Much development and marketing resource is being directed at technology that supports tracking and managing the customer experience (CX) and identifying prospects. All of this is good for business and highlights some of the exciting potential for artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) to really accelerate the basic need of matching buyers and sellers to create more efficient markets for the benefit of all. But part of the B2B customer experience also revolves around quality and...
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Topics:
Revenue Management,
Sales Engagement,
Office of Revenue
Sales and revenue operations teams have for the most part traditionally relied on CRMs for information relating to leads and opportunities. For inside sales (sometimes referred to as high-velocity sales) as well as field sales, relevant product, pricing and customer have been loaded or entered into the CRM to be accessed via reports, dashboards or spreadsheets. For inside sales teams, dialers with prioritized seek lists were an additional need. Yet traditional CRM software providers were...
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Topics:
CRM,
Sales Engagement,
Office of Revenue
Ventana Research recently announced its 2024 research agenda for the Office of Revenue, continuing the guidance we have offered for nearly two decades to help enterprises across industries derive optimal value and improved outcomes from business technology. Chief Sales and Revenue Officers face an imperative to manage their sales and revenue organizations, but they do not always have the guidance they need to embrace technology. As we look forward to 2024, we are focusing on the entire selling...
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Topics:
Digital Commerce,
Subscription Management,
partner management,
Revenue Management,
Sales Engagement,
Office of Revenue,
Revenue Performance Management
There are stark reminders that all is not well in business-to-business sales and marketing land. Many organizations struggle to hit revenue targets, and individuals consistently fail to hit their quotas. Various reasons are put forward, but the more convincing argument is that buyer behavior has transformed over the years, requiring changes to the traditional way of engaging with B2B prospects and customers. Even Jon Miller, co-founder of Marketo, has acknowledged that the process on which he...
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Topics:
Revenue Management,
Sales Engagement,
Office of Revenue
Customer relationship management systems have been around since Tom Siebel created one while working at Oracle in the late ‘80s and then monetized it founding Siebel Systems that eventually was bought by Oracle. When Salesforce launched its “No Software” slogan in the early 2000s, CRM moved to the cloud, but the concept was still based on a object model centered around an opportunity that represented a potential sale. The user interface allowed entry of data to the opportunity, along with...
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Topics:
Revenue Management,
Sales Engagement,
Office of Revenue
Having worked at a start-up during the first wave of artificial intelligence (AI) that was predicted to revolutionize sales in the mid-2010s, I guess I am a natural skeptic when it comes to new claims about how AI will change sales forever. In the mid-2010s, vendors were using machine learning (ML) models trained on sets of historical opportunity data that represented closed won and closed lost deals. The ML models were looking for correlation and patterns to see whether they could predict...
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Topics:
Digital Commerce,
Sales Engagement,
Office of Revenue
I have been involved with customer relationship management for over 15 years, and although that is not as long as the category has been around, it does coincide with an era where companies and commentators are calling into question the application’s effectiveness. To counter this perception, both CRM vendors and complementary third-party “add-ons” have developed new functionality that aims to improve the “R” in CRM, especially as it relates to sales engagement. But much of this additional...
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Topics:
Revenue Management,
Sales Engagement,
Office of Revenue
Ventana Research recently announced its 2023 research agenda for the Office of Revenue, continuing the guidance we’ve offered for nearly two decades to help organizations realize their optimal value from applying technology to improve business outcomes. Chief Sales and Revenue Officers face an imperative to manage their sales and revenue organizations, but they don’t always have the guidance they need to embrace technology to achieve the best possible outcomes. As we look forward to 2023, we...
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Topics:
Sales,
Analytics,
Internet of Things,
Data,
Sales Performance Management,
Digital Technology,
Digital Commerce,
Conversational Computing,
mobile computing,
Subscription Management,
extended reality,
intelligent sales,
partner management,
Sales Engagement,
AI & Machine Learning
Those of us who have worked in or alongside sales teams have observed that many sales fundamentals have changed over the years. Yet, in many ways, they have not. One essential that has not changed is sales enablement. How do you onboard salespeople and quickly bring them up to speed? Or, how do you introduce new products and services so the sales team is conversant and knowledgeable about them? In years past, this would have happened at the head office or a regional office, with videos and...
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Topics:
Sales Engagement,
Office of Revenue