Podcasts
In their CRM Talk podcast, Technology Advisors Inc. co-founder Sam Biardo and CRM Switch co-founder Steve Chipman discuss everything CRM – from the latest releases, to trends in the market, and the future of business technology. Sam and Steve have a combined expertise of 45+ years in the industry, and they bring that expertise to the table in these informative & fun podcast episodes. Join these two experts as they interview technology influencers, banter about recent software news, and give valuable advice for streamlining data & improving business processes. Available for free on the iTunes Store.
CRM & ERP Selection
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.
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Lars Helgeson of GreenRope
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 strategy, the benefits of modeling the sales process, the reason for GreenRope’s contact-based vs. user-based pricing model, what types of companies use GreenRope, the need for at least one person to own CRM within an organization, the weak CRM component of many “all-in-one” solutions, GreenRope’s approach to vertical markets through private-label resellers, GreenRope’s pure organic growth, the value of having operations-side applications such as events and LMS built into the platform, integrated predictive analytics, how to get a no-pressure, consultative demo of GreenRope.
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Bonus Episode: Ian Gotts of Elements.cloud
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, resources as an alternative to swim lanes, attaching items to an activity box, making a process map universally understandable, using Elements.cloud in a live workshop, how to run workshops, Ian’s “business analysis improv” approach when he presents, displaying process diagrams within Salesforce objects, self maintaining user training material, why process mapping can be used in almost any industry and across all departments, the coming GDPR compliance requirements & how Elements.cloud can help, where to find Ian and his team at Dreamforce, the Elements.cloud “free forever” model.
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Extensible CRM
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 deploy CRM on-premise, cloud security vs. corporate network security.
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Gartner Totality
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.
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Bonus Episode: John Rounseville of Saxa Solutions
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 are located in provider facilities or with patients.
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Bonus Episode: Brandon Bruce of Cirrus Insight
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 sales playbook, using best practices to develop Flight Plans, landing in the prospect’s inbox instead of in their Promotions tab.
Brandon’s book, “The Slow Sale: How Slowing Down Wins More Deals” and the need for a quiet period while working a deal, the dangers of focusing too heavily on sales acceleration, reconciling management pressure to close deals with the value of the quiet period, open communications in selling and avoiding surprises, Brandon’s experience with a timeshare salesperson’s process and what happened when he veered from the seller’s playbook, sales effectiveness vs. sales efficiency.
Bonus Episode: Jon Ferrara of Nimble
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 with people in many different roles and what you should do to get people to call you rather than you calling them.
We also discuss today’s announcement of Nimble Smart Contacts App, a new freemium add-in for Microsoft Office 365, Outlook desktop and iOS.
Vendor Trustiness
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.
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The Big Sam Sick
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, integrating acquire companies’ products, the CRM beasts that will not die, companies moving back to ACT!, Google My Business for B2B companies, the sale of Endeavor Commerce to Vendavo, Zoho’s new Zoho Sign digital signature app, Zoho’s alternative to QuickBooks.
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