Ardath Albee

Cloud Computing on Ulitzer The first thing I have to say about Dreamforce is WHOA! 19,000 people registered this year, from 60 countries. So many were in attendance that they had to have an overflow room for about 3,000 to watch Marc Benioff's keynote from afar. Salesforce.com clearly wants to see everything in the cloud...their cloud. What's not to like? A multi-tennant, pay-as-you-go, elastic platform that allows your company to expand or contract as needed is pretty compelling. And according to IDC, it's 5X faster and about half the cost to build apps in the cloud. IDC found that companies were able to reduce TCO by 54%. Even better, it's accessible for small to midsize to enterprise companies. The theme that emerged was all about social media, collaboration and conv... (more)

Manticore Technology VII is All About Marketers

I've known the folks at Manticore Technology for quite a while. I've been watching their progress and I've been impressed by their interest in learning what's working and what's not for the companies who implement marketing automation. Based on feedback from their customers, they've taken note that a one-size-fits-all mentality doesn't work for marketing, nor does it work for the techno... (more)

eBook: Tune Up Your Customer Focus

In my book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, I talk about how B2B marketers need to really get to know their customers in order to improve their marketing effectiveness. One of the exercises presented in the book is The Customer Focus Tune-up. This eBook expands upon that exercise. In the eBook, I present: A breakdown of the steps in the complex buying process. 4 Steps to impro... (more)

What Happened to the Sales Funnel?

The traditional concept of the sales funnel is gone. If you're still thinking only about volume as a factor in the sales equation, you're missing the conversion to buyers being in control of their buying process. The old way went something like this: Pour X# leads into the top of the funnel if you want X# sales at the end of the quarter. Rinse and repeat. To me, this was always a curious ... (more)

Sales 2.0 Conference: The Real-Time Economy

Gerhard Gschwandtner, (@gerhard20) the founder and CEO of Personal Selling Power, Inc. kicked off the Sales 2.0 conference to a full house with opening remarks focused on how much selling is changing. He credited 7 trends for driving this shift in the way buyers choose to buy: Conversation Economy - buyers want to talk to each other, not necessarily you. Transactional Selling - will disapp... (more)