B2B Connection

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for HR Management 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. HR Management Software There is no shortage of HR Management software solutions, and figuring out which one meets your business needs best can be a difficult task. HR professionals on TrustRadius use reviews written by software end-users and product comparisons to help them make better-informed purchasing decisions. In the past quarter more than 39,800 professionals used TrustRadius to evaluate Human Resource (HR) Management products—at least 5,579 of them were from enterprise companies with more than 1,000 employees. Visitors evaluating HR Management products were most curious about reading product reviews and comparing different products —59% read reviews and 31% compared at least two products. Here are the winners: UltiPro From Ultimate Software, recently acquired by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, UltiPro is an HCM Suite that offers companies […]

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Talent Management 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. Talent Management Software Talent Management software is designed to help businesses find, hire, and train high quality employees. Essentially, talent management products enable businesses to manage their talent pools for the duration of their life with the company. Most talent management suites include seven core modules; recruiting and ATS, onboarding, performance management, compensation management, learning management, and succession planning. This set of talent management capabilities are regarded as one of the ‘strategic’ functions of human resource (HR) management. Some of the top rated products listed below are HCM suites with robust talent management capabilities. There are also a few products below that serve as stand-alone talent management solutions. One thing buyers should consider when looking for talent management software is the scope of the solution they need. Larger HR […]

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Learning Management Systems (LMS). 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. Learning Management Systems (LMS) An LMS is a platform that helps instructors manage educational resources, communicate with students outside of class, and conduct online classes. Common LMS features include content creation and management systems, course management tools, grading tools, separate portals for students and instructors, and student data analytics. Some LMS vendors offer additional features such as mobile apps, gamification systems, integration with social media, and learning object repositories (LORs). Most products support standard Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) plugins that add new features or integrate with third-party software like YouTube, Microsoft Office, and Learning.com. Some LMS vendors include support for technology-enhanced items (TEIs), which add interactive elements to assessments. TEIs can be used to ask students to perform tasks such as identifying keywords, labeling images, or completing […]

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Corporate Performance Management (CPM) 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. Corporate Performance Management (CPM) Software Choosing the right Corporate Performance Management software, one that meets all your business needs, can be a difficult task. CPM professionals on TrustRadius use reviews written by software end-users and product comparisons to help them make better informed purchasing decisions. In the past quarter more than 20,900 professionals used TrustRadius to evaluate CPM products—at least 2,800 of them were from enterprise companies with more than 1,000 employees. Visitors evaluating CPM software were most curious about reading product reviews and comparing different products —40% read reviews and 37% compared at least two products. Here are the winners: Prophix Prophix is corporate performance management platform aimed primarily at small and medium-sized businesses. It has an extensive list of capabilities including budgeting, planning, modeling, […]

Brand and product promotion is a big part of what drives business. What better way to do that than through email marketing? In today’s digital world, the drive to promote your products and services must gravitate to the available technology to stay ahead of the game. Thus, marketers across the nation are gearing up to rocket their efforts in email marketing campaigns with increased budgets. Email marketers are expected to spend an estimated $350 million this year, up by $80 million from 2015. Yet, with consumer attitudes towards email marketing plummeting, brands need to be careful with campaigns if they want to see ROI on their increased investment. Understanding what drives consumers attitudes may save your email marketing campaigns from falling into the SPAM pit of despair. Here are the top email marketing complaints from U.S. consumers – and what you can do about them with the right software tools. High frequency emailing is a turnoff–overly eager marketers get ignored While persistence has its bonuses, sending overly frequent marketing emails can be a counterproductive for your product, service, or even your brand. Sometimes frequency is a good thing, leading to increased click-through rates, but that isn’t always true. Marketing Charts […]

Google Analytics is hands-down the most utilized website analytics platform available today. This granddaddy of web analytics solutions accounts for 60% of the market share. When companies need to know how their site is performing, Google Analytics is one of the first places they turn to. Despite this, many marketers do not use this solution at full capacity. By integrating Google Analytics (GA) with marketing software, marketers can gather more advanced insights to drive brand management and engagement. This allows professionals to better understand their customers, create better goals, and effectively drive growth. How to boost brand engagement with digital marketing and analysis Marketers know the importance of brand engagement. Brand engagement sounds like a great idea but lacks a clear, technical definition. Without a clear definition, marketers can get lost in pursuing a goal they don’t fully understand or agree upon. Brand engagement has to do with consumer connection with a brand – emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally. Some refer to this concept as a purely emotional connection and commitment one has with a brand, whereas others believe this concept has more to do with what actions a consumer takes in regard to a company. Still, others believe that it […]

Reviews are a driving force for your brand’s reputation. Your reputation is what creates conversion. Do you need reviews for your company but don’t know where to start? We are going to take a dive into why reviews are important, where your reviews should live online, and 10 ways for you to ask for the reviews your business needs. Why Reviews Are a Big Deal Customers are relying more and more on word of mouth and online reviews to make an informed purchase. 95% of customers read online reviews before buying a product. Customers are doing independent research more than ever. A product with zero reviews is 270% less likely to be purchased than a product with only five reviews. Reviews help future customers become aware of products. They also allow customers to narrow in on their final decision by giving them realistic and honest expectations of the product. Additionally, reviews enable customers to ask better questions of sales representatives. Lastly, they supplement marketing materials with real-life experiences. Even negative reviews are better than no reviews. 85% of buyers look for negative reviews before buying a product. Bad reviews build the trust and credibility of a collection of customer responses. […]

Being a great Project Manager means wearing a number of hats. Not only do you have to ensure a project executes on time, in the budget, and within scope, you will also serve multiple roles: negotiator, decision maker, team-builder, mentor, schedule-maker, risk-evaluator, budgeter, and task manager. Each of these roles requires skill and practice. Below, in no particular order, are seven skills you want to master when as a project manager. 1. Leadership Arguably the bread and butter of project management, leadership is a skill you wouldn’t want to miss in a project manager. There are a number of smaller skills that go into being a good leader, some of which you may have already. What they essentially boil down to is being a cheerleader, coach, and referee to your team and being able to balance these three roles. Good teams are made up of people that are motivated, skilled, and accountable to themselves and others. A good leader creates an environment where this can happen. Leaders that cheer their team on and provide  “feel good” vibes will have happier teams. Not only do happier employees make the workplace a more enjoyable place to be they’re also beneficial for the […]

Where there’s a rule, there’s a loophole. Where there’s a security feature, there’s someone to hack it. Where there’s a system, there’s someone figuring out how to game it. So, once online reviews revolutionized how we buy stuff—allowing us to use the real experiences of others to decide which vacuum cleaner to buy, which hotel to stay at, which doctor to consult, which cruise to take, which book to read—that system got gamed too. Amazon is the quintessential example, where a slew of fake review schemes have led to a system where even legitimate sellers feel they need to buy fake reviews to stay competitive. And the latest news—that the Elon Musk-based AI nonprofit OpenAI has created an AI tool that can generate fake text—doesn’t bode well for the consumer online review industry (though it’s not releasing the code for fear of misuse). What about business software reviews? Our process ensures that they don’t get published, but we see (and reject!) our share of fake reviews submitted to TrustRadius too. (And I feel confident our review readers would spot an AI-generated review off the bat.) But the motivation is different. In the consumer world, it’s the sellers buying fake reviews to […]

Yesterday we announced our 2019 “Most Loved” winners! We were really feeling the love this Valentine’s Day and wanted have a little fun with our Valentine’s Day cards! Here are the Top 10 “Most Loved” tools on TrustRadius, and what you can learn from them!

Here at TrustRadius, love is in the air every time we look around at our growing community of business software users. In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, we compiled the first ever TrustRadius Love Report, which analyzed every review we have collected to date word by word. We looked at a total of 168,000+ reviews of 4,185 products across 421 categories, and determined which products were the most beloved by TrustRadians by comparing mentions of “love” in all its (grammatical) forms to the total number of reviews we’ve received of each product. After much consideration, fifty products emerged as the winners of TrustRadius’s first-ever Most Loved Award, with the highest ratio of “love” per review across our entire site. The award winners span many categories and are most loved by their customers for a multitude of reasons, but there were some things that charmed and beguiled reviewers across the board. Here’s the full list of the 50 “Most Loved” Award winners, as well as an in-depth look at what we learned from the top 10 products about how to tell you’re head over heels in love (with a software product): Workable The one you love doesn’t try to change you. […]

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 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 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. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Search engine optimization (SEO) tools help users grow organic traffic on their website, social profiles, or mobile application by increasing the site’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). A few ways SEO teams can boost the ranking of specific webpages or mobile apps is to (1) feature original, relevant, and interesting content, (2) adjust site architecture to make it more intuitive and easy for search engine crawlers to find, and (3) increase external links (or backlinks) to their site. SEO tools help users track and measure SEO performance with features such as keyword analysis, backlink management, technical site audits, site ranking tracking, and traffic analytics and reports. Some products offer the ability to measure additional metrics such as share of voice […]

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Web Conferencing 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. Web Conferencing Software Web conferencing software enables users not in the same physical office, such as remote employees, clients, prospects, business partners, or members of other office branches to participate in online meetings. This software is used in many scenarios: one-to-many presenter style meetings, group meetings, virtual face-to-face client or remote employee meetings, online presentations, conference calls, webinars, online learning, product demos, and live trainings or tutorials. Many vendors offer features such as audience polling, live chat, Q&A, and file sharing along with standard video conferencing, dial-in, and screen sharing capabilities. Evaluating web conferencing software and finding one that has the level of quality, reliability, security, and scalability that fits your business best can be tough to navigate. Feedback from users who have already been through this process […]

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Survey & Forms Building 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. Survey & Forms Building Tools Survey & forms building tools help users design and distribute surveys, collect responses, and analyze online survey results. Some products may focus more on survey design and include a range of survey question types and logic, while other tools may focus more on reporting and offer advanced statistical results analysis. These tools have a wide application and are used across industries for things like customer satisfaction surveys, employee feedback surveys, and market / academic research. Common survey & forms building tools features include various survey formats (e.g. online, print, or phone), survey templates and layouts, response collection, question types to choose from (e.g. multiple choice, single select, sliding scale, matrix questions, open-text), question logic options (e.g. conditional, branching, random), and results […]

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Marketing Automation 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. Marketing Automation Software The ultimate goal of every marketing team is to find high-quality leads, nurture them with personalized and relevant content, and pass them along to the sales team to be turned into happy (and hopefully repeat) customers. Marketing automation software helps marketers achieve this by automating and scaling the more repetitive tasks that would otherwise take hours of manual labor. Products include features such as implementing marketing campaign sequences across a variety of channels (e.g. email, social, mobile, landing pages, etc), landing page customization, lead list segmentation, lead nurturing and scoring, and analyzing marketing campaign performance to see what works and what doesn’t. Many marketing automation products integrate with third-party tools and platforms (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce, etc). There are many things to consider when purchasing […]

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for A/B Testing 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. A/B Testing Tools A/B testing tools enable users to optimize their website, webpages, or mobile applications in order to positively impact desired outcomes such as increased conversion rates and decreased page bounce rate. They allow businesses to divide site traffic across different websites or web page versions to test which variant performs best. Basic A/B testing tools will be able to implement A/B and Split URL tests, calculate conversion rates, and provide the statistical likelihood of one site version outperforming other variations. Some products may also include other analysis tools such as heatmaps and scrollmaps, site surveys, and visitor recordings. While some A/B testing tools require knowledge of HTML or CSS in order to create tests, many of these tools have a WYSIWYG interface that enable users without […]

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 Web Analytics 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. Web Analytics Tools Web analytics tools enable businesses to track user activity and engagement on their website, and in some cases on social platforms and mobile applications as well. These tools track metrics such as number of active users, number of pageviews over a specified time period, conversion rates, number of onsite link clicks, how far users travel down the page, and average time on page. Some tools may specialize in one area of web analytics such as heatmaps and scroll maps, visitor recordings, A/B and split URL testing , and audience segmentation and personalization. There are also larger web analytics platforms that provide marketing, SEO, product, and sales teams with an overall view of user activity and engagement metrics. All of these tools aim to help businesses […]

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Content Management Systems. 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. Content Mangement Systems (CMS) Content Management Systems (CMS) allow users to create, publish, and manage digital content, typically on a website. However, more advanced CMS and/or Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) enable users to manage content across digital channels. Some popular CMS use cases are on content-heavy websites such as blogs, news sites, eCommerce sites, corporate sites, and intranets. While different types of CMS may have different areas they focus on, most include these capabilities; a WYSIWYG editor, content creation tools, content indexing, document format management, content versioning and archiving, and content publishing with templates or a wizard. More advanced CMSs may include other features such as the ability to create personalization rules based on site visitor activity or demographics that control which users see specific content. Here are […]