CRM Talk: Recent Episodes
Steve Chipman & Sam Biardo
Analysis of the latest CRM industry news. Discussions about CRM best practices and how to succeed with CRM.
In the final episode of the CRM Talk Podcast, hosts Steve Chipman and Sam Biardo reflect on over a decade of industry evolution since their 2013 debut. Spanning 129 episodes, the duo discusses the transition from basic reporting to integrated AI and no-code development.
They explore shifting client expectations, noting a move from highly customized processes toward seeking vendor-led best practices. The conversation highlights the technical hurdles of legacy integrations, the complexities of API changes, and the persistent friction between sales and marketing teams regarding lead qualification.
As they "bow out," the hosts offer professional insights into the future of CRM strategy.
Steve's websites:
CRMSwitch.com
HelpfulSEOs.com
Sam's websites:
TechAdv.com
StarfishETL.com
Steve and Sam are joined by One Chowdhury, founder of the AI-native CRM, Octolane. One shares his incredible journey from a Duke University student who didn't know what a CRM was to a Y Combinator-backed founder aiming to take down Salesforce.
He discusses why legacy CRMs are "trapped with their own success" and struggle to adapt to AI, while Octolane is built from the ground up to eliminate manual data entry and give sales reps their time back. Learn how Octolane's 'Action Mode' proactively suggests follow-ups and meeting prep, aiming to turn every user into a 'superhuman seller'. This conversation covers the future of CRM, go-to-market strategy, and building a product that addresses the core pain points of sales professionals.
Sam and Steve discuss the practical applications of AI in modern sales and marketing. Steve explains his process for using Gemini's Deep Research feature to generate detailed company reports, condensed infographics, and audio summaries for effective account-based marketing.
Sam shares his techniques for leveraging AI to create personalized connection requests on LinkedIn and to repurpose podcasts into engaging social media posts.
They also explore how AI is changing SEO, shifting the focus from clicks to brand mentions within AI-generated search results. The conversation covers how AI can transform existing content into new formats and significantly shorten the traditional sales discovery process.
In this episode, Steve and Sam are joined by special guest Clint Oram, who recently left SugarCRM after exactly 21 years.
The group explores the future of CRM, the transformative power of AI, and how technology is reshaping the way organizations think about customer relationships, system design, and collaboration.
Jennifer Noonan, VP and GM of CX and IPMC Business Units at Infor, joins Steve and Sam to discuss the evolution of Infor CRM SLX (formerly SalesLogix) and its role in industry-specific digital transformation. Jen shares how Infor’s vertically aligned strategy enables the delivery of tailored ERP and CRM solutions to manufacturing, distribution, and service-based organizations.
The conversation covers CRM and ERP integration, quoting workflows, and why CRM should be the system of engagement while ERP remains the system of record. Jen also reflects on Koch Industries’ long-term investment approach and how it has accelerated innovation across Infor’s cloud offerings.
Is your organization ready for CRM?
Sam and Steve discuss the ten readiness statements from CRM Switch's online calculator: https://crm-readiness-calculator.crmswitch.com/
In this episode of CRM Talk, Steve Chipman and Sam Biardo discuss AI agents and their impact on business. They talk about how AI agents have evolved from basic IVR functionality to sophisticated business tools.
Steve mentions Greg Eisenberg's insights about various types of agents (acquisition, research, content, and community agents) and how they're replacing human tasks at a fraction of the cost ($2,000 in agent costs vs $2 million in salary costs).
They discuss Salesforce's Agentforce, with Steve noting Marc Benioff's aggressive marketing against Microsoft's Copilot. Sam shares his experience using Copilot and discusses implementing AI in their Starfish product, including their pricing strategy of raising rates to cover AI token costs.
They also explore various pricing models for AI services, from token-based to per-question pricing, and discuss the integration trends they're seeing in the industry, particularly with ServiceNow, HubSpot, and Infor. The conversation concludes with a discussion of sales tax software integration needs and AI-powered headshot generation tools.
Sam LinkedIn : linkedin.com/in/sambiardo/
Steve LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/schipman/
Steve X: @stevechipman
Sam Biardo of Technology Advisors and Steve Chipman of CRM Switch discuss the changes and trends in CRM implementations over the past few years. The key points discussed include the shift towards low-code/no-code platforms, the transition from on-premise to cloud-based solutions, the reduced need for developers and increased reliance on business analysts, the growing involvement of clients in the configuration process, and the emphasis on delivering a minimally viable product (MVP) in shorter implementation cycles to minimize risk and provide faster value realization. Other topics covered include the importance of planning and phasing, integration challenges with legacy systems, project management and AI tools, reporting and dashboard creation, measuring success criteria, and data migration best practices.
Sam and Steve discuss the high-level differences between these top CRM vendors. Topics include:
- Vendor Overviews
- Scope and Complexity of Business Needs
- Extending the CRM Database
- Native vs. Integrated Marketing Functionality
- The Consultant Ecosystems
- The HubSpot & Salesforce App Marketplaces
- Freemium vs. Only Pay-For
- Scope of Product Offerings
- AI Features
- Business Process Automation Tools
- The User Experience and Interface
At the end, we tack on a AI version of the podcast created with NotebookLM which was derived from this blog post: https://crmswitch.com/buying-crm/hubspot-salesforce-differences/
Steve and Sam talk to Sati Hillyer, founder, and CEO of OneMob, about his journey from starting the AppExchange at Salesforce to developing and advancing his company's video platform for sellers over an almost ten-year period.
With a OneMob microsite, sellers can provide context, content, and a clear next step for the prospect.
👉 If you are in sales, you can sign up for a Forever Free account athttps://onemob.com/pricing-benefits/
Sam and Steve are joined by Jon Richards of Evolve Video Marketing. We discuss today's buyer, using video in the sales process, how digital sales rooms work, and getting salespeople to adopt tools like OneMob.
Steve and Sam interview Ross Simmonds, the leading authority on content distribution and using AI in marketing.
Steve and Sam discuss quote-to-cash (Q2C) solutions that enable sales teams to quickly generate quotes and receive more orders. They cover use cases for field and desk-based sales, components like CPQ and eSignature integrations, rule-based guidance, and vendor solutions from Conga to MobileForce. Also discussed are sales scenarios with frequent pricing changes, needed integrations, and evaluating vendors based on industry-specific requirements.
AI-generated summary
In this episode, Sam and Steve discuss the benefits of podcasting for marketing versus blogging, based on data showing more people per podcast than per blog. It then covers a survey showing that most marketers are using at least some AI to generate blog content, with the risk of too much AI hurting search rankings.
Sam and Steve agree AI is best for outlines and some after-the-fact SEO optimization, while human-written content ranks better. They discuss various uses of AI in marketing, like generating content sections, outlines, titles/descriptions, Tweets, LinkedIn posts, images, presentations, and videos.
Key takeaways are that AI is extremely helpful for accelerating content creation and distribution but should be used carefully and edited by humans for the best results. The hosts emphasize keeping human-created, original text for critical content like blogs.
They note AI content lacks nuance and sounds formulaic if not edited. Data shows that human-optimized content ranks better in search.
Other topics include using AI for sales enablement assets, contracts, policies, CRM, training, and deflecting questions.
AI is great for outlines, titles, descriptions, and images, but human creativity is essential for resonance and ranking.
X thread prompt
"Create an X (formerly Twitter) thread from this article https://yourcompany.com/blog/postname. Ignore the information in the page's footer. Create a 5-part thread, with 3-4 lines each. Each part should lead the reader to read the next part of the thread. Do not use hashtags."
Sam and Steve discuss CRM AI use cases for sales, marketing, customer service, customization & configuration, data migration & integration, analytics, and automations.
Sam & Steve forget how to think on their own, Enterprise AI megatrends, using ChatGPT for CRM test cases and test data
Steve and Sam talk to Scott Eller, Chief Relationship Officer & Co-founder of Neuraswitch about transcription, redaction, and sentiment analysis.
Sam and Steve talk about enforcing security for remote work, COVID's effect on shared workspaces, hindsight 2020 COVID predictions, Creatio's unique approach to a virtual conference, Sam's mathematical mindset around phased implementation, Salesforce sunsetting the Legacy Workflow Builder, the use cases for low code, integration uptime, people not reading iHateCRM.com, HubSpot's biggest product announcements, handling CRM custom objects, Snowflake, and Destination CRM's 2021 CRM Industry Awards. Steve also previews his thoughts on AI and marketing, which will be addressed in greater depth next month.
Creatio ACCELERATE Conference Registration
Steve and Sam interview Kevin Snow, CEO of Time on Target, sales expert, and technology geek, about CRM implementation challenges, introverted salespeople, accurate sales forecasting, and more.
#InternationalPodcastDay
Andy Zambito, Chief Sales Officer, Americas at Creatio, joins Sam & Steve to talk about process management, CRM, digital transformation, low-code, tailored experiences, differentiation, speed of change, speed of operations, and more.
10 questions you should ask when looking at integrating your CRM, 5 reasons a spreadsheet is not a database, 8 plugins to use with your new Wordpress site (relating to Google's new page experience standard)
Sam and Steve verbally expand on several of their respective listicles. Source posts are:
10 Questions you Must Ask When Selecting a CRM
5 Levels of CRM Requirements
8 Website Issues That May be Costing You Sales Leads
An interview with Jeffrey Russo, Director of Product, Sales Hub Go-to-Market at HubSpot. HubSpot's evolution from a marketing system to broader front office solution, focusing on the needs of the user experience, streamlining the quote-to-cash process, moving up market, getting "technical debt" that exists within organizations out of the way of the customer experience, applying functionality such as automations across different departments and use cases, HubSpot's durable partner channel, Conversation Intelligence, sales coaching based on transcripts, applying machine learning to transcripts, honoring two party states & countries, HubSpot's advantage for applying revenue attribution to marketing efforts.
Creatio raises $68 million, HubSpot goes enterprise, Sugar's HD-CX, AWS and AI, Salesforce eyes $50 billion in five years.
Creatio's first ever funding announcement video
Rich Green's Deep Learning & Time video
Salesforce's Vaccine Cloud, Sam's vaccine shot scheduling nightmare, Sam's joint webinar with Creatio, CRM 3.0, how low code/no code has altered roles in CRM deployment & management, field service, ABM, video selling, video training, CRM best practice videos, de-densifying your slide decks, HubSpot's customer code deck, explaining difficult to explain concepts, telling a story, content distribution.
Salesforce's acquisition of Slack (and Acumen), SugarCRM acquires its largest partner W-Systems, CRM vendors & leads, getting found for CRM searches, Creatio's 24 hour event, low-code solutions, BA to developer ratios, Facebook acquires Kustomer, visual development tools & whether they are necessarily simple, the Microsoft/C3.ai/Adobe alliance, CRM predictions for 2021.
An interview with Josh Johnson, senior product manager at Wistia, about Wistia's new audio hosting platform for marketers.
Learn more about the audio offering.
Chris Lavigne's excellent post and video about how to build a Soapbox Station for video recording.
David Campbell, Vice President of Product Marketing at SugarCRM, joins Sam & Steve to discuss sales, marketing, customer support, data, AI and the customer experience.
The west coast in flames, whether a podcaster should host the next presidential debate, CRM product news from Inforum, updates from HubSpot's virtual Inbound conference.
Sam's commitment to golf, the NHL and NBA bubbles, deploying CRM & training CRM users during a pandemic, using emojis for product searches, the most effective forms of marketing in 2020
A moratorium on CEO interviews, iOS 14 & location tracking, an "off the grid" mobile option, marketers' digital transformation, new Google My Business features, gathering requirements & conducting online workshops.
Musings about online meeting technologies and how they're being used. How CRM vendors are helping out with discounts and free components.
Reasons for our absence -- long vacations, Public Service Power Shutoffs and parasites. bpm'online becomes Creatio. More Salesforce acquisition rumors. Dreamforce '19 report. Video outreach. Observations on Gartner Magic Quadrants. CRM industry maturity and commoditization. Accelerated release cycles by CRM vendors. Vendors increasingly aligning their offerings around analysts' "three pillar" expectations.
Sam's iOS 13 beta testing blues, Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation, a variety of HubSpot to CRM integrations, declining website visitor conversion rates.
Rich Green is Chief Product Officer and CTO at SugarCRM. Rich leads SugarCRM's engineering and product management teams and is responsible for the product vision and global strategy of the award-winning Sugar platform.
In this episode, Sam and Steve ask Rich for his perspectives on and his vision for CRM.
Massive Salesforce outage, multi-tenant vs. single tenant hosted CRM databases, SugarCRM acquires Collabspot and Salesfusion, Sugar's new quoting module, Sage sunsets SageCRM Online, bpm'online's low code no code, citizen developers.
Sam & Steve talk to Max Altschuler, Vice President of Marketing at Outreach, about sales engagement and how Outreach facilitates multi-channel sales communication with prospects.
Max is co-author of Sales Engagement: How The World's Fastest Growing Companies are Modernizing Sales Through Humanization at Scale.
A discussion with Greg Martinelli about CRM in the agricultural business. Greg is an ag sales trainer, coach and speaker.
Greg's website.
The deep freeze hits Chicago just in time for the bpm'online conference. Sam previews his talk at the conference.
Sam's latest wine club, when & why Infor CRM wins, a look back at 2018 acquisitions, ContactOut Chrome extension, Wix gets into CRM, "CX" in 2019, CRM in email client sidebars, CRM AI in 2019, 5 CRM trends for 2019, bot backlash.
Instead of show notes for this episode, we'd like to use this real estate to provide information about an option for making a donation to victims of the Camp Fire. Since you're most likely reading this on your mobile phone, please text CAWILDFIRES to 90999 to make a $10 donation (the Red Cross and AT&T).
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 Force Automation and some of the positional changes since last year. A close pack in the Leader quadrant. bpm'online is alone in the Challenger's quadrant. ProsperWorks rebrands to Copper. Copper's win percentage vs Salesforce. Salesforce and Google are cozying up. Will Google acquire a CRM vendor? Google's Hangouts Meet as a viable online meeting app.
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 vendor---whether the vendor's offering is cloud or on-premises.
The approaches to strategy, selection and implementation for ERP and for CRM are contrasted.
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, TIBCO buys Scribe Software, data lakes, a deep dive on integration methods.
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, their 15 use cases for AI, AI’s potential for sandbagging detection and for booking travel.
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 seasonal release documentation, Microsoft Office 365 upgrades to Dynamics, Sam’s GDPR webinar series, the need for a public documented & auditable processes, GDPR policy statement template, recording GDPR related transactions in CRM, how to change your outbound emailing procedures.
Webinar: GDPR & Your CRM Webinar
Wednesday, April 4th, at 10am CDT
Register here
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.
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 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.
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.
Promised links:
Ian’s Session at Dreamforce
GDPR eBook
Analysis Automation Adoption eBook
Insider’s Guide to Dreamforce ‘17
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.
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 Management, patient engagement and tracking data about and from medical devices -- whether the devices are located in provider facilities or with patients.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, rewards and CRM.
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.
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.
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.
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 for 2017, Yahoo! announces a new hack.
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.
Sam’s European river cruise & other adventures, Podcasteasy.com, Dreamforce ’16 report, Salesforce Einstein, MVPs, Twitter pass, DCLeaks and acquisition targets, government email security.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
Sonoma wine, MarTech, the marketing technology stack, how to develop a marketing automation playbook.
Steve's company's site | Sam's company's site
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
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
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
Steve and Sam talk CRM and mapping with Proxima Software founder David Wahl.
Steve's company's site | Sam's company's site
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
Steve interviews Brandon Bruce, co-founder of CirrusPath, at Dreamforce 2015 in the Admin Zone.
Steve's company's site | Sam's company's site
Sam and Steve talk about CRM use cases and about a bottle of 2001 Casanova di Neri Brunello.
Steve's company's site | Sam's company's site
After congratulating one another for the respective championship victories of the Hawks and the Warriors, Sam and Steve discuss CRM project management, the effectiveness of drip email, big data and predictive analytics.
Steve and Sam lightly deconstruct the Marc Benioff / Stephen Kelly fireside chat about the upcoming release of Sage Life, a small business accounting application that's being built on the Salesforce1 platform. This is followed by a discussion about verticalized CRM.
Sam and Steve discuss all the speculation that was sparked by Bloomberg's report that salesforce.com "is working with financial advisors". Zoho's CEO speaks out. CRM product upgrades and rewrites.
Steve & John discuss Microsoft Convergence 2015, InsideSales, ProsperWorks, HubSpot CRM and Larry Ellison.
Sam, Steve and guest John Kassar discuss the differences and similarities among Sugar, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.
CRM prototypes, configuration vs. customization, Sage's salesforce.com announcement, Google's new mobile-friendliness standards, Amazon Prime addiction.
How specialization is occurring in everything from mobile apps to underwear. CRM requirements, the business value of podcasting and getting overwhelmed by online ads.
After talking about Steve's latest mountain bike mishap, Sam and Steve review their batting averages on their 2014 CRM predictions and take a stab at some 2015 predictions.
A post Inforum 2014 discussion about Infor CRM (formerly SalesLogix) and how CRM fits in with Infor's many offerings. Sponsored by http://crmswitch.com
Steve & Sam discuss the differences between integrating CRM & ERP and unifying the two product categories, as well as the challenges that come with either scenario. Sponsored by http://crmswitch.com
Steve & Sam talk to Diane Berry, Chief Knowledge Evangelist at Coveo, about the present state and the future of customer service. Diane explains how to make sense of ever changing data in different formats across different on-premises and cloud systems -- in order to most efficiently solve customer issues.
Steve and guest Cathy Boudreau of Harvest Solutions discuss HubSpot's Inbound 2014 conference as well as the similarities & differences between Pardot and HubSpot.
Steve also talks about the Marketo road show and what he learned about lead enrichment and predictive lead scoring.
Sam and Steve trace Infor's CRM moves from the 2011 bromance between Charles Phillips and Marc Benioff to the recent acquisition of SalesLogix from SwiftPage.
Brian Kelly, CMO of InsideView, joins Sam and Steve to explain how a combination of data, insights and connections helps salespeople and marketers drive highly relevant conversations and communications - and therefore dramatically higher conversion rates.
Steve and Sam discuss Gartner's 2014 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation. Sam airs a few of his CRM pet peeves.
Sam and Steve discuss Microsoft's Spring '14 Release Preview Guide & the race to catch up with salesforce.com, switching from HubSpot to Pardot, NetSuite SFA, SalesLogix Xbar and G2 Crowd Grid for CRM.
Steve returns to the show eight weeks after his mountain bike crash and talks marketing automation and CRM with Sam
The benefits to defining your CRM requirements as early as possible. Base's move from Chicago to the Bay area. Microsoft's CRM strategy. Native advertising explained. Twitter today.
Dan Ogdon joins Sam & Steve to discuss the coming Act! Cloud and how it will be interwoven with Swiftpage's flagship email marketing offering.
Dan Reid, the Director of Product Management for partners at DocuSign, Inc., joins Sam and Steve to discuss why everything's better with DocuSign on top of it (including CRM, of course)
Sam and Steve discuss extreme weather, SalesLogix 8.1, Microsoft's purchase of Parature, cloud CRM iteration pace, BrightTALK integration with Salesforce, Zendesk's IPO "signals" and more.
Rhoda Bernstein, the Director of Strategic Alliances for Dun and Bradstreet, joins Sam and Steve to talk about important business improvements that result from having accurate CRM data.
Sam & Steve review the year in CRM and make some predictions for 2014 without going too far out on respective limbs.
Sam and Steve discuss the lead qualification process and the best time for inside sales to handoff a marketing qualified lead to outside sales -- and at what point the lead should be converted to an account/contact/opportunity