Televerde, the demand generation and sales acceleration solutions provider, unveiled Morag Lucey as the company’s new CEO. Lucey succeeds Jim Hooker, who has led Televerde as its CEO since 1996 and will be retiring, according to the company.

InsideSales.com, a sales acceleration platform, announced it has added direct mail capabilities to its Predictive PowerDialer offering. The features position sales reps to send personalized cards and notes to better reach prospective customers and boost engagement.

LiveHive launched updates to its sales acceleration platform designed to provide users a holistic view of their sales teams’ processes, activities and opportunities throughout the sales lifecycle.

QuotaFactory launched its prospect relationship management (PRM) platform for B2B sales teams, which is designed for sourcing contacts and managing prospecting plans. It positions users to identify ideal customer profiles and develop more accurate phone and email databases.

LiveHive, a sales acceleration company, launched a group email tool for its sales acceleration platform designed to boost sales efficiency. The company also announced access to more in-depth sales productivity metrics.

With the combination of group email capabilities and sales analytics, users are positioned to:

• Visualize all sales rep activities and customer engagement, so sales leaders can quickly see and automate best practices for their team;
• Send personalized emails to hundreds of prospects at the same time, leveraging customizable email templates with group email scheduling to optimize response rates; and
• Receive real-time buyer insights through LiveHive’s ‘LiveFeed’ about how each prospect engages with emails and sales content for the most complete customer picture.

“Sales leaders are under a lot of pressure to rapidly generate and qualify leads. This requires better sales processes to build the most effective and productive sales teams and respond to today’s more informed buyers,” said Suresh Balasubramanian, CEO of LiveHive. “LiveHive’s group email automation extends the power of our deep content engagement analytics and gives organizations visibility into sales reps’ activities, so they can quickly identify what approaches are most successful.”

By Suresh Balasubramanian, LiveHive

Without synchronization between sales and marketing, the business suffers. According to Aberdeen Group, the lack of integration of sales intelligence with sales and marketing systems causes the biggest gap between top sales performers and under-achievers. However, fewer than one out of 10 B2B companies report good alignment between their sales and marketing organizations, SiriusDecisions research shows.

Weak processes between sales and marketing have made it challenging for sales and marketing to work together successfully. While delivering immense value, existing CRM and marketing automation systems don’t deliver a complete buyer picture for the organization. Furthermore, this data has not been easily shared across departments.

WebReply's cloud-based sales acceleration platform is designed to help sales teams create segments, leverage marketing-approved content and gain insights on how to effectively nurture prospects through the sales funnel.

LiveHive, a sales acceleration platform provider, has released new integrations with several cloud services, including Egnyte, Box, Dropbox and OneDrive. The integrations position sales teams to track prospect engagement with any content stored in these file management services.

The integrations are also designed to give sales reps access to the latest content approved by the marketing team, and provide real-time visibility into the buyer's journey.

By Cari Baldwin, Co-Founder & Partner, Bluebird Strategies

A recent study estimates that more than 70% of leads generated by marketing are never followed up by sales.

By Cari Baldwin, Co-Founder & Partner, Bluebird Strategies

A recent study estimates that more than 70% of leads generated by marketing are never followed up by sales.