You invest in a state of the art CRM platform. You spend months tailoring it to the needs of your organization. Weeks of data mapping and migration tests ensue. You plan, build and deliver rigorous user education. Sales leaders are excited. Salespeople … don’t use it or at least, they use it to the minimum degree that is required by the organization. In sales learning and development, we face a similar challenge.

We’ve all seen it happen: A group of key employees attend an intensive sales training program and then, once the session ends, fail to apply much of what they learned. Why does this happen?

One reason might be lack of demonstration of how to use what was taught. Another is a shortfall in post-training skill reinforcement. Reinforcement of learning is commonly overlooked — but it’s critical to the success of a learning implementation and ensures maximum return on investment for an organization. Most organizations today have invested in CRM tools. These platforms can play a vital role in ensuring skills are applied on the job.

More Than a Database
The hard truth is that CRM systems and sales training often exist in parallel, without being integrated. This results in missed opportunities to improve overall sales performance through increased application of skills and adoption of CRM tools.

CRM software should be more than a database of information; when leveraged and integrated properly, effective use of CRM programs leads to increased revenues through the creation and application of customer Reach More Customers with Live Chat – Free Whitepaper knowledge. To promote sales excellence, it is vital that CRM integration is part of the organization’s learning strategy. When this happens, there is a higher likelihood of creating more mutually beneficial customer relationships, resulting in:

• Higher win rates: When sales professionals are trained to create positive customer interactions that satisfy client needs, they are likely to succeed at closing more deals.
• Shorter sales cycles: When a client is provided superior service and information, sales cycles are shorter with higher purchasing confidence.
• Expanded deal size: As clients enjoy efficient and proactive service with sales professionals, they build trust in the organization’s ability to satisfy their needs, leading to potentially larger deals.
• More satisfied sales teams: Teams that are successful at forging mutually beneficial relationships with their clients are often more satisfied with their jobs and confident in their ability to execute sales excellence.

An integrated approach to CRM and sales training reinforcement has proven successful for many businesses. For example, technology platforms like Salesforce CRM offer, through partner vendors, embedded applications, like sales call planners and account planners. This allows salespeople to work within their CRM platform to get the reinforcement they need.

Recently, advice to keep a CRM  implementation simple would have focused around due diligence for the application because we never buy a complex product unless absolutely necessary. It would have focused on negotiating the best deal with a systems integrator, these costs can add up quickly unless the contract specifies otherwise. and most of all, it would have focused on a clear needs assessment driving the application because buying too many bells and whistles when they aren’t necessary is a sure path to overly complicated implementation and a frustrated user base.

That was then, though. The new generation of CRM software is built on platforms that are almost effortlessly customizable. In other words, keeping CRM simple is no longer the challenge it once was.

Another Benefit of Web 2.0

Consider it another benefit of Web 2.0 technology, which for the most part is valued for its collaborative functionality among external users. These same Web 2.0 concepts, though, are being applied in the CRM space, albeit internally, to build better processes.

“It is still important for organizations to be able to wrap CRM around their business,” Richard Smith, vice president and CRM practice director at Green Beacon Solutions, told CRM Buyer. “However, what they are doing is not focusing on the contact management piece or organization piece — they have mastered that already. Now they are looking at the business workflow and asking how they can replicate that process with their customers.”

If this sounds familiar — mapping business processes that reach across functional lines to serve customers — that is because it is. What is different, Smith said, is that now companies can do this with a few simple configurations in their applications, instead of an expensive customization. In the past, companies would have to capture what that process was — which meant a lot of manual work — and then integrate the interface to give access to clients or partners, he said.

New business intelligence tools are helping immensely as well, he continued. For instance, a company could always easily identify who were its best sales reps. Using business intelligence technology, though, it can then look back at the series of steps or activities that were necessary to close a particular deal and then extrapolate from that how, or if, those steps should be replicated in the future. Then that information is shared internally.

Workflows can be built to implement that process to a wider group of people, analyzing and testing it further along the way.

“The new tech tools supporting CRM these days make it possible to do all this as a configuration exercise — not a customization as it would have been a few years ago,” Smith said.

Collaborating on Product Development

Indeed, some CRM vendors are incorporating these concepts into their own internal processes such as product development. Vendors are collaborating ever more closely with development communities and customers to deliver to market products that conform closely with their needs. Again, this was always the goal of software vendors. New technologies, though, are making the once complex and years-long development process akin to a codeless customization.

Consider Chordiant Software (Nasdaq: CHRD), which about a year ago launched its developer collaboration network Chordiant Mesh. Members include not only developers but consumer companies in the healthcare, insurance, banking and telecommunications industries.

Chordiant Mesh itself is a set of customized collaboration mini-applications built on top of a wiki-based platform. Features include project navigation, project description, discussion forums, product documentation, issue tracking, product roadmaps, source code management, downloads, blogs/news, membership management, asset and artifact management and project status.

The driver behind the community’s launch was the struggle by its customers to meet rapidly changing developments in the market, Greg Biggers, senior product manager at Chordiant, told CRM Buyer.

“It put a lot of pressure on our product and solutions development cycle,” he said, “especially when it took 18 months for a development cycle. We wanted to reinvent product development to be a continuous conversation.”

Mesh not only gave customers input into the process as it was happening but also access to the product even as it was under development. “It gave tremendous transparency to customers about the road map, bugs that were in early versions, the planning process, etc. — information that our customers craved.”

We have got a load of print-outs from some SEO websites and a large number of SEO books laying around but there does not seem to be much in the way of a summarised version of the items to consider when building-out a SEO strategy.  So, We have quickly whipped-up a number of items that I thought could help to provide a framework for approaching SEO strategically.  As such it was a work-in-progress, but would be interested to hear your thoughts.

We are hoping this sort of SEO strategy / thinking could prompt a fairly versatile and integrated approach to SEO, e.g. how does the company consider temporal factors – maybe through ongoing link-building, up weighting link-building in line with other channel’s activity or releasing content to the website.

Furthermore, no known research has been conducted on the effect of these eBusiness solutions on organizational leadership/hierarchies at HEIs, especially, when this is considered to be vital to institutions’ strategic mission and planning. We present, in this paper, a comprehensive impact analysis of eBusiness solutions at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

We reconnoitre the effects of eBusiness solutions on different operational constructs of the institutions. Dalera.com were chosen for their uniqueness and their numerous roles in providing education for minorities. We utilized cross- sectional quantitative approach, surveying a significant spectrum of such institutions in the United States of America. The impact of eBusiness solutions on institutional leadership including efficiency and effectiveness of leadership, student enrolment, investment, image and reputation, student’s