According to research from IDC, over 40% of all marketing materials aren't used by sales teams. The primary reason is that sales reps are unable to locate or access the materials when needed. But in top-performing organizations, sales and marketing are closely aligned. A CRM system is usually the starting point, but the technology available to support sales marketing alignment go well beyond a common platform for customer and prospect contact information. The eight tools here deliver a range of functionality such as email automation, automatic email and call logging, workflow scheduling, lead qualification, sales enablement, and personalized direct mail.

I was recently a guest speaker at the Sales Leadership Conference organized by Dr. Karen Peesker, Co-Founder of the Sales Leadership Institute, a department at the Toronto Metropolitan University (formally Ryerson University) in Toronto, Canada. The conference was hosted by the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto Metropolitan University (Formerly Ryerson University) in collaboration with HEC Montreal and Ivey, funded by SSHRC, IT World Canada, Microsoft, DHL, Rogers, RBC, CPSA, and other community leaders. The conference goals were to bring university professors, students, industry leaders, and academicians to share their learning programs, identify gaps and requirements to advance the sales profession and most importantly, tackle a vision for the future of sales. The strongest theme of the conference was the business imperative for advancing digital literacy, data literacy and ensuring that technology was firmly embedded in all sales learning programs. Digital literacy is best defined as an individual's ability to find, evaluate, and clearly communicate information and knowledge through using diverse digital platforms.

Every day, businesses of all sizes, sectors and locations are learning more about the data they hold and the opportunities it can unlock. As organisations once again look ahead to a new year, what are the major data trends the tech industry can expect in 2022? The rise of application automation Dan Sommer, Senior Director, Global Market Intelligence Lead at Qlik, believes 2022 will be the year application automation will trigger actions. He explains, "the API economy opens up entirely new ways for businesses, partners, customers, and even competitors to unite for joint initiatives while reducing the relevancy of buy-versus-build. With an opportunity to assemble and orchestrate, application automation is a strongly emerging area that removes the need to code these integrations, making the opportunity much more accessible to a wider variety of actors."

Broadvoice, an award-winning provider of hosted voice, unified communications (UC), and SIP trunking services for businesses, is reinforcing its commitment to its indirect sales partners with the addition of two new regional sales professionals to its channel management team. Robert Sanchez joins Broadvoice as Regional Channel Manager – Mountain West and Joseph Galluzzi is now Regional Channel Manager – Northeast. Broadvoice also has regional channel managers in California, Southwest, Midwest, and Southeast. "As a channel-first organization, Broadvoice continues to expand its partner community, so we're adding resources and expertise to stay ahead of growing demand," said Kim McLachlan, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "We're pleased to welcome two veteran telecom sales professionals to the Broadvoice team to provide in-region sales support."

Lockdowns are lifting but customers aren't rushing back to their offices in a hurry. The Covid era fast-tracked sales professionals into a world of digital selling whether they were ready for it or not. Grounded sales teams have quickly had to learn how to network and engage digitally. Before Covid, the average sales person spent 36% of their time in contact/meeting customers. During Covid, 77% of sales professionals said they're holding more virtual meetings.

"Our greatest assets are our team members, and we are committed to continually improving their lives. Whether investing in leadership initiatives, or improving our facilities, we believe the only way you can create a world-class customer experience is by first creating a world-class team member experience." Preface: To tee up the new item produced by Clayton Homes that follows below, some background is useful. First, some related background, then the new items from Clayton. An independent of Clayton Homes that stopped selling their HUD Code manufactured homes some time ago reminded MHProNews about claims that after Warren Buffett bought their brand, they tried cutting the pay of retail general managers.

Time is something that we all have an equal amount of. How you spend your time at work, along with how many hours you spend there varies by industry. A common myth I hear among sales professionals is that work-life balance isn't an option, and burnout is a necessity for success. I'm here to tell you that it doesn't have to be that way. After working in the CRM for over twenty years, I knew there had to be a different way of doing things.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world of business in a myriad of ways. Businesses and brands are working to incorporate the emerging technology into their products and services for the benefit of their customers and employees. As the technology becomes more advanced, the greater impact it will have on every aspect of your business, including social selling. As we mentioned in a recent article, social selling is the art of building relationships during the sales process, and it usually takes place on various social media platforms. In the current sales climate, social selling has become an essential step for salespeople, with 78% of sales professionals who engage in social selling outselling their peers.

The rapid growth of digital technologies in the recent years has created a very distinct type of a customer-a customer that allots majority of his/her time on the internet be it via social media networks or mobile. We, our self can identify with them the way we spend most of our time online- and this is majorly affecting the way we communicate with customers. Statista says that as of 2018, "over 4 billion people are active internet users and 3.3 billion are social media users". Plus, out of this digital population, 79% of consumers demand real-time conversations and engagements with brands rather than phone or e-mail. The new type of customer is empowered with all the information and connectivity at their disposal.

Account-based selling is experiencing a surge in popularity in B2B sales due to changes in technology that have appeared over the past few years. One of those technologies is what is referred to as "relationship intelligence." In this conversation, Jaxson Khan describes how marketing can leverage relationship intelligence to more effectively collaborate with sales and how managers can use relationship intelligence to enable customer success across the board. Relationship intelligence is one of the new technologies that is changing the way sales is done – and it provides huge benefits for every sales role throughout an organization. Jaxson Khan is Head of Marketing at Nudge.ai, a relationship intelligence platform.