'“Social selling” is getting quite a bit of coverage and discussion these days and I suppose this blog post is evidence of that.  Sales (and marketing for that matter) have always been social disciplines because they involve interacting with other people directly and in a meaningful way.  The presence of technology in the mix is designed to make this human interaction more efficient for both buyer and seller as well as enhance the time together – not about replacing humans with machines. So how do you implement a successful social selling program?  It’s all about timing. MORE >>

It’s really tempting to treat any measurable thing as a metric. For instance, I’ve seen several (way more than several, actually…) social media campaigns focused on “generating likes” This is not to denigrate likes, but they are not a metric unto themselves. How do those likes become the actions that matter? It is only measuring them in conjunction with other metrics that they begin to tell a story. As my “likes alone don’t matter” example I’d like to offer this shining example: Read it and weep. Million Likes. Nary a conversion to be found. MORE >>

We’re huge fans of Scott Brinker and the work he does over on the Chief Marketing Technologist blog – ChiefMartec. He put a great presentation together on “agile marketing” and we wanted to feature it here on our blog. “Agile” is a concept around fast moving activities, rapid testing, and frequent delivery that started on the software development side of the house. Many of these same concepts are driving best practices around new marketing approaches especially as the technologies to enable marketing (like marketing automation) become more widely adopted. MORE >>

Most businesses at a certain stage of their marketing maturity understand that an email marketing program is an efficient and cost-effective way to communicate with customers and prospects.  Products like MailChimp , Constant Contact , Vertical Response , and iContact (now part of Vocus ) made this capability accessible to even the smallest of businesses.  This further leveled the marketing playing field between small and large companies. The same can be said of marketing automation.  This makes the ROI on a marketing automation investment quick and meaningful. MORE >>

Paul Greenberg does so much for our industry from great insights to the CRM Idol contest to his annual CRM Watchlist publication.  We were very excited to be included as a “Company to Watch” on the 2013 CRM Watchlist and had briefed Paul early on about our strategy around combining Nearstream and LoopFuse into one company.  Here’s Paul’s write up on us: “What makes  Nearstream an intriguing choice for the near future is the recent merger between Nearstream and Loopfuse, both CRM Idol contestants. That’s 18-24 months away, and on the right track.” Thanks Paul!  MORE >>