Brainshark, a sales enablement solutions provider, launched new analytics capabilities as part of its Sales Accelerator platform.

The updates to the Sales Accelerator platform position sales teams to gain insight into how current clients engaged with content during the decision-making process. In addition, the new features are designed to provide metrics on how content is impacting deals that are currently in the pipeline.

The new tools aims to help users answer questions such as:

• How is sales content being used?

• Which content is best to use and when?

• Where in sales cycle does content work best?

• Which content drives more and bigger deals?

“Sales conversations are no longer limited to what takes place in a meeting room – they’re happening before, during and after that actual meeting,” said Joe Gustafson, CEO of Brainshark. “With the Brainshark Sales Accelerator, content becomes a proxy for being in the room. Managers get to be a fly on the wall, while sales teams have access to insights about engagement they’d never otherwise have – helping them refine strategies and ultimately boost revenues.”

By Erich Flynn, TreeHouse Interactive

If you struggle with lead generation, you’re not alone. A recent study on Lead Management and Social Engagement, by research firm CSO Insights, found that poor data quality for both prospects and customers — and the fact that sales personnel feel they don’t receive the right tools from marketing that they need to close sales — topped the list of sales and marketing pain points in 2014.

How can companies turn these problems around and reach their top marketing objectives of capturing new accounts, optimizing cross-sell/up-sell and new product introductions, and improving renewal rates? While web design and content, data quality management, and social media were reportedly the three top areas where companies plan to increase lead generation investments over the next year, the study found that email marketing campaigns were the most effective method for engaging prospects, delivering both the highest quality and quantity of sales and marketing leads. In fact, almost 55% of leading companies surveyed discovered a surge in lead conversions when they used lead nurturing.

The Invoca For Salesforce app integrates the vendor’s inbound call marketing platform into Salesforce to provide marketers with broader marketing automation capabilities, including Invoca's call routing, tracking and analytics features.

The Oracle Eloqua AppCloud is moving to the vendor’s Topliners user community site, enabling customers to more easily share, comment and follow apps, and receive updates from a single location, according to company officials.

The integration also enhances users’ ability to learn about AppCloud partner offerings as well as interact with Eloqua, partners and other organizations from within the familiar Topliners community.

BuiltWith Technology Profiler is a technology tracking platform that is designed to provide intelligence and analysis related to a company’s technology use.

Salesforce.com recently issued a set of release notes that offer a detailed preview into the company's planned Spring 2013 update for its CRM platform.

According to the release notes posted to the Salesforce.com web site, the company's Spring '13 update will include scores of new capabilities across a number of platform components. These include previously unannounced upgrades as well as planned changes already announced during the second half of 2012.

At a DemandCon event session earlier this month, Jon Russo, Founder and CEO of B2B Fusion Group, asked a room full of marketers how many were still using Excel spreadsheets to track their performance. About 90% of them raised their hands.

Russo said he wasn't surprised at the show of hands. But he is definitely concerned about it.

"This is risky business for a marketing organization," he said. "Executives are now accustomed to seeing metrics integrated with tools like Salesforce. When they see these reports dumped onto spreadsheets, they're going to question the validity of the data."

While BtoB organizations migrate toward the practice of Revenue Performance Management (RPM), the concept is still in its infancy and requires greater sales and marketing alignment to be optimally effective, according to new Gleanster Research.

Although marketing automation technology adopters utilize features like lead scoring, nurturing, and CRM integration, the Gleanster report, found that these tactics fail to address fundamental areas of RPM: connectivity, and dashboards and analytics.

While BtoB organizations migrate toward the practice of Revenue Performance Management (RPM), the concept is still in its infancy and requires greater sales and marketing alignment to be optimally effective, according to new Gleanster Research.

Although marketing automation technology adopters utilize features like lead scoring, nurturing, and CRM integration, the Gleanster report, found that these tactics fail to address fundamental areas of RPM: connectivity, and dashboards and analytics.