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.
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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Backlink Cleanse
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 on their respective websites.
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Everything Bots
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 an agent, forwarding non-www to www, Burger King okays Google, website speed and WPEngine, Arlo vs. Nest Cam, two security camera use cases.
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Distant Restrooms
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.
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