Industry news
Returning to the office is overrated
The social contact. The hallway conversations. The comfortable chairs. THE SNACKS. At the beginning of the year, only 29% of displaced workers were willing to give all of that up. Oh, what eight months can bring. Last month, PwC followed up on their January survey about remote work to see how attitudes might have changed, and change is what they found. After interviewing 1,007 full and part-time employees, PwC now reports that 41% of employees want to be fully remote. That's a big shift, and it doesn't come without its challenges. Insider takes a look at the survey findings from PwC's August remote work survey and examines the implications for recruiting, equity, and more. The majority of employees still don't want to abandon the office completely, but their love for the office was clearly overrated.
The State of CRM
When a company that is responsible for the second-tallest building west of the Mississippi conducts a survey about its industry, you know it's going to be big. How big? Salesforce partnered with Forrester to conduct a mega "State of CRM" survey that encompasses responses from more than 800 executives and 1,500 employees worldwide. There are tons of interesting insights, and Salesforce invited its Global Innovation Evangelist Brian Solis to be your guide. Brian has poured through the research and identified 8 tips and insights to help you get the most out of your CRM. Understanding global CRM trends might seem like a tall order, but that's just the way Salesforce likes things.
What's your budget?
Getting a prospect to reveal their budget for a purchase is hard. Do you know what's harder? Allocating sales budgets so reps can effectively reach the stage where that question can be asked in the first place. Periodically reviewing sales budgets has always been a good idea, but as budgets for travel and conferences get slashed, sales leaders need to figure out how to best reallocate those funds. Before making your shopping list, Seismic's CRO Ed Calnan has a few questions you should ask—especially when it comes to spending money on tech.
In the Groove
About that herd of unicorns
Salesforce announced its quarterly earnings last week, and not only did they beat analyst expectations, they also raised their forecast for the fiscal year. So what's driving this growth and bullish optimism? If you ask Marc Benioff, he'll say that it's a herd of unicorns. Not the imaginary forest creatures, but rather the growth of certain tech unicorns in its stable of acquisitions—Tableau, Mulesoft, and Slack. The Enterprise Times recently asked Groove CEO Chris Rothstein why he thinks Salesforce is doing so well. As the co-founder of a sales engagement platform built on Salesforce, Chris follows the company's news very closely and has strong opinions about the drivers of its current growth, and, of course, unicorns.
Learn something new
Ad hoc and opaque
"Ad hoc" and "opaque" are good words to know for an SAT test, but they're not so great when used to describe a B2B sales process. CRM systems are supposed to provide the visibility that reps and sales leaders need to close more deals in an effective and efficient way, but all too often they wind up being used as "a simple accounting and workflow management system." That’s according to a recent Harvard Business Review article that looks at how sales leaders can avoid this scenario by embracing sales plays. However, these aren't your run-of-the-mill sales plays. In the article, four partners from Bain & Company share five ways coordinated sales plays driven by data can enable organizations to improve sales outcomes, coaching opportunities, and the buying experience.
How are you doing?
More specifically, how are your account executives doing? How are they performing compared to industry averages? And what about average tenures or the time it takes to onramp new hires? How are you doing there? The only way we can answer these questions is if someone goes around asking a bunch of sales leaders for this kind of data. Thankfully, someone is doing that right now. The Bridge Group just launched its AE Motions, Models, and Metrics survey, and now is your opportunity to contribute to the results. It only takes 5 minutes, all responses are aggregated anonymously, and you'll receive a copy of the results. You've got nothing to lose—except maybe some blind spots.