The Townsend Report

If you have searched for software lately, you may have noticed that the first page of Google is full of listings not from the software companies themselves but instead from software review sites.  Review sites can be handy to find a list of products for a particular segment.  The reviews themselves can also be helpful, although the quality of listings and reviews is mixed. Here are some of the top sites: G2.com Capterra SourceForge Crowdreviews.com Software Advice Technology Advice SaaS Genius GetApp SoftwareSuggest TrustRadius Review sites take pains to ensure that reviews are genuine, but some fake reviews seem to get through. In some cases reviewers are paid for reviews which could affect their authenticity. Software review sites are financed by the companies with paid listings - this is not Consumer Reports.  Paid listings are more prominently featured and can even pop up as ads on the free listing pages of competitors.  Some review sites earn extra revenue by taking your informati

For sales force automation, the best customer relationship management system is the one that makes users successful.  For that to happen, users must adopt the CRM.  It doesn't do much good to have a brilliant design for a system that salespeople do not use. This means that you must measure adoption both in quantity and in quality of usage.  How often does your sales team access CRM? Do they use mobile or desktop clients?  You can determine these from the user logs.  What is the quality of your opportunity data?  Beyond the required fields, how good are your sales team members at filling in details such as lead source, opportunity rating, and other fields?  How fresh is the data?  Do you see estimated close dates in the past?  That would indicate the opportunity has not been updated recently.  Does the opportunity record become more populated as the opportunity progresses?   One of the best ways to encourage adoption of the CRM is to use it as the basis for pipeline calls.  Don'

This is my guest blog post on pavliks.com The number of new features in Microsoft Dynamics 365 is nearly overwhelming! Spring is nearly here, and in April the first wave of the 2022 release of Dynamics 365 will arrive.  The release contains hundreds of new features for Dynamics 365 applications, including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Supply Chain Insights, Human Resources, Commerce, Fraud Protection, Business Central, Connected Spaces, Guides, Remote Assist, Customer Insights, Customer Voice and Microsoft Cloud for Health Care, Financial Services, Sustainability and Nonprofit. The number of new features is nearly overwhelming, the release wave 1 plan is 412 pages long! That is too much to cover in blog post, so we are focusing on Customer Insights, Marketing, Sales, Customer Service and industry cloud solutions. Here are our top picks of the new features: Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Enable AI Suggestions - Enable AI Suggestions