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 out in recipients’ inboxes with timeliness and relevance, email as one part of an omni-channel strat...
Oct 20, 2017•31 min
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 Million”, simplified notations, the handoff between activities, activity boxes that start with verbs...
Oct 18, 2017•42 min
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 product releases vs. continuous improvement (micro-releases), open source CRM, companies that still dep...
Oct 12, 2017•28 min•Ep. 67
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...
Sep 01, 2017•34 min•Ep. 66
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 Management, patient engagement and tracking data about and from medical devices -- whether the devices ...
Aug 03, 2017•28 min
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, tracking sources from Lead to Order, Contour mapping, Coleman AI, Infor’s vertical market strategy, int...
Jul 18, 2017•32 min•Ep. 65
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 of marketing automation, transferring the drip marketing apparatus to sales, programming your sa...
Jul 13, 2017•29 min
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 businesspeople should be connecting with on a regular basis. Jon reveals how to stay top of mind wi...
Jul 11, 2017•26 min
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 coming Starfish automated data migration tool.
Jun 23, 2017•31 min
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 perspectives on CRM vendors, G2 Crowd’s latest round of funding, Sam & Steve’s no-popup policy ...
May 26, 2017•31 min
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.
Apr 19, 2017•33 min
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, rewards and CRM.
Mar 17, 2017•31 min
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.
Feb 21, 2017•36 min
Sam’s birthday, Steve’s trip Down Under, six levels of CRM expenses, the cure for low CRM adoption by salespeople, Sam’s DIY Virtual Digital Sales Assistant (VDSA), a commentary on Gartner’s Todd Berkowitz’s 10 fearless predictions for 2017 .
Jan 20, 2017•38 min
Peter D’Cruz on early days sales management software, objective sales pipeline, helping salespeople, building a sales process, self-disciplined salespeople, when buyers buy, explaining yourself fully, disqualifying early, forcing a prospect to say “no”, change the prospect’s opinion, buyer self-education, beware the lonely prospect, the “don’t follow up” sales strategy explained, applying Taoism to sales, not swimming upstream and going with the flow in sales.
Dec 29, 2016•30 min
Sam’s office party interruption, Salesforce vs Microsoft comparison update, CRM requirements for sales management, self-implementing CRM, the cost of CRM professional services, preventing scope creep on flat rate engagements, quote to order to invoice, level of detail in CRM requirements, the difference between sales and marketing, low CRM adoption by salespeople, giving salespeople more options, the Benioff and Nadella bromance is over, our past bad annual predictions, a couple of predictions f...
Dec 15, 2016•30 min
Golfing in central Florida with alligators, Microsoft Dynamics rebranding and new pricing, more CRM vendors add AI, Chat and Drift , blocking the LinkedIn deal, automating drip marketing, customer journey mapping overload, simplified process mapping with Elements.cloud , CRMNext and banking, building a CRM vertical on a platform vs. building from the ground up.
Nov 23, 2016•38 min
Sam’s European river cruise & other adventures, Podcasteasy.com, Dreamforce ’16 report, Salesforce Einstein, MVPs, Twitter pass, DCLeaks and acquisition targets, government email security.
Oct 20, 2016•31 min
Cheap MacBook upgrade, Apple’s port reduction, Yathit for Sugar and Gmail, Microsoft’s big win over Salesforce, Wells Fargo’s sales compensation plan “glitch”, autonomous selling, AI-powered CRM.
Sep 16, 2016•32 min
Quickbooks to CRM integration, data driven digital marketing, Oracle acquires NetSuite, salespeople's first CRM impression, Best CRM advertising site, the $14B CRM debacle, SugarCRM's channel award, sales & marketing alignment. Steve's company's site | Sam's company's site
Aug 24, 2016•34 min
Using Uber for business travel, LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration with Microsoft's top competitors, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce closes DemandWare deal, Chat popups and exit intent popups. Steve's company's site | Sam's company's site
Jul 22, 2016•29 min
SugarCon 2016, Microsoft buys LinkedIn & what Facebook should do, Salesforce buys DemandWare, Klipfolio. Recorded at the beautiful Gloria Ferrer Caves & Vineyards in Sonoma, California. Many thanks to Jason for his excellent service and great insights into sparkling wine. Steve's company's site | Sam's company's site
Jun 16, 2016•36 min
CRM Evolution conference, customer portals, customer experience management (CX, CEM or CXM), Salesforce NA14 downtime, voice commands and CRM, Amazon Echo, Calendly, Google Slides API & CRM use cases. Steve's company's site | Sam's company's site
May 28, 2016•34 min
Apple news, being an airline passenger in the 1960's, Sam's CRM database cleaning effort, limiting the number of marketing automation system records. Steve's company's site | Sam's company's site
Apr 27, 2016•34 min
Sonoma wine, MarTech, the marketing technology stack, how to develop a marketing automation playbook. Steve's company's site | Sam's company's site
Mar 26, 2016•33 min
Sam and Steve discuss gamification and touch on the benefits of a marketing automation playbook. Steve's company's site | Sam's company's site
Feb 26, 2016•30 min
Voice control of CRM, prospect and customer engagement data with Wistia and Attach , CRM poll results, Google Trends for CRM and MA vendors. Steve's company's site | Sam's company's site
Jan 30, 2016•29 min
Native advertising, removal of CRM features, CRM software rewrites, 2016 predictions, crowdsourced CRM review sites. Steve's company's site | Sam's company's site
Dec 12, 2015•32 min
Steve and Sam talk CRM and mapping with Proxima Software founder David Wahl. Steve's company's site | Sam's company's site
Nov 21, 2015•30 min
Sam & Steve discuss Dreamforce, Infor Next San Diego, CPQ technology, Amazon EC2 & S3, Chromebooks, Vertical CRM vendors and LinkedIn as CRM. Steve's company's site | Sam's company's site
Oct 17, 2015•33 min
