Mergers and acquisitions present challenges to even the most seasoned leadership teams. Executing a strong and organized communications plan—one that delivers the right messages to the right constituents at the right time—can help a merger or acquisition go smoothly and establish unity and profitability. Yet, despite the best-laid plans, change management is always hard and you’re sure to encounter challenges along the way.

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a place for businesses to collect data that can help increase productivity, internal communication, and training support within your sales team. It can also help to create a bridge of information for marketing to use for optimizing campaigns. But, your CRM can reach beyond these two teams, providing valuable information for many other departments at your company that can help your executive team make decisions.

Gamification has some proven benefits to increasing customer engagement, but what can it do for your sales team? In many industries, risk aversion and market volatility mean slower sales cycles, lack of clarity on how to sell in a changing environment, and general sales malaise. Adding an element of fun and competition might be the answer to jumpstarting your sales team’s activities and helping them hit sales quotas.

Whether you’ve been storing data in a CRM for years or your brand new to the tool, there are common challenges companies face that make their tool less effective. These challenges can impact your team’s efficiency, as well as your bottom line.

The CCPA was created with the goal of enhancing the privacy rights of California residents. Going into effect on January 2020, the CCPA requires businesses to take several steps to be compliant. The law is comparable to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) but takes certain measures even further, like having a broader definition of what constitutes private data.

In our planning and strategy sessions we always center the conversation around data-driven decision making. So, we decided to dig up 20 sales stats to help you build your sales plan in 2020. Want to talk to an expert about hitting your sales goals in the new year? Contact us for a free consultation.

The New Sales Process & The End of the Test Drive

Sales, at its worst, is exemplified by the stereotypical used car sales process. The high pressure, lack of pricing transparency, the awkward test drive, peering under the hood pretending you know what you’re looking for, and the hand-offs from department to department... it’s a game no one seems to enjoy.

Whether you’re a startup working through a product launch, or a large enterprise operating a small division, there will probably come a point where find yourself in the catch 22 of business growth: You need more accounts to fund a sales team, but you need more sales from your current team to get there. It’s through these growing pains that efficiency is paramount in your sales process. We’ve been helping companies overcome challenges like this for over 30 years, and we’ve got some tips to share from this experience.

By now, you know that Salesforce is gearing up for its Summer ’19 release, which will arrive in North American orgs on June 15. As usual, the release notes for this update are very long, but they do include a number of exciting new features to explore. If you get a chance, we encourage you to go read them in full—but for those of you who simply don’t have time, we’re providing some especially notable highlights here.

FIX ISSUED: Update as of 12:00pm EST, 5/21/2019:

Salesforce is now stating that a fix has been implemented and the incident is being declared over for users outside of NA53, 57 and 59. Anyone still experiencing issues should submit a support ticket if there are any left-over permission issues discovered.

Imagine a salesperson—what comes to mind? We all likely picture the cliché car salesman who is pushy, "all-knowing", always closing, and solely commission driven. We may even suspect that this is appropriate behavior for a salesperson. Now consider the last time you purchased a car. How much research did you do before interacting with sales? What did you want from that salesperson? Did you care most about the expertise to answer your questions or the willingness to move at your pace?

Although expertise is necessary for a salesperson's success, the strongest next gen salespeople understand where the customer is in the buyer's journey and how to help them continue on that journey. Customers have changed and it is important that your organization keeps up with new buyer needs—whether that means engaging the help of a sales consultant, integrating new sales technologies, or revamping the sales process all together. 

Follow our 3-step process to make the switch to salesforce lightning.