If you've recently taken part in a conference or trade show, you know the feeling all too well. You’re pumped up and excited about your prospects—and utterly exhausted.
If you've recently taken part in a conference or trade show, you know the feeling all too well. You’re pumped up and excited about your prospects—and utterly exhausted.
Trade show planning and closing the loop doesn’t begin after the trade show. The key to consistently closing the loop with leads is planning. Remember that famous quote from Benjamin Franklin: “Failing to plan is planning to fail"? That is the key to most victories, especially trade show success and return on investment.
Are you thinking about working with an agency? There are a few essential tips we can offer to ensure you start off on the right track, from marketing assessments to technology audits. Business Development Lead Michael Christian brings up the top five things that you should consider before doing so.
As a business development lead, my job is to ask prospective clients questions and evaluate if we, as an agency, can help with their marketing efforts. I speak with small businesses and Fortune 100 companies and see my share of business strategies (or lack thereof). It still amazes me, however, how many times I learn that companies, regardless of size, are still not using a Client Relationship Management (CRM) tool.
This question comes up quite often in my discussions with small to medium businesses: Does Big Data matter to you?
Big Data has been perceived as a large enterprise focus area while small organizations think that they can sit on the sidelines and wait. You hear of companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon and IBM focusing a lot of resources toward capturing and utilizing Big Data. If you're sitting out until you think it's relevant for small business, then you need to get started today because it's relevant now.
In this customer-centric age, the only thing worse (actually exponentially worse) than having no dedicated system for your customers, better known as Customer Relationship Management systems or CRM systems, is to have a CRM that doesn't work the way you intended it to! You may have made massive investments, including money and time. You may have implemented the best CRM for your organization and, yet, slowly but surely you can see it's failing to live up to your expectations. Sounds like a complete nightmare, doesn't it?
Business owners, the executive team and sales management can get very excited about implementing a CRM into their sales process. The thought of elaborate reporting tools and enhanced data collection and the promise of increased efficiency can blind them. They often forget how their sales teams and support staff will react to the thought of significant change. There are fears of "Big Brother" watching every move, extra administrative work to do, and the loss of their feelings of relevancy. I have seen all of these in play with companies that did not think it through. Here are a few things to consider that will make your CRM implementation projects run more smoothly.
Today's ever-changing technology landscape offers tools and tactics that can make your business more effective and efficient. The excitement of having a new tool or toy like a CRM platform can help with analytics, observations and trends but it can overshadow a very important question, which is, "How is this integration or CRM implementation going to effect my company's culture?"
One of the most time-consuming aspects of any CRM implementation for any enterprise is the selection of the CRM system itself. In my experience, I have seen stakeholders spend considerable time (months to years) analyzing one option after another, sifting through the subscription plans on offer. In fact, if you are a rookie, the sheer plethora of options available to you will whirl your mind.
Engaging a managed technology service provider has often been viewed as something for large organizations who have a lot of cash to spare. However, technology outsourcing is slowly finding its following amongst organizations of all sizes and industry, courtesy ever-changing business dynamics and innovation. I am often asked, why and when to outsource in-house Salesforce services to a managed service provider. The answer, though involves explanation, is simpler than what you may have initially thought.
Well, not quite literally! Salesforce 1 Lightning is a new-age Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering from Salesforce. Billed as the fastest, quickest way of dishing out cross-device, responsive applications on the Force.com platform, Lightning is a collection of new and re-branded technologies that simplify and deliver the whole lifecycle of building apps, integrating data and automating business processes, at the speed of light!
Essentially, Salesforce 1 Lightning comprises of Lightning Connect. True to its name, Lightning Connect enables you to connect to external sources and legacy systems and access the data within real-time.
Salesforce introduced its new component framework Lightning in its winter’15 release, targeted at building apps, integrating data and automating business processes at a very fast speed. In this blog post, I am going to talk about the Lightning Process Builder, Salesforce’s workflow and process automation framework.
