Exclusives

"We saw that there was a lack of kindness, a lack of empathy ... and we thought it would be nice if we could use technology to do something about it," said A Better World President MarySue Hansell. "

"CRM was originally created for the managers and bosses to report on the pipeline, and it was sold as a value proposition to the manager," noted Nutshell CTO Andy Fowler. "What's changing now is that CRM is becoming much more about supporting the rep -- giving them the tools they need to improve the...

"If there's anything true about B2B service, you have to do it in the context of the customers themselves in order to be successful. That's our philosophy," said CloudCraze EVP Andrew Witherspoon. "What is the purpose of CRM and marketing? It's to reach out, find and engage prospects, and to move th...

Lexi Palmer is CEO of EquiSeq, a biotech firm that does genetic testing of horses. Palmer was brought on as CEO by the company's founder, genetic researcher Paul Szauter, in 2015. "I was just finishing up my degree in interpersonal communications, and he told me about the company he'd started," Palm...

Making sales account-based is "the ability to take an account and use a holistic approach when dealing with it," said Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach. "You use a combination of marketing and sales to get to that account," he continued. "It's giving a name to something people already do, and it creates...

Prior to founding Girls in Tech, Adriana Gascoigne was one of the very few women working at a startup. "I'd look around the room every day and see that there was a huge problem of representation. I knew we needed to change the culture of the company to recruit more women and benefit more women, but ...

Beena Ammanath is VP for data and analytics at GE Digital. She has worked in the data analytics field for more than 20 years and serves as board director at ChickTech, a nonprofit dedicated to recruiting girls and women into the tech workforce and retaining them once they're there. Ammanath was rece...

One of the most noticeable recent trends in CRM is that "there are a lot more companies looking for tools to centralize data," noted Oro CEO Yoav Kutner. "We're seeing multichannel businesses that interact with customers both through a brick-and-mortar and through multiple touchpoints.

Twenty years ago, CRM "was more of an inside-out technology," recalled Sandeep Kadam, director of CRM at Eagle Creek Software Services. "It was about making sales calls more efficient, and giving salespeople all the tools they needed so they could achieve their numbers. From there it has become more...