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From the Switchboard to Social Media: A Brief History of Customer Service

Sales and Marketing Management

Smart companies saw the possibilities of cyber customer service from the beginning, and jumped right on that bandwagon. For the first time in decades, email and live chat support made it possible to quickly and easily communicate with a real person instead of a computerized menu or canned response.

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26 CRM Techniques and Strategies for Customer Retention

Cience

Your customers are one of your company’s most important assets. Although new sales are important, smart companies also focus on retention. Your CRM stores all data about your customers. Then you use that data to drive customer retention. However, your job is to turn that feedback into valuable data.

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Sales is Storytelling. Marketing is Storytelling. Business is Storytelling.

Sales and Marketing Management

Not surprisingly, several respondents emphasized the importance of advancing tech skills, including understanding tech stacks and embracing the wave of customer data. Demonstrating emotional intelligence and empathy goes a long way in marketing communications; no one wants to be treated as if they’re a data point.

Marketing 226
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The Perils of Piecemeal

Cincom Smart Selling

Smart companies don’t have software initiatives; they have business initiatives that drive software purchases. For CPQ to work best, it should sit on top of your CRM master data: your customers, your products, etc. In a four-year period, this company consolidated more than 40 systems into less than seven.

Scale 48
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3 Facts About B2B Buyer Experience You’re Probably Ignoring

Sales Hacker

Now let’s break it down and look at the data in more detail: Your Buyers are Knocking. Our data indicate that responsiveness and ease of engagement are only part of the picture for B2B buyers. TimeTrade’s survey data shows that these types of forums are not only valued by B2B buyers, they can also be a valuable purchase incentive.

Buyer 79
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The Future of AI for Sales (And How to Prepare for It)

Sales Hacker

The Salesforce State of Sales report notes that only 46% of sellers have access to client and prospect data insights (something that 85% of salespeople say helps them produce). Salespeople, especially on the enterprise level, need to understand their company, their product, their market, and their buyer exceptionally well.

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Smart Selling Visions: Up-Close with Top Revenue Leader Brian Leach, CEO of @unboxedtech

SBI

Assistant captures everything during customer interactions, including data from prospects that don’t buy. Brian: We’re making significant upgrades to our platforms to help clients mine the data we’re collecting on both the training side and the sales side. On their own, CRMs are just large data warehouses.

Up-Sell 50