Alyce, an AI-powered gifting platform, has launched Swag Select^TM, a new solution designed to help marketers personalize gifts to potential clients and keep track of them during delivery, avoiding undelivered packages and no visibility into their impact.

With the new addition to the Alyce platform, customers will be equipped to expand the core value of Alyce across the customer journey, according to the company. Swag Select is designed to streamline gifting by enabling users to:

• Track a package by individual, allowing senders to measure and attribute the influence of each mailer on pipeline; and
• Send premium swag items from the Alyce catalog and third-party swag suppliers in a customer marketplace.

{loadpostion GIAA} “The current state of the world is fundamentally forcing companies to rethink sales and marketing right now and the entire approach they are taking,” said Greg Segall, CEO of Alyce in a statement. “That includes how companies manage swag, which has been broken for a long time. Swag Select is an extension of the Alyce platform that helps companies create stronger personal bonds with everyone they do business with, while helping businesses save time, money and the environment.”

Alyce found that companies spend an average of $185,000 on swag per year, with no real way of gauging ROI. With Swag Select^TM, every item of swag delivered is tracked to a specific individual, so companies can measure and attribute the influence the selected swag has on a company’s pipeline and customer base.

“As the digital space becomes more saturated than ever before, marketers are looking to break through the clutter while ensuring the highest impact across every program,” said Blake Grubbs, Senior Manager, Product Marketing at Alyce. “Swag Select gives full transparency into the ROI of swag, allowing marketers to measure and report on swag across different use cases, which was never before possible.”

As we enter a new decade, emerging trends in sales technology are creating new opportunities for businesses that embrace them. We’re seeing tremendous growth and evolution in areas like virtual reality (VR), speech recognition and new applications of concepts like artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of things (IoT). Below are three ways businesses can harness these trends in sales tech to move the needle in 2020 and beyond.

The addition of artificial intelligence (AI) to the traditional marketing ecosystem can help businesses leverage real-time customer interactions to automate routine tasks and personalize responses to convert more leads. Many tools in the marketing tech stack — including marketing automation, customer relationship management systems and content management platforms — incorporate AI to some degree already, and it is becoming more pervasive.

B2B marketers react to the thought of artificial intelligence (AI) in different ways, said Pam Didner of Relentless Pursuit LLC. Pessimists may envision dystopian universes as portrayed in the Terminator, Blade Runner or The Matrix; optimists may picture R2D2 or Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Whichever attitude marketers take, “AI is not a fad. It’s here to stay,” declared Didner in her keynote address, How AI Is Already Impacting Every Stage of Buyer Engagement, which explored how B2B marketers currently use AI and looked ahead to the technology’s future.

The B2B buyer’s journey is a nonlinear process. But sellers still track deals using discrete stages in a linear sales process. This disconnect compromises pipeline analytics and sales forecasts, leaving sales managers without good information to identify risk in their sellers’ deals. 

Demandbase is adding the Dynamic Audiences feature to its flagship ABM Platform, enabling B2B marketers to further automate their advertising and marketing campaigns. Powered by Artificial Intelligence, Dynamic Audiences is designed to automate the targeting of specific accounts with specific messages based on sales stage, intent, website engagement and other buyer data.

Traditionally, CRM solutions have been unreliable for sales forecasting. Companies have dealt with inaccuracies and blamed their bad data. However, things are starting to change thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and predictive analytics. According to Salesforce, only a quarter of companies use predictive analytics. Of those using it, 86% have already seen a positive return. Predictive analytics can be brought to the CRM to create more accurate sales forecasts and provide actionable insights for reps, partners and managers.

MRP Prelytix is an ABM Platform designed to power global enterprise programs. The technology and services aim to help identify the needs and buyer's journey stage of each target account and apply real-time AI to trigger orchestrations across seven channels, in 20 languages.

Salesforce has unveiled its Einstein Search feature, designed to solve the complexities of CRM search by making them more intelligent, less overwhelming and more personal and effective for sales and marketing teams.

DealSignal, a B2B on-demand contact data platform, revealed a CRM Data Health™ module integration for Salesforce, designed to refresh incomplete or outdated leads, contacts and accounts in an effort to tackle CRM data decay with accurate data that is GDPR-compliant.