CRMEvolution 2018 – A Good-Bye, a Hello, and some not so random Thoughts
Just back home from CRMEvolution it is time to do a little recap on this year’s instance of the conference. This year the conference was co-chaired by Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary, two of the most accomplished independent analysts and influencers around. And also two great persons! It is with a sad I that we see Paul saying good-bye to chairing the conference after 2018 but then Brent is likely to be a very good successor. It will be interesting to see where he will add his style, connections, and background to the conference. This year, we have seen an Amazon keynote for the first time, which I reckon is one of the first marks Brent set as a chair. CRM Evolution: The Main Themes This year there have been some main themes; none of them really surprising, if one follows the industry: It is all about people, not about technology. And in order to successfully get things done in the coming years people need to ‘unlearn’ a thing or two, in order to become open for solving challenges in the novel ways that are required. This point was already hammered down in Brian Solis’ opening keynote. Iteration (doing the same in a better way) doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. Thriving in future will require more innovation (doing new things) and increasingly disruption (doing new things that make the old ones obsolete). At the same time it is crucial to keep one’s audience in mind. AI, machine learning, and with it chat bots are taking centre stage. Customer as well as user engagement needs to be in real time...
Clari – Nipping at Salesforce’s Heels?
A brief while ago I had the chance of talking to Andy Byrne, CEO of Clari, about how AI can help making sales organizations more effective and efficient. Clari is a vendor of Opportunity-to-Close solutions. G2Crowd lists the company amongst the leaders of its Sales Analytics Software quadrant, while Gartner Group in 2017 named it a cool vendor in the Tech Go-To-Market. Shortly after the conversation Clari announced the closure of a $35 Million funding round “following record growth”, essentially a tripling of their customer base while maintaining a near 100 per cent renewal rate. According to Andy, the company applies “machine learning focused on sales”, i.e. predictive and prescriptive analytics to improve pipeline visibility and to get more insight into which opportunities are more likely to close than others. This helps in focusing on these opportunities. This solution was developed after having in depth conversation with a number of big sales teams, figuring out their challenges/problems. As a result of this the company is addressing three problems. Many to most sales reps do not consider CRM systems (or SFA systems, for that matter) as particularly helpful. Sales managers do have a poor visibility into what their teams are doing, with which opportunities they spend their time. Executives and Sales Operations are dealing with “XLS hell” because the system’s forecasting ability is broken. All in all, points two and three are consequences of point one. If a system is not of help it is a time-waster and tends to be avoided. Data about opportunities will not be entered in a timely manner nor will it be very accurate. Clari’s...
Salesforce Sales Cloud Supercharged – Einstein’s next Move
The News A few days ago Salesforce announced an update to its sales cloud that features Einstein powered predictions, insights, and productivity. The press release is linked above or alternatively you can read it below, along with some comments of mine. Salesforce is (again) addressing the three main issues that plague CRM implementations since Tom Siebel coined this term. Let me paraphrase them> Salespeople do not find the time to do their job, which is selling. Instead they are spending an inordinate amount of time entering data that supposedly only helps their management controlling them a little more. Sales managers do not have enough visibility into what is going on in their area of responsibility, what their team is doing (and why), whether they are doing the right thing. The same problem, of course, applies to the Head of Sales, just at a bigger scale. Sales operations is charged with creating meaningful reports that tell the one single truth. This they need to do using data that resides somewhere, data that is distributed, instead of some central consolidated place. Data that is essentially not fully trustworthy. Salesforce is doing this using a triple of features: The Salesforce resident AI: Einstein to help sales persons identify the most promising opportunities to work upon The Salesforce Inbox that increases productivity by attributing emails to the right accounts as well as connecting to the calendar Sales Analytics to help salespeople and their management to visualize, interpret, and use the available data The Press Release Ask any rep what their favorite part of the day is, and chances are that their answers...