On this week in sales we’ll be looking at; research showing what buyers top 10 deal makers and deal breakers are, Ford partnering with Salesforce to make a uber CRM, laying 900 people off with a Zoom call and much more!
Sales news:
Korn Ferry research – Top 10 deal makers and deal breakers
Top deal maker – “Understood my business needs”
Top deal breaker – “Did not understand me or my business”
https://i.marketingprofs.com/assets/images/daily-data-point/071221-kornferry-deal-lg.jpg
Ford Motor drives into CRM services for America’s SMBs with Salesforce in the passenger seat
With the automotive industry looking to diversify its sources of revenue, Ford Motor Co has teamed up with Salesforce to launch VIIZR, a CRM and field service tool targeted at meeting the needs of small business owners in the US.
VIIZR is a custom solution built on Salesforce Field Service that Ford says will “help tradespeople schedule field appointments, send invoices and manage customer relationships from one integrated, cloud-based platform”.
It’s been developed by Ford Pro, the dedicated commercial arm division of Ford Motor that was set up earlier this year with a brief to focus on vehicles, technology and services for the commercial vehicle sector and increase fleet productivity, improve uptime and lower operating costs through connected services and work-ready internal combustion and battery electric vehicles.
https://diginomica.com/ford-motor-drives-crm-services-americas-smbs-salesforce-passenger-seat
Gartner Eyes Declining Mobile Opt-Out Rates
The opt-out rate for mobile app tracking will decline from 85 percent now to 60 percent by 2023 as consumers gain experience with untargeted ads, Gartner predicted in a recent report.
- By 2023, the volume of ad impressions that TV and streaming media channels deliver during what are traditionally considered working hours will grow by 60 percent. This comes as working from home is expected to be the norm for many employees well into 2022. As a result, periods that were once considered prime time by advertisers have flattened and video consumption, among other things, has intensified during what were once traditional working hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- By 2025, one in five B2B companies will use artificial intelligence/machine learning to proactively slow down customers’ journeys by connecting customers with sales reps during digital commerce interactions.
- By 2026, chief marketing officers will dedicate 30 percent of their influencer and celebrity budgets to virtual influencers.
Connect the Dots collects $15M Series A to help companies graph connections
A former Salesforce executive wants to make it easier to find those connections, and he’s building Connect the Dots, a startup that aims to build a personalized, professional relationship graph.
The way it works is you sign up and it scans any email accounts you have, looking for connections at different companies. It collects and correlates this data. When you look at a particular company, you can see who you know who knows someone there, with the strength of your connection measured by three colored dots. If they’re all green, it’s a solid connection and you can request an email introduction.
Drew Sechrist, who was employee 36 at Salesforce in 1999, believes that email is the key connector. “We’ve got these emails that have been piling up forever representing relationships. And we just didn’t have any way to pull [them together] and get value out of them. But technology was getting to the point with machine learning and some other advanced techniques [that] we could extract value from that data and then build a graph of relationships to see who actually knows who,”
Well-known estate agency sales trainer suspends courses indefinitely
After 33 years, well-known industry trainer Adam Walker has announced that he will not be running any more training courses.
More than 150,000 people have attended Walker’s training courses since 1987, but he has decided to suspend them indefinitely owed in part to Covid-19.
He continued: “The first obviously is the pandemic. Covid has changed the sales and management training market for ever. For several months, it was illegal to run a training course. It is now possible to run one but demand for traditional training is only a fraction of what it was before. The majority of training is now delivered online but I simply do not believe that it is possible to achieve the same results from a virtual course. I simply do not want to run courses that are less effective than the ones that I ran before, and so I have decided reluctantly to stop running training courses altogether.”
Downing Street Christmas party
A source who had attended the alleged gatherings on 18 December in No 10 told us there’d been “several dozen” people in attendance, with food, drink and even party games on offer, with the event, however it was described, going on past midnight.
It was only the next day, the 19 December, that Boris Johnson tightened Covid rules still further, “cancelling Christmas”.
This is all during a period where the rest of the UK was under lockdown.
