On this week in sales we’ll be looking at:
- Salesforce declaring the 9-to-5 workday dead
- HubSpot Signs Agreement to Acquire The Hustle (and proves us right)
- Boutique CRMs
And much more!
This Week In Sales hosts:
- Will Barron – Salesman.org/Youtube
- Victor Antonio – Youtube.com/user/salesinfluence
TOPICS:
Salesforce declares the 9-to-5 workday dead, will let some employees work remotely from now on
So we are giving employees flexibility in how, when and where they work with three ways of working:
- Flex – When it’s safe to return to the office, most of our employees around the globe will work flex. This means they’ll be in the office 1-3 days per week for team collaboration, customer meetings, and presentations.
- Fully Remote – For employees who don’t live near an office or have roles that don’t require an office, they will work remotely full-time.
- Office-based – The smallest population of our workforce will work from an office location 4-5 days per week if they’re in roles that require it.
HubSpot Signs Agreement to Acquire The Hustle, Adding Content to Help Scaling Companies Grow Better
HubSpot, the customer relationship management (CRM) platform for scaling companies, announced today it has signed an agreement to acquire The Hustle, a media company that produces a newsletter, podcast, and premium research content.
Kieran Flanagan, SVP of marketing at HubSpot. “By acquiring The Hustle, we’ll be able to better meet the needs of these scaling companies by delivering educational, business, and tech trend content in their preferred formats.
HubSpot has built a large community around its educational content, with seven million people each month reading the company’s blogs and hundreds of thousands viewing HubSpot videos on YouTube.
HubSpot’s Academy is another source of education for its community. More than 100,000 people take lessons every month, and over 300,000 people have received a HubSpot certification.
Yext, Inc., the Search Experience Cloud company, announced the promotion of David Rudnitsky to President and Chief Revenue Officer.
“Yext is disrupting the search category and Dave has, quite literally, written the book on technology sales disruption,” said Howard Lerman, Founder and CEO of Yext.
Yext is a search engine for your site
Cox Communications uses Yext to update and maintain important brand information across the entire Knowledge Network — approximately 175 digital services globally, including Google, Amazon Alexa, Apple, Bing, Facebook, Yahoo, and Yelp — and to provide a user-friendly search experience on its own website.
Using Yext Answers, Cox Communications experienced a 51% increase in site search conversion rate and a 59% decrease in repeat on-site searches.
B2B sales data startup Lusha secures $40 million Series A funding
After five years of growth, Tel Aviv-based startup Lusha has landed a $40 million Series A round to scale its crowdsourced data community for B2B salespeople.
Lusha’s goal is to make accurate data accessible to all B2B sales professionals, specifically up-to-date contact and company information that helps reps target their efforts. The platform also recommends relevant prospects and organisations according to the rep’s activity.
community has already expanded to over 520,000 sales professionals and 167,000 sales organizations
https://tech.eu/brief/lusha-series-a/
SugarCRM Users Can Now Utilize Exceed’s Conversational AI to Automate Lead Qualification
The integration enables marketing and sales teams to tap into Exceed’s lead engagement and qualification technology to increase revenue generation from current pipelines
Exceed ai Inc., a leading provider of marketing and sales Automated AI solutions, has announced their newest integration with SugarCRM, CX platform that delivers on high-definition customer experience. SugarCRM is the recent CRM to integrate with Exceed, following Salesforce, Oracle, HubSpot, Marketo, Zoho and more.
With 80 percent of new leads never translated into sales according to statistics published by Invesp, Exceed’s technology can lower this percentage by engaging all leads autonomously.
Vivun raises $35 million to advance presales engineering platform
Vivun provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform dubbed Hero that automates the management of presales processes.
While customer relationship management (CRM) software is widely employed to manage sales processes, applications optimized for presales teams — made up of engineers who often have more insights into which deals are likely to close than other members of the sales team
Presales engineers tend to have a better idea of which deals are likely to close based on the attributes of a product.
https://venturebeat.com/2021/02/10/vivun-raises-35-million-to-advance-presales-engineering-platform/
The Top Real Estate CRM software
For the most part, real estate CRM software does not differ from traditional CRM systems.
- Lead generation.
- Lead management.
- Contact management.
- Marketing automation.
However, there are some additional types of data that real estate CRM systems are designed to accommodate:
- Listings management.
- Property tracking
- Properties as investments
The real estate CRM market is still relatively new, but here are some noteworthy players in the field:
- Market Leader
- Follow Up Boss
- Wise Agent
- TotalBrokerage
- IXACT Contact
https://searchcustomerexperience.techtarget.com/tip/The-best-real-estate-CRM-software
The Top Marketing Strategies for SMEs in 2021
Research from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index reveals that 50% of small businesses are concerned that they’ll have to permanently close in the next year if the economic climate doesn’t drastically change.
Top marketing strategies to adopt this year:
- Get to know your audience
- Explore omni channel growth
- Incorporate shoppable content
Consumers live online and they shop online too, with a whopping 60% of people saying they discover new products on Instagram. As a result, the social commerce trend is predicted to boom in 2021, whereby user engagement on social media is converted directly into sales.
- Integrate innovative tech
Research from Quantcast and Forbes Insights revealed that of 500 marketers, 52 per cent had noticed a growth in sales, while 51 per cent had noticed a growth in customer retention since introducing AI capabilities to their ecosystem.
https://martechseries.com/sales-marketing/top-marketing-strategies-smes-2021/
What motivates employees? Clearly it isn’t internal competition
- Less than 20% of sales representatives improve their performance under competitive conditions, according to data from Enerjoy
- 35% of salespeople improve their performance through cooperation, not competition
- 70% improve their performance through group challenges and achieve peak performance when operating in small groups of two or three people.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3892797,00.html
Speeding Up the Sale with Contract AI Software
The sales function at any enterprise encompasses a vast array of duties, ranging from discrete contractual tasks to overarching strategy. On the contractual front, sales operations is responsible for many phases of contract lifecycle management, including:
- Creating requests for contracts
- Drafting contracts
- Monitoring the progress of those contracts
- Keeping them moving forward when things stall,
- Approving contract terms
- Delivering contracts to customers for signature
Onit’s Contract lifecycle management (CLM) – solution helps with end-to-end automation of the entire contract management process, allowing for a more efficient sales function and better insight into sales data.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/how-contract-ai-software-is-changing-7142607/
