Archive for the ‘Productivity’ Category

Presentation: Empower Mobile Salesforce.com Users to Close More Deals

Friday, July 9th, 2010 | located in Productivity, Salesforce | No Comments »

Yesterday we co-hosted a webinar with the folks from Echosign and the slides as well as the audio is now available in case you missed it live.

Webinar: Using Ribbit and EchoSign to increase salesforce productivity

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 | located in Events, Productivity, Tips and Tricks | 3 Comments »

Ribbit is partnering with EchoSign and CustomerThink to provide a free webinar taking place on July 8th that will highlight how on-the-go sales reps can boost productivity. Spend your time selling, not filing paperwork.

Live demonstrations will show how reps can:

• Call in meeting notes and sales updates from the field instead of typing into Salesforce.com
• Get out of “voicemail hell” with voice-to-text call transcriptions
• Use voice integration with Chatter, a new collaboration tool from Salesforce.com
• Send contracts from Salesforce.com to increase sales productivity and…
• Enable customers to sign contracts electronically from smart phones, to shorten the contract signing process.

While demand may be picking up, competition will continue to be intense. Join us for one hour to learn how to free up more sales time to drive revenue, not busy work.

We hope you will join us for this webinar. Registration is free.

Article: Destination CRM highlights enterprise use of Ribbit

Monday, May 17th, 2010 | located in Articles and Media Mentions, Productivity | No Comments »

Adam Boretz, from Speech Technology magazine, digs into Ribbit’s speech technology and highlights two enterprise clients benefiting from their use of Ribbit for Salesforce - Delta Dental and Selling Power.

—–

(1) Delta Dental of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Tennessee: Adam interviewed Kevin Edelman, CRM product solutions administrator who said, ”I saw [Ribbit] at the [Dreamforce 2007] tradeshow and saw a value in [Ribbit for Salesforce], where sales reps could leave themselves messages and record their activities that way.”

Since then, Edelman has seen the company evolve. He successfully implemented Ribbit for Salesforce at Delta Dental, where about 40 sales reps use it mostly to receive transcripts of their voicemail messages on their mobile phones and to record memos and email drafts via voice. He estimates that Delta uses the technology to process 500 to 700 messages per month.

“I think [Ribbit] is very aggressive in coming together with some really great things,” he says. “They’ve been adding a lot of different functionalities over the last year and a half…. It was good before, but now it’s even better.”

Edelman says reaction to Ribbit has been positive at Delta, but admits that adoption has been slower than anticipated — with some older, less-tech-savvy salespeople resisting the new technology. Nonetheless, he remains very positive and suggests that enterprises start small when deploying Ribbit.

“Roll it out division by division,” he says. “Have a plan for continuous education…. Find a power user in each division so they can then take over the championship of that application.”

Recently, Edelman and Delta expanded their use of Ribbit, tying office voicemail to Ribbit for Salesforce — something he calls a big success. “The sales staff has a single point of entry for all their voicemail,” he says. “Everything gets recorded. Everything gets reported. It has improved our response time on critical issues and I have some managers that will swear by it.”

—–

(2) Selling Power, a publication currently read by more than 420,000 sales leaders and producer of the biannual Sales Leadership Conference series. Adam spoke with Marcel Sendejo, a regional manager who works remotely from Austin, Texas, and uses the solution when he is on the road to dictate notes into Salesforce and to keep up with voicemail messages. Like Edelman, Sendejo learned about Ribbit at Dreamforce and has had a relationship with the company ever since.

“It’s just an organization tool that I pretty much can’t live without now,” he says, adding that he will walk out of a meeting and begin dictating notes immediately. “It helps me to be efficient. It helps me to be very organized.”

Sendejo says Ribbit prevents him from having to log on to Salesforce and play catch-up after a long day on the road and allows his supervisors to keep tabs on his accounts without phone calls or additional meetings.

“The main thing [is] the convenience,” he says. “The transcription is ideal. It’s just a huge time saver…. I love the dictation aspect. The big story for me [is] time savings. And not having to do administrative work to keep everybody else in the loop.”

—–

Nice words from Salesforce.com:

Scott Holden, director of product marketing, and Al Falcione, senior director of product marketing, are also impressed with what they’ve seen from Ribbit. ”It’s a pretty amazing solution,” Falcione says. Holden agrees, noting that Ribbit is one of the most highly rated applications by customers using Salesforce’s app exchange.

“If you look at just the ratings that the Ribbit application gets, it averages a 4.7 out of 5,” he says. “And everything people say is really sort of game-changing about how they interact with the telephone and their voicemail and how they attach those voicemail and texts inside Salesforce.”

Road Warriors Work Best in the Cloud

Monday, April 19th, 2010 | located in Productivity, SME Trends | No Comments »

Laptop? Check. iPhone or Blackberry? Check. 3G/4G card? Check.

Most sales professionals already have everything they need to stay productive on the road, according to David Taber, CRM consultant and author of Salesforce.com Secrets of Success. In a recent article penned for CIO magazine, Taber makes a strong case for cloud-based CRM versus remote-desktop solutions and smart phones with CRM clients over laptops. Taber also weighs in on the iPad and gives it the thumbs down.

Read all about it here: CRM for Road Warriors: Phone or Laptop?

Improving Lead Management: Insights from B2B Marketing University

Monday, April 12th, 2010 | located in Productivity, Tips and Tricks | No Comments »

Did you know that something like 70% of B2B leads don’t get followed up?  I heard this surprising statistic last week at a B2B Marketing University conference, an event addressing new processes, tools, and staffing strategies to improve marketing and sales activities. The statistic, which reflected results from a B2B survey highlighted at the conference, was so surprising because every sales and marketing organization I’ve ever worked with seems to be working overtime to gather and follow up on leads.

The conference offered these valuable insights as well:

• Buyer behavior is changing dramatically as more product information becomes available online. Prospective buyers are using the Web to create a short list of product companies, and contacting sellers directly (instead of the traditional sales model of companies contacting and nurturing buyers).
• The Internet has altered the types of media buyers use to gather purchasing information. Buyers using print media, for example, to gather information has declined 10-25% while buyer using blogs, white papers, and word-of-mouth has increased over the past few years. This implies that marketers need to shift their media buying to better align with the changes in information gathering.
• Marketing’s role needs to evolve from “batch and blast” (emails) to “lead nurturing” (delivering leads to sales when prospects are close to making a buying decision). This means emphasizing lead quality over quantity, properly qualifying opportunities, and giving buyers the right information for each stage of the decision making process.
• The sales team needs to contribute more to the lead/opportunity management process by providing ongoing, accurate insight and detail about the buyer that can be captured and shared across the sales team (using CRM and business mobility tools, for example). Better insight into the buyer’s decision-making process will give the sales team the support they need to close deals.
• Marketing automation innovations—including content management, lead scoring analytics, sales lead insight tools, campaign management, web analytics, and closed-loop analytics—can be used to more accurately target potential buyers with educational content appropriate to each stage in the decision-making process.

The conference ended with a panel discussion of sales professionals from companies that had revamped their lead management processes. My favorite takeaways from this discussion included:

• Most of the work in improving lead management happens outside of software.
• Implementing changes in phases is best. As one panelist put it: “Trying to fix everything at once is like trying to boil the ocean.”
• Improving the lead management process is well worth the effort. Panelists cited increases in sales revenue of 15-30%.

My Favorite CRM App (next to Ribbit for Salesforce, of course)

Thursday, April 1st, 2010 | located in Productivity | No Comments »

I like streamlining and making information available when I need it—especially when it comes to sales processes and tools.  Just as Ribbit for Salesforce unifies and automates voicemail, SMS text, and Salesforce, I find Box.net for Salesforce helps streamline communication between sales and marketing by putting relevant content at my fingertips. Gone are the days of FTP or email attachment size restrictions and time-consuming downloads. I can now send documents and files via an embedded link right inside my email messages sent from Salesforce.

When I’m on the road, I can access my Box.net account from my mobile phone to send email messages with attachments and track when shared files are downloaded. Additionally, I can track version history and conduct full text searches of all of my stored files as needed. Box.net improves my collaboration with remote team members and clients by allowing me to access files anywhere, anytime. To further enhance communications, I can also use eFax and EchSign to send contracts requiring approval and signatures.

Check out Ribbit for Salesforce’s New Release

Monday, February 8th, 2010 | located in Features, Productivity, Salesforce | No Comments »

In response to customer feedback, we’ve completely rebuilt our Ribbit for Salesforce productivity tool with advanced features for linking all your critical sales tools— voice communications, email, SMS, CRM, and voice-to-text transcription —so you can work less and sell more.  Upgrading is free—get all the new features for the same price!

Here are just some of the new features in Ribbit for Salesforce designed to make you even more responsive and productive:

• Schedule SMS reminders for tasks and events right from Salesforce
• Reply via SMS in Salesforce
• Answer incoming mobile calls on your home, office, or web phone using intelligent call routing
• Easily attach voice communications to customer records in Salesforce
• Talk to create new customer records or kick-off workflow in Salesforce
• Delete multiple messages, manage settings, and load pages faster with the new and improved user interface
• Use Ribbit with Salesforce Mobile on your iPhone or Blackberry

Sign-up for a FREE trial or test drive on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.

Starting April 30th we’ll be migrating our development efforts to the new version, so don’t wait to upgrade.

Why hasn’t Will Stacy checked his voicemail in nine months?

Monday, January 25th, 2010 | located in Productivity, Success Stories | No Comments »

Santander’s Director of Marketing has some big news to share with the world. (No, not that kind of news, but exciting nonetheless.)

Watch this YouTube video to find out how Ribbit for Salesforce is saving Santander’s team of 100 sales reps up to fifty hours per day—and helping the company realize a 10:1 return on its investment. “Just the fact that we get an email with our [voice messages] transcribed as text every time we get a voicemail is huge,” says Stacy. “We love it.”

Sales 2.0: Boosting Rep Productivity with the Best New Web Technologies

Monday, November 30th, 2009 | located in Events, Productivity | No Comments »

Do you wish you had a crystal ball so you could see how companies will sell successfully next year–or in 5 years? During the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco - folks from Salesforce CRM, Jigsaw, Radian6, Genius, and our own Greg Goldfarb from Ribbit - got together and shared how each of our products and services (individually, and collectively) can help shape the future of corporate sales.

Webinar - “Anytime, Anywhere” Mobile Sales Productivity

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 | located in Events, Productivity | No Comments »

Join Ribbit for Salesforce and Model Metrics for a webinar on August 4th at 10 am PST about two great products to help make your mobile sales team more effective while on the road.

This webinar will highlight Ribbit for Salesforce and Model Metrics’ “2GO” product, and is free to attend.

Register here.