B2B Connection

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Ecommerce Platforms . The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are the most trusted in the industry because they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user feedback and satisfaction scores. Top Rated awards are the voice of the market and are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, or status as a TrustRadius customer. Ecommerce Platforms Ecommerce platforms help users create and manage online storefronts to sell their products. Businesses use ecommerce software to manage product offerings and pricing, assist customers with purchases, manage orders and inventory, and track sales data. Common features of ecommerce platforms include desktop and mobile-friendly storefronts, support for multi-channel sales, blogging, customizable discounts, content management capabilities, payment processing, and tax preparation assistance. Some ecommerce providers partner with shipping companies, offering shipping discounts to their customers. In the past quarter more than 12,100 professionals used TrustRadius to evaluate Ecommerce Platform products—at least 258 of them were from enterprise companies with more than 1,000 employees. Visitors evaluating CRM products were most curious about comparing different products and reading reviews—38% compared at least two products, and 34% read product reviews. […]

At the heart of sales is the ability to understand and connect with buyers. It is only after this connection that salespeople will hold any influence on their sales. Trust is what that connection needs. Yet only 3% of consumers trust salespeople. At that rate, it is difficult to connect with leads and close sales. Identifying the roadblocks that are slowing you down is the first step to improving your numbers. Here are 5 things that might be getting in your way, and some of the trends and technology that can help you push through. Top 5 Roadblocks For B2B Salespeople #1 Pursuing the wrong leads Let’s start at the top of the funnel, with prospects. Or, if you are a flywheel fan, the “attract” section of the wheel. 28% of salespeople say that identifying good leads is more difficult than it was a few years ago. The same study says that 37% of reps struggle most with prospecting. Cold calls and cold emails are simply ineffective. Shane Snow, the author of Smartcuts, sent 1,000 cold emails to executives as an experiment and received very little feedback. Only 1.7% of those who received emails responded. This often-cited experiment was insightful […]

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Sales Email Tracking Tools. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are the most trusted in the industry because they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user feedback and satisfaction scores. Top Rated awards are the voice of the market and are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, or status as a TrustRadius customer. Sales Email Tracking Tools Sales email tracking tools tend to include a core set of email tracking metrics along with other capabilities that allow users to create, test, and monitor sales email campaigns. These tools help salespeople view overall email engagement by tracking metrics such as open rate, click through rate, and how far down an email prospects are reading. Sales email tracking tools are typically very easy to use and integrate with the user’s email application to provide email engagement information from inside the user’s inbox. They also don’t require any action either from the email sender or recipient in order to track an email and thus run ‘noiselessly’ in the background. Common sales email tracking tool features include email engagement metrics tracking, email templates, automated […]

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Sales Intelligence Software. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are the most trusted in the industry because they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user feedback and satisfaction scores. Top Rated awards are the voice of the market and are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, or status as a TrustRadius customer. Sales Intelligence Sales intelligence software is used by sales and marketing teams to collect and analyze information on new and already established leads. These tools help to strategically build the pipeline with in-depth information on prospects, track and record customer and prospect interactions, create lead lists, conduct lead scoring, provide context for lead nurturing, and determine when leads are ready for a conversation with a salesperson. Most sales intelligence tools either feed contact data into the user’s CRM, or serve as a data repository for collecting prospect contact, demographic, firmographic, and technographic information. As with any database, the quality and freshness of the data is a paramount concern, and is a key consideration when purchasing sales intelligence software. Another factor to consider is the size of the contact […]

Your website can be a revenue-generating machine when you optimize it with your users in mind. But if you want to generate more leads, and more revenue, then implementing effective user experience (UX) best practices is a must. There are many tools that can help you on your UX journey, including A/B testing tools, Digital Experience platforms, ecommerce software, and other tools aimed to optimize your website and enhance your strategy. Consider these six effective UX strategies you can use to leverage revenue-producing results from your website. 1. Optimize Your Landing Pages Your landing pages are the face of your online presence and will help generate revenue by leading prospects down the sales funnel and increase your conversion rate. For instance, you can create landing pages that help prospects make a purchase and use clearly identifiable buttons for carrying out the transaction. Making sure the content on your site is consistent on your landing pages is also another way to streamline and optimize your website. For example, if you’re offering a free trial on your site, your landing page should mirror that message. 2. Make Site Navigation Natural A site that is hard to navigate can drive down your revenue […]

Finding the right prospective buyers to engage with, and hopefully turn into customers, can be a headache for both marketing and sales teams. For marketers, having a pile of questionable leads can mean more time sifting through and nurturing them before they are ready to be passed on to the sales team. And for salespeople, there is almost nothing more frustrating than trying to entice a prospect who just isn’t that into it – it being your pitch, brand, product, service, etc. As both teams know well, a long lead list and a full pipeline doesn’t always equal high-quality prospects. And having good quality leads is now a top priority for 68% of B2B professionals. Unsurprisingly, finding these high-quality leads has been recognized as a top challenge for 59% of B2B marketers. This is where marketing automation, customer relationship management (CRM), and sales intelligence software can make all the difference. These technologies help automate the process of collecting relevant information on leads, storing that data, and using it to craft targeted and personalized content to nurture your leads. Marketers can save time they might have spent manually segmenting and scoring lead lists, and make sure only high-quality leads get handed […]

For several years, e-commerce companies have enjoyed a tax-free advantage over traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, as many of these online purchase were essentially tax-free unless ordered from a company operating in the same state as the customer. Many states and local governments have argued that they are missing out on tens of billions of dollars in revenue each year as a result of this tax loophole. However, on June 21st, 2018, the Supreme Court 5-4 ruling in South Dakota v. Wayfair granted the state authority to impose sales tax obligations on out-of-state transactions which could affect remote sellers. This ruling overturned the 26-year-old precedent established by the Quill Corp. v. North Dakota case, which ruled that catalog retailers (Quill in this case), did not have to collect sales tax in North Dakota if it did not have a physical presence in the state. The impact of this recent ruling cannot be overstated as it will likely have a dramatic impact on American companies, local governments, and consumers for decades to come.  According to the Government Accountability Office, up to $13 billion more in sales tax could have been collected in 2017 if states were allowed to require sales tax from online […]

The temperature is dropping, the leaves are falling, and all the other usual signs of changing seasons are upon us. In short, winter is coming, and the holiday shopping surge is coming along with it. Deloitte’s annual holiday season forecast predicts that retail sales could exceed $1.10 trillion in the 2018 holiday season. Essentially, ecommerce is a key player in this story. It plays an ever-larger role from year to year, with online holiday sales this year expected to rise 22% over 2017’s season. That translates to an expected sum of $134 billion in ecommerce alone. What’s more difficult to know at a glance is the nitty-gritty of how brands and businesses are updating their ecommerce marketing strategies to handle the shopping season on the horizon. In what follows, we’ll try to make these particular signs are little easier to read by tapping into vendors, marketers, brand managers, and other key players on the supply side to see what they expect and how they’re prepping for this year’s holiday blitz. Ecommerce Basics Gone are the days when the corner store where everyone knows your name represented the norm in retail or customer service. Like so many other facets of our […]

E-commerce is as much about the experience customers have to interact with your brand’s site as it is about the product and price. There are a lot of options for consumers shopping online. Creating an experience that prioritizes convenience, trust, familiarity, and efficiency is key to running a successful e-commerce business. Whether you are working on creating a new experience from scratch, or you want to revamp your current strategies, we’ve put together twelve ways to create a customer-centric e-commerce experience. 1. Give mobile the respect it deserves People are using their mobile devices to make online purchases more and more. Because of this fact, it’s crucial to make designing your mobile experience a top priority. Your best approach is to build a mobile layout for your website and then adapt it for the desktop experience. If you take the opposite approach, you’ll find yourself having to remove features in order to fit everything into the smaller screen. Another good strategy for creating a smooth mobile shopping experience is to let customers checkout using their social media account. Encourage your users to sign in using their social media credentials, rather than creating a whole new account on your site and manually […]

What are some of the strategies for a productive, successful conversation? No matter who we’re speaking with, or the circumstances surrounding a conversation – whether we’re speaking to a friend, asking for advice, or passing the time of day with a stranger – a conversation must convey relevance and value to both parties for it to continue. For modern buyers, that immediate and contextual relevance -receiving the right information at the right time – is now an expectation across digital interactions with brands too. It is a key aspect of buyer empowerment and decision-making. In fact, conversational inside sales and marketing techniques, such as live chat and intelligent chatbots, are playing a huge role right now in personalizing, humanizing, and building trusted relationships between buyers and organizations. However, it’s not all smooth sailing! From the buyer’s perspective, there’s still a lot of information out there. There is plenty to consider when looking for the right-fit solution – particularly in B2B. In fact, often there’s so much information that buyers experience analysis paralysis when they feel swamped by information overload and indecision. For a B2B sales leader today, finding a way to cut through the noise, and deliver that expected timely […]

Today, we awarded the 2018 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Ecommerce Platforms. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are unique in that they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user satisfaction scores. Here are the winners in each segment, listed in order of research frequency on TrustRadius. We have also provided insights on how to pick the right ecommerce platform based on your needs and current industry trends. Overall Top Rated BigCommerce Shopify Salesforce Commerce Cloud Episerver Digital Commerce WooCommerce Top Rated by Enterprises Salesforce Commerce Cloud Episerver Digital Commerce Top Rated by Mid-Sized Companies Salesforce Commerce Cloud Shopify Episerver Digital Commerce Magento Open Source (formerly Community Edition) Top Rated by Small Businesses BigCommerce Shopify WooCommerce What are ecommerce platforms? Ecommerce platforms provide a software solution for vendors who want to sell products and services online. The core components of ecommerce software include an online storefront, shopping cart capabilities, and a system for processing payments. The online storefront (or ecommerce website) is a site where customers can go to browse through products and compare details and pricing. Shopping cart capabilities allow customers to place items they want to buy in a virtual cart, so that they can […]

Today, we awarded the 2018 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Sales Intelligence Software. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are unique in that they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user satisfaction scores. They are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, site traffic, or status as a TrustRadius customer. Sales intelligence tools allow sales teams to stay on top of prospect and client data. These products aim to make salespeople more productive by updating/augmenting account and contact data and surfacing details that can help reps qualify leads or provide context for a conversation. They (typically) integrate with the user’s CRM, email inbox, social networks, and web browser. It’s important for sales intelligence tools to be convenient to access and easy to use, as well as provide accurate data. Reviews provide buyers with insight into these areas from sales reps, managers, and marketers who use sales intelligence tools to build a pipeline. Feedback from users who have experience with more than one sales intelligence tool is particularly valuable, since they’re able to compare products head to head and explain where products can be used in combination. Here are the winners: Overall Top Rated ZoomInfo […]

When it comes to picking prospecting tools, sales and marketing teams are in a more powerful position than they’ve ever been. Regardless of the specifics of what a company does, the products it’s selling, or even its budget, there’s never been so much choice when it comes to choosing tools that will help supercharge their sales efforts.   That said, with so many tools to choose from, how can we know which ones will work best for us? Obviously, since every company and its needs are different, there’s no one “right” answer to this question. But what we can do is look at which tools are hot on the radar of others in the industry, and leverage perks such as free trials and demos to establish which tool (or tools) best fit our own unique needs. Here are 5 prospecting tools to consider, broken down by price, features, and ease-of-use. 1. Harness the Power of Video with BombBomb Did you know that 55% of us watch videos online every day? And that experts predict video will account for 80% of all online consumer traffic by 2019? That means one thing: if you’re not using video in your marketing already, you probably […]

Today, we awarded the 2018 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Configure Price Quote Tools. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are unique in that they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user satisfaction scores. They are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, site traffic, or status as a TrustRadius customer. Configure Price Quote (CPQ) tools are used by sales teams to generate product quotes and manage product configuration during the proposal process. CPQ tools institutionalize sales knowledge and product constraints, and can help determine pricing in complicated negotiations.  By semi-automating quotes, they save time for salespeople, who can then get accurate quotes to their customers more quickly. Integrations (to CRM, contract management, accounting, or product information systems, for example) are an important element in achieving these benefits. Feedback from other sales organizations on how well integrations support automation can be very helpful for buyers who are evaluating whether a product will help with efficiency, productivity, and consistency at their own organization. Here are the winners: Overall Top Rated Apttus Configure Price Quote Apttus was designed to help sales representatives create quotations for customers based on standardized pricing and configuration rules. It also offers […]

Along with account-based marketing and selling, specialization is one of the biggest trends in SaaS sales right now. Many sales leaders at high-growth B2B tech companies are following the advice offered in the bestselling book Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross & Marylou Tyler, also supported by research findings (touted by vendors like InsideSales.com): specialist models “achieve a 7-point improvement in close ratios over a generalist model.” Specialization means to break out responsibilities and disperse expertise, so that people focus on a particular piece of a larger operation. Much of the TOPO Sales Summit conference, which happened last week in San Francisco, was focused on how to specialize Sales organizations effectively—in terms of people, processes, and technology. Sales development is not the only area that can be specialized, but it seems to be the focus of conversation in the space right now. There were presentations from TOPO analysts and consultants on the topic, as well as from high-growth sales leaders who have been successful with specialized SDR teams. At the conference, I interviewed sales development leaders about their experiences building and honing SDR teams. Across companies, these are some of the key steps to implementing an SDR team: Map SDRs onto the sales process/greater sales […]

Account-based marketing is a huge trend in the B2B software world right now, but sales leaders and experts on sales methodology are starting to ask—how does it fit into the overall scalable revenue machine? The account strategies underpinning ABM are drawn from fairly traditional Sales tactics (which are being adopted by Marketers), and, after all, ABM cannot produce its celebrated benefits without the help of Sales. So what is the role of Sales in ABM, and how can companies organize around a unified account-based strategy? At their recent Sales Summit conference, TOPO proposed a framework to establish how the relationship between Sales, Marketing, and customers should work with an account-based strategy. TOPO calls their framework Account-based Everything—in summary: target high-value accounts; be data and intelligence-driven; organize around account strategy; make interactions valuable for the buyer; and use the appropriate number of touches. To find out what these account-based strategies look like in practice, I interviewed practitioners Ted Purcell (Marketo), Doug Landis (Box), Lars Nilsson (Cloudera), Jeff Imm (When I Work), and Chris Albro (Zendesk). Here are the big takeaways: The right approach depends on your product and the business model. An account-based strategy looks different for companies that are targeting a […]

3/30/2016 Sales Leaders from High Growth Companies Come Together to Discuss Organization, Process, Pipeline Development, and Technology at the TOPO Sales Summit. On April 7-8 Sales Leaders will gather at Pier 27 in San Francisco for the first TOPO Sales Summit. TOPO is a research and consulting firm that helps Sales and Marketing teams develop a high-growth revenue stack consisting of processes, plays, people, technology and metrics. The conference is organized around four topics: Sales leadership, Inside sales, Sales development, and Sales technology. It promises to give attendees insight into how the most effective sales leaders have been able to drive scalable revenue growth. The Summit is indeed timely. TOPO’s research indicates that in 2016 successful Sales leadership is no longer tactical, but rather, strategic; companies who want to drive sustainable growth must design and run their Sales teams accordingly. Check out TOPO’s 8-point Sales Framework for driving revenue growth on their blog here. In summary, according to TOPO, Sales leaders should: determine their ideal customer profile and buyer personas; develop a sales strategy and framework; align their organization to the ideal customer; design a standardized sales process; use buyer-centric messaging; invest in sales enablement; design and build their sales technology stack; and track and optimize […]

The sales software category is red hot right now as companies try to apply best practices and technology to improve prospecting effectiveness and efficiency. The category has attracted a lot of investment capital and competition is intensifying.  I caught up with Nick Hedges, President and CEO of Velocify® at the Dreamforce conference to learn more about their offerings and approach to the market. Velocify is a provider of cloud-based sales software, designed for high-velocity sales environments. It has two core products – Velocify Pulse for companies using Salesforce.com and LeadManager for those that do not use Salesforce.  Its primary focus is on accelerating lead response, optimizing sales practice to boost conversion, and prioritizing sales activities. Velocify is reviewed on TrustRadius by users here What’s the founding story of Velocify and how did you get to this point? The business has changed quite a lot over time. We got our start in the financial services industry. About 11 years ago, many financial services companies, particularly in the mortgage industry, were buying a lot of leads. It was an exploding vertical, growing really fast. Companies were growing really quickly but not building marketing capabilities. They had been buying leads from Lending Tree, for […]

InsightSquared is a sales performance analytics solution that includes sales forecasts, KPI tracking, and multi-data source reports. The solution helps businesses immediately identify weaknesses in their sales process, diagnose the root cause of the issue, and take action to correct course. It’s a top rated BI solution in the small business segment on TrustRadius. What’s new at InsightSquared? We’ve grown a lot this year and had a great year last year. We feel like we’ve really found product market fit, so we’re leaning into growth. We moved to a new 45k square foot office in Boston – that’s triple our old space. Our team has doubled in the last year to over 150 people. Our sales team, in particular, has grown pretty aggressively. There’s been a lot of change. What’s new on the product front? We’ve doubled down on sales performance analytics. If you look at our reviews on TrustRadius, we are the top rated sales performance analytics product on the market. We offer over 400 reports – we think it’s the deepest library out there. Our product is very configurable, but customers can still be up and running within a week with limited to no professional services. That’s really unique in the industry. To date, […]