Just like professional athletes, sales professionals need state-of-the-art equipment to elevate their game and outplay the competition. Some organizations have turned to dialing technologies like predictive dialers, which work to determine how many lines to dial in order to get a response. Unfortunately, predictive dialers are a 30-year-old, outdated technology suffering from many limitations and even…

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Sales teams aren’t always the first to take advantage of exciting, new technologies. They’re usually too busy hustling to hit quota to play around with shiny objects. So, it should come as no surprise, really, that the sales industry is one of the last groups to embrace the power of predictive analytics. In the past…

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Want to know the secrets behind XANT’s breakaway success? Today is your lucky day. XANT CEO Dave Elkington discusses the ups and downs of building a fast-growing technology company in an in-depth radio interview on KCPW’s “The Bottom Line.” In a wide-ranging conversation with KCPW host Doug Wells, Elkington shares the intimate details, difficulties, pain,…

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As soon as XANT announced its $100 million Series C funding round Monday morning, the calls and emails started flooding in. The company expected to get some coverage of this exciting news, but the frothy media frenzy that ensued completely blew us away. Reporters, commentators and bloggers — from “The Wall Street Journal” to Bloomberg…

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Predictive analytics and Shakespeare have more in common than you think. At least, according to Brian Kardon they do. Brian, CMO of Lattice Engines, recently presented a session on predictive analytics at the Inside Sales Virtual Summit. And he invoked some help from Shakespeare. The main takeaway? “The past is prologue.” This quotation from Shakespeare’s…

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In the movie Moneyball the Oakland A’s baseball team was at the bottom of their game. To quote the movie … “There are rich teams, there are poor teams, then there is 50 feet of crap, and then there is us.” Based on a true story of the 2002 Oakland A’s who used statistics to hire…

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We forget sometimes just what exactly it is all this technology in business is supposed to be doing for us. The point of it all is that ultimately we want to replace the aspect of human intuition….or do we? On the surface you’d think that was it, right? If anything, we want sales to be…

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Ran into a great blog by Bob Apollo (@bobapollo on Twitter) on the Inflexion-Point Blog this morning that really got my wheels turning, entitled “Is your CRM system a sales prevention system?” Since one of my company’s biggest products is a lead management CRM, I was intrigued by Bob’s five “danger signs” that a company’s…

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