's guest appearance on "Our Love Hate Relationship With Sales", Infor CRM's integration to LinkedIn's Sales Navigator, the high price of standalone Navigator, the value of connecting CRM to multiple big data sources, Nimble's capabilities, Infor CRM's Marketo integration, what doesn't sync from marketing automation to CRM, tra...

Brandon's run for Knoxville city council, persistent CRM adoption problems and what to do about them, where salespeople actually build relationships, CRM as a management reporting tool, meeting users where they work, bringing CRM data into the inbox, updating CRM in the inbox, saving salespeople time and helping them make more money. Managing nuts & bolts CRM tasks in the inbox, under-utilization...

A discussion with Jon Ferrara about managing relationships where you can have conversations. Jon's passion is to build relationship platforms that help other people achieve their goals. Since starting GoldMine in the late 1980's, Jon has believed that the more people you can help grow, the more you'll grow. In this episode, Jon identifies the many types of people beyond customers and prospects who...

Cleveland is not Detroit, prospect reactions to vendor canned responses and preset dialogs, All Turtles for natural language AI, Cirrus Insight's coming Flight Plans, Paul Greenberg's article on trust, trust metrics, establishing trust on your website,recording video testimonials on the cheap, Camtasia video editing for marketers, establishing credibility and website authority with HARO, the comin...

Identifying and getting rid of toxic backlinks, The new version of Starfish ETL, the upcoming Starfish ETL partner program, LinkedIn data's availability to Microsoft D365 customers, feedback on the Zoho's Zoholics Sales & Marketing Conference from Steve, Zoho's numerous apps, Sam explains the processes of becoming a bpm'online partner, bpm'online's wide range of capabilities, divergent analyst per...

Skype fail and Plan B, gated vs. ungated content, A/B testing, HTML vs. plain text nurture emails, nurture tactics, tracking with Google Analytics events, visualizing data in Google Sheets, chatbots, getting re-asked for your account number by a call center agent, forwarding non-www to www, Burger King okays Google Home, website speed and WPEngine, Arlo vs. Nest Cam, two security camera use cases....

Unlimited Verizon data (sort of), Apple's possible move from Salesforce to Sugar, IBM's move to Salesforce's Service Cloud, Salesforce's use of IBM's Watson to power Einstein, Marketo and Infor partnership, marketing automation system rollups, Infor CRM gets out of neutral, Windows 10 upgrade reportedly "breaks" Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, Salesforce's ongoing Lightning push, loyalty programs, re...

Changing listener's lives, winter golf in Chicago, more detail on Simple CRM System, selling salespeople on using CRM, industries that lag in CRM adoption, what it takes to implement CPQ, getting salespeople to tag DQ'd leads with "reason disqualified", getting around the gatekeeper, use-case-driven CRM data migration, to migrate or not to migrate custom fields.