Articles by Chris Bucholtz

At some point, the discussion about artificial intelligence and sales is going to mature. Too many people still think AI for sales will resemble C-3PO, a bumbling assistant that gets in the way more often than not, or the Hal 9000, subverting the sales process in ways that endanger the very existence of the sales person As the discussions mature, a...

A good motto for modern marketing would be, "When in doubt, check the data." Perhaps an even better one would be, "When not in doubt, check the data to see if you should be." There's never been a time when we've had such an ability to compile, collate, analyze and understand data around marketing. As businesses increase their abilities to collect d...

Ask salespeople and they'll tell you: They don't have enough time in the day to sell. That's not because the laws of physics cause salespeople to move through time faster than the rest of us -- it's because salespeople are pulled in many directions over the course of a day, and every one of those activities cuts into their selling time Actual selli...

A company in the CPQ (configure, price, quote) space last year announced an artificial intelligence feature for its solution. AI is a trend, and it's always nice to be trendy, but as great as CPQ is, it's still only one source of data. Without sufficient data, AI is extremely limited. It's like allowing your toddler to learn only about colors: The...

More than a quarter of marketers went into marketing because they wanted to be creative, researchers have found. So why do so many B2B marketing efforts seem exactly the same? The reason, in part, is that some things work well. In nature, convergent evolution leads different kinds of organisms to similar solutions when they work. The number of stra...

Back in the day -- like, 1993 -- every company had to have a website because it was the thing you did! A website was something new, fresh and shiny, and it allowed the marketing team to reach more people than ever before. It was on the Internet, which automatically made your company seem cool. It was totally rad! Within about 18 moths, though, ever...

When the U.S. Department of Labor issued its fiduciary rule last year, it set financial advisers, insurers and agents into a mad scramble to meet an April 10, 2017, implementation deadline. The rule elevates all financial professionals who work with retirement plans or provide retirement planning advice to the level of a fiduciary, or someone bound legally and ethically to meet the standards of that status.

Not long ago, I received an email from my health club. I've been member there for 13 years, and this was the first of its kind. It said, in part:"Dear Chris, We've noticed you haven't been in as regularly in recent weeks. I understand there may be many reasons for not being able to make it in, but I just wanted to send a quick note to check if you're happy with the service we've been providing. Let me know if I can be of any assistance and I hope to see you very soon!"While I appreciate that the health club is at least trying to stay in contact, this email managed to do several things wrong all at once -- and they're all avoidable.

If you talk to marketers for any amount of time about what they do, you are bound to hear the term "customer journey" at some point. The go-to exercise for marketers looking to up their lead generation game today is "journey mapping," which helps you understand how a potential buyer navigates content and other offers on the way to a closed deal How...

In sales, A-B-C does not simply refer to the Alec Baldwin scene in Glengarry Glen Ross. It's the system that sales managers (and salespeople themselves) use to categorize performance. A players smash their quotas on a regular basis; B players battle to deliver results, and usually do; C players have a history of missed objectives and should consider work in another field...

Sales people love leads. They want lots of them, and they want them now. The more leads, the more money -- because sales is a numbers game, right? Well, yes and no. Some believe in an equation that says X number of leads will produce Y number of closed deals. If you make X greater, Y will be greater, too, right? ...

"Perfection is the enemy of completion" is a bastardization of a translation of the first line of a poem by Voltaire. That makes the saying itself sort of an example of what Voltaire was talking about -- but it doesn't make it any less true In the processes we use to run our businesses and deal with customers, there's a lot of "good enough" thinkin...

It's hard to overstate the impact that the arrival of Software as a Service had on the CRM world. Spearheaded by Salesforce.com and picked up by almost every other vendor in the CRM space, SaaS made CRM available to virtually every business, and has paved the way for the continued health of the CRM space It did so by dropping the cost of entry by s...

Social media and its close relative, social CRM, allow you to connect with customers in new and meaningful ways, on a greater scale and at a greater velocity than ever before. When it's done right, that is.

The jargon of an industry is a good indicator of where the mindset of that industry is at any particular moment. Think of terms like "the cloud," which are set upon by marketers and subverted to their ends until the meaning has been wrung from them For many in IT, the cloud is a place that solves many of their routine problems, sight unseen, and it...

We all know about the idea of total cost of ownership, or TCO, and the concept of return on investment, or ROI. Both have their place in business evaluations of CRM. There's another measurement, however, that should be considered -- one I like to call "time to value" -- T2V The T2V test is simple: From the time you begin deployment of a CRM solutio...

For the better part of six years, we pundits have been urging businesses to get social. Social CRM (SCRM) even has its own Gartner Magic Quadrant, and while the entries in that document are all over the map in terms of what they do, vendors serving aspects of SCRM are well established. Gartner itself said that sales of software for SCRM -- as Gartner defined it -- topped $1 billion in 2012...

As a journalist covering technology, you get bombarded with material from PR people trying to get you to write about their clients. Although there are some stellar PR people, the majority of pitches I get are not targeted at what I write about, addressed to the wrong person, or make claims that are demonstrably false or inaccurate I was pondering t...