Thus, your marketing system may think he is a prospect and treat him as such, when your CRM recognizes him as a customer. This gives marketers the ability to know where prospects come from, what prompted them to engage with the company and what the next steps in the nurturing process should be, once they become known. Share this on LinkedIn. Digg this! Yesterday, I had the opportunity to co-present on a webinar with Amanda Batista, from DemandGen Report and Chris Parisi, from Bulldog Solutions, on the State of Marketing Automation in 2011. Tweet This! MORE >>

Todd Heim supplies a helpful guide to best practices for building a following on and generating traffic from social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Mixx and Propeller. Here he outlines five ways that sales can use these tools as well, from social CRM to teaching prospects how to solve business issues. Possibly inspired by Social Media is Simpler Than You Think , John Jantsch explores five ways to use social media for common business tasks such as prospect follow-up and market research. Digg this! Share this on LinkedIn. by Kuno Creative. 5 stars. MORE >>

What was most gratifying about this year’s conference was the much needed show-down between two major CRM platform leaders:  Salesforce and Oracle.  Imagine,” he said, “that a Sales guy could use CRM like Amazon’s users, knowing immediately not only everything a prospect has done in the past, but what he is likely to BUY in the immediate future”.  transaction history + web) data is integrated enough, and then run through a powerful enough analytics engine across customers and prospects, the Sales 2.0 Share this on LinkedIn. Digg this! solution. Neither.  MORE >>

Regardless of the fact that you will be “pounding the pavement&# , you will need to keep a record of your prospective customer interactions and sales pipeline from those interactions. “expensive&# ) customer relationship management (CRM) system to get started. You can create a simple database of basic information about the prospects and insights gained as well as any follow-up promised. Zoho’s offering is nice because it allows for easy upgrade to their CRM app when you need it. Share this on LinkedIn. Digg this! Tweet This! MORE >>

In addition, it includes ranking of prospects by potential and by timing, allowing reps to focus their efforts on those opportunities that are most likely to generate the highest return in the shortest time frame. At the rep level, the dashboard allows reps to look across their books of business and drill down to those opportunities, customers, or prospects that need attention. B2B sales dashboard capabilities are contained within many CRM systems, but my sense is that those tools are not leveraged as frequently or as well as they could be. Share this on LinkedIn. MORE >>