Different businesses have different needs, but you can’t go wrong with strong customer relationship management software. These are the hallmarks of a great CRM. Your business can’t live without a CRM. You need it to track leads, monitor relationship management and maintain your contacts. But, with a bevy of CRM platforms on the market, how do you know which one is right for your business? Different CRMs may have distinctly different features that can narrow down your search, such as the ability to customize the platform to your needs or create a reporting structure that fits your business requirements. We asked 11 entrepreneurs from YEC to share what features they look for the most when selecting a CRM. Here’s what they said. 1. Ease of use“When deciding on a new CRM system, my initial thought is to analyze the user experience. I know that if the design is intuitive and easy to use, my employees will be able to find information quicker, which could result in them reaching out to more clients.” – Syed Balkhi, OptinMonster 2. Integration“The best feature to look for is integration. The software needs to be integratable to your website, phone and email accounts. It might be time to switch if you’re closing fewer deals and losing clients.” – Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance 3. Revenue tracking“When choosing a CRM, I focus on which one is going to give me the most visibility when it comes to my revenue tracking. If I am not able to track my revenue, then the CRM isn’t doing me any good. The more I am able to track my data, the better the CRM is. This is why I typically go with Salesforce or HubSpot CRM, because they support data being the core of your business.” – Sweta Patel, Silicon Valley Startup Marketing 4. Security“A good CRM will gather a great deal of pertinent data on our customers. Some services offer more in-depth features than others, but the one aspect that I always prioritize is security. The most damaging action a business can take is losing the trust of their customers, which is why any sensitive data gathered by CRMs need to be encrypted competently. If there’s a leak, it’s time for us to switch.” – Bryce Welker, CPA Exam Guy 5. Role specificity“There are so many CRMs these days that they have now become role specific. You’re now able to find CRMs specific for PR, real estate, finance and more. Sometimes finding an industry-specific CRM is the way to go, because they already have all the features you would have spent time customizing.” – Jared Atchison, WPForms Share this:The post 11 Features to Look for in a CRM appeared first on Statii News. from Statii News http://news.statii.co.uk/11-features-to-look-for-in-a-crm/ from https://statiicouk.tumblr.com/post/172512921332
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Quit making introductory offers to strangers and start engaging with past customers happy they did business with you. Stores around the country are looking to make more sales and increase revenue, but many are failing. Why is this? While many businesses waste money on ineffective advertising targeting leads that go nowhere, very few are focused on activating what I call your “power base.” Every store has them. Your power base includes large databases of previously sold customers and people who are coming in for service who may have bought products or services elsewhere. Targeting your power base is literally a multi-million-dollar game-changing opportunity, and I will tell you why: Most businesses are spending more time and energy marketing to strangers than the people closest to them. Of course, you want new people to know about your business, but do not put your power base on the backburner. You need to make retaining customers and building loyalty a top priority because every business — no matter the industry — has a better chance of selling to an existing customer than a new prospect. Here’s how to mine the gold out of your power base: Get a good CRMYou have to stay organized to stay in contact with customers. Many stores have invested in CRM, but the staff doesn’t use it. I know most CRM’s are a pain, but not using a CRM is a bigger pain. Buy the easiest CRM software solution you can find for your staff and commit to actually using it. The ability to bring up customer information at a moment’s notice is a game-changer. If you don’t use one, you will never be able to use targeted, individualized offers for people because you won’t know anything about them. Stay in communication with past buyers.More engagement, with a good strategy in place, will equal more sales. You can’t be passive and just hope people will come back. You must have your staff engage your customers with new, and better, buying opportunities. With a good CRM in place, you can cross-reference the data with any new incentives you have on specific products to create more targeted prospects. Don’t limit service to your service department.How many customers come through for some service or repair issue that could be potential buyers if presented with a good offer? Few businesses have a good strategy in place to engage service customers to upgrade their products or services. Remember that specific is better than generic. You must have the right offers to the right people, communicated at the right times, with individualized, value-added opportunities to upgrade their product or service. Share this:The post You’ll Find the Best Leads in That CRM Software Nobody Is Really Using appeared first on Statii News. from Statii News http://news.statii.co.uk/youll-find-the-best-leads-in-that-crm-software-nobody-is-really-using/ from https://statiicouk.tumblr.com/post/172512498207 As you explain cloud – and your latest cloud decisions – to others in the organization, you’ll want some data points for contextCIOs don’t want to debate cloud adoption any more: They want to talk cloud optimization, as Jeff Budge, VP at OneNeck IT Solutions, recently noted. Analyst outlooks and research reports back this up, showing rapid growth for public cloud and hybrid cloud in the months and years ahead. As you explain cloud – and your own cloud decisions – to others in the organization, you’ll want some data points for context. So we’ve highlighted a few studies that help tell the public and hybrid cloud story for 2018 and answer some relevant questions: Where does cloud land on a CIO’s priorities list? Is it living up to its cost-savings promise? How much work is shifting to the public cloud? Dig in for more. 2018 global cloud market: $178 billion (Forrester): According to Forrester’s cloud predictions, the global public cloud market will jump from $146 billion in 2017 to $178 billion in 2018. Beyond this year, Forrester predicts it will continue to grow at a 22 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Also noteworthy according to the Forrester report:
Nearly 80 percent of companies studied plan to have more than 10 percent of their workloads in public-cloud platforms in three years, according to McKinsey’s 2017 global cloud cybersecurity research. “Just 40 percent of the companies we studied have more than 10 percent of their workloads on public-cloud platforms; in contrast 80 percent plan to have more than 10 percent of their workloads in public-cloud platforms in three years or plan to double their cloud penetration,” the report states. Who’s investing the most in cloud? Manufacturing. Where will the most spending occur? IDC breaks down investment by industry and region in its public cloud spending forecast for 2018. “The industries that are forecast to spend the most on public cloud services in 2018 are discrete manufacturing ($19.7 billion), professional services ($18.1 billion), and banking ($16.7 billion). The process manufacturing and retail industries are also expected to spend more than $10 billion each on public cloud services in 2018,” notes IDC. IDC also predicts that the United States will be the leading country in cloud spending, accounting for $97 billion – more than 60 percent of global spending. Cloud rates third on CIOs’ investment lists: Where does cloud fall in CIOs’ overall IT investment priorities for this year? The 2018 State of the CIO survey results from CIO.com list cloud computing as ranking third (28 percent), behind enterprise applications (35 percent), and data/business analytics (33 percent). IT hardware growth gets new life thanks to hybrid cloud: What does all this cloud spending mean for on-premises data centers? According to Morgan Stanley, “Several catalysts are converging to give IT hardware a second life – and drive double-digit earnings growth in 2018,” writes Katy L. Huberty, Head of North American Technology Hardware Equity Research. “One of the biggest detractors of growth hasn’t been the actual migration of computing to cloud, but rather decision-making around the cloud. For the last few years, enterprises have been putting IT hardware spending on hold while they grapple with decisions around how, when, and how much of their workloads to move to the cloud. While companies plan to migrate a larger share of their workloads to the cloud, they aren’t abandoning on-premises computing. Instead, many are adopting a hybrid IT model in which applications move between a public cloud and their own internal data centers.” Article Credit: Enterprisers Project Share this:The post Public cloud: 8 stats to see appeared first on Statii News. from Statii News http://news.statii.co.uk/public-cloud-8-stats-to-see/ from https://statiicouk.tumblr.com/post/172476997512 The Windows era at Microsoft, long in eclipse, is officially history. Microsoft said on Tuesday that it was splitting up its Windows engineering team and that the leader of its Windows business was leaving. The moves, analysts said, were part of a reorganization intended to accelerate Microsoft’s emphasis on newer, faster-growing businesses like cloud computing and data-fueled artificial intelligence. That shift, they noted, has been underway since Satya Nadella became chief executive in 2014. In an email to employees, Mr. Nadella cited the central role of cloud computing and the advances in artificial intelligence — and their potential across all the company’s products. The organizational overhaul, Mr. Nadella wrote, “enables us to step up to this opportunity.” Terry Myerson, 45, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Windows and devices group, will be departing. In a separate email to employees, Mr. Myerson said that he supported the company’s evolution under Mr. Nadella. “I believe in it, and these changes are great for Microsoft,” wrote Mr. Myerson, who worked for the company for 21 years. The post Microsoft Reorganizes to Fuel Cloud and A.I. Businesses appeared first on Statii News. from Statii News http://news.statii.co.uk/microsoft-reorganizes-to-fuel-cloud-and-a-i-businesses/ from https://statiicouk.tumblr.com/post/172476505327 Individual data elements may be inert, but when different elements are combined together, they can create a toxic mix. As a result, should businesses be treating data like dangerous chemicals? Big breaches and data leaks occur with disappointing frequency. We often see incidents happen (which may or not be breaches) whereby millions of records fall into the wrong hands or are misused. But when large swathes of personal information are leaked so regularly, people often respond with apathy because they don’t see the personal impact of these breaches. If a fraudster takes out a mortgage application using someone else’s details, it is nearly impossible to pin down where those details originated. So, it is treated like any other fraud quickly forgotten. In contrast, people have reacted to the Cambridge Analytica scandal with outrage across all parts of the globe. What makes this situation different? For many years, advertisers and marketers have been working to try and understand ‘who’ their customers are. Big data has allowed information to be collected and analysed at scale. Many companies with access to a dataset of habits or personality traits will use it to help improve their products and offerings. Video streaming sites can recommend shows and movies that they think you’d be interested in based on both your own viewing history, and what others with similar interests have watched. Shopping advertisers use similar algorithms to help predict buying patterns. For example, purchasing a pair of shoes will often lead to shoe polish recommendations. While not perfect, these legitimate uses mostly work well for both sides. They help the retailer upsell or keep the viewer glued to a site for longer, and the consumer enjoys the convenience of “hand-picked” recommendations. When data manipulates youHowever, when huge amounts of data on individuals are aggregated into one place, it becomes possible to use that data to manipulate the individual. In her 2013 paper, Analyzing the Chemistry of Data, Wendy Nather asked whether data should be treated like dangerous chemicals. Individual data elements may be inert, but when combined, they can create a toxic mix. The post What the Cambridge Analytica scandal means for big data appeared first on Statii News. from Statii News http://news.statii.co.uk/what-the-cambridge-analytica-scandal-means-for-big-data/ from https://statiicouk.tumblr.com/post/172475937112
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Privacy & Cookies Policy Go to Source The post Digital doping: Are big data, AI and virtual reality creating an uneven playing field? appeared first on Statii News. from Statii News http://news.statii.co.uk/digital-doping-are-big-data-ai-and-virtual-reality-creating-an-uneven-playing-field/ from https://statiicouk.tumblr.com/post/172475602802 Isn’t technology wonderful? At Purdue University, the same IT infrastructure that enables us to manage student assignments and grades, operate residential and dining facilities, and support a leading community of scientific researchers produces as a byproduct a massive amount of fascinating information. We know where each student is anytime — which is virtually all the time — their mobile devices are connected to our Wi-Fi network. When they enter their dorm, or dining court, or recreational facility, they swipe in, and a machine captures the time and place. Whether they’re in class or in their rooms, a machine knows when they’re online and where they’re going while there. Forget that old ominous line, “We know where you live.” These days it’s, “We know where you are.” University people are curious by nature, and much of today’s “Big Data” era was born at our school. So it’s only natural that we would want to delve into this treasure trove of information in search of illuminating patterns — especially those that might prove helpful to those same students, whose academic success is the heart of our mission. Does the data say that too many days away from campus, or too many absences from class, or too much in-class browsing of websites unrelated to the course, or too few visits to the gym, correlates with lower grades? Does eating meals with the same people day after day appear to help scholastic performance? If so, shouldn’t we bring this to the students’ attention, for their own good? For the past two years, virtually every entering Purdue freshman (there is an opt-out option that few exercise) has been given a mobile application through which the university sends them personalized information about ways to improve their chances of academic success. So far, the information employed and the ways we’re using it have not seemed at all problematic. “Is that combination of courses you chose a historically tough one? Here’s where you can find a tutor.” “Did you know that students who wait as long as you did to sign up for courses are more likely to struggle? The registrar’s office opens at 8 a.m. tomorrow.” But that’s today. With the best of motives, schools like ours will feel the urge to use more and more personal data, through more and more insistent tactics, all in the “best interest of the students.” Share this:The post Are We Letting Big Data Know Too Much? appeared first on Statii News. from Statii News http://news.statii.co.uk/are-we-letting-big-data-know-too-much/ from https://statiicouk.tumblr.com/post/172474855342 PARIS — France’s Emmanuel Macron knows his country is not about to develop a local equivalent of Google or Facebook to power the development of artificial intelligence. But in a national AI strategy to be unveiled this week, the French president will argue that France has other assets to fuel innovation: its foreign brain trust, huge troves of state-owned data and links to European research institutes to share and leverage knowledge, according to French officials. Macron’s aim is nothing less than to drag his country into the age of AI and erase 30 years of underperformance on innovation. “We missed all the big technological revolutions of recent years, but France has a card to play in the field of artificial intelligence,” said an aide to the president who asked not to be named. “Either we seize the chance now, or we watch another wave pass us by.” In a briefing with journalists ahead of the strategy’s unveiling Thursday, two advisers to Macron conceded that France was starting from way behind China and the United States on AI, and their fiscal-deficit-challenged state would not be able to tap billions of euros in taxpayer money. Venture capital remains far more limited in France than in the U.S., and there are no plans to overhaul tax rules to draw in investors. Another key aspect of Macron’s plan is to lure French AI researchers, many of whom occupy top positions in Silicon Valley, back to France. Yet aides argued that Paris, which has just brought its budget deficit under a European Union threshold, would still muster a “considerable” financial effort. The total earmarked for AI research in France’s next budget would exceed, for example, the amount that Finland is investing, they said, without specifying a figure. Finland plans to spend about €200 million over the next four years. Macron’s idea, the aides said, was to leverage the cash to develop sector-specific AI technology in areas where France has an edge thanks to its giant, state-run agencies and vast troves of centrally collected public and private data. Share this:The post Macron aims to drag France into the age of artificial intelligence appeared first on Statii News. from Statii News http://news.statii.co.uk/macron-aims-to-drag-france-into-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence/ from https://statiicouk.tumblr.com/post/172443643287 Big technology companies get much of the blame when technology behaves badly. But these same companies, says Partnership on AI executive director Terah Lyons, could also be part of the solution in making sure future AI technology works better for the world. Speaking at MIT Technology Review’s annual EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco, Lyons presented the Partnership on AI’s four-point mission statement and eight tenets that the organization calls its guiding principles. Those tenets include working to protect the privacy and security of individuals, striving to respect the interests of all parties that may be affected by AI advances, helping keep AI researchers socially responsible, ensuring that AI research and technology is robust and safe, and creating a culture of cooperation, trust, and openness among AI scientists to help achieve these goals. The Partnership on AI hopes that these principles will be adopted by the wider technology community. Six companies—Amazon, Apple, IBM, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft—started Partnership on AI in 2016 with the belief that a lot of the issues in AI are too complex to handle alone. The organization is now up to 54 member institutes that range from technology companies like eBay and Intel to nonprofit groups like the ACLU and Amnesty International. Lyons announced the Partnership on AI’s first three working groups, which are dedicated to fair, transparent, and accountable AI; safety-critical AI; and AI, labor, and the economy. Each group will have a for-profit and nonprofit chair and aim to share its results as widely as possible. Lyons says these groups will be like a “union of concerned scientists.” “A big part of this is on us to really achieve inclusivity,” she says. Tess Posner, the executive director of AI4ALL, a nonprofit that runs summer programs teaching AI to students from underrepresented groups, showed why training a diverse group for the next generation of AI workers is essential. Currently, only 13 percent of AI companies have female CEOs, and less than 3 percent of tenure-track engineering faculty in the US are black. Yet an inclusive workforce may have more ideas and can spot problems with systems before they happen, and diversity can improve the bottom line. Posner pointed out a recent Intel report saying diversity could add $500 billion to the US economy. Share this:The post For better AI, diversify the people building it appeared first on Statii News. from Statii News http://news.statii.co.uk/for-better-ai-diversify-the-people-building-it/ from https://statiicouk.tumblr.com/post/172443090267 Artificial-intelligence tool that has digested nearly every reaction ever performed could transform chemistry. Chemists have a new lab assistant: artificial intelligence. Researchers have developed a ‘deep learning’ computer program that produces blueprints for the sequences of reactions needed to create small organic molecules, such as drug compounds. The pathways that the tool suggests look just as good on paper as those devised by human chemists. The tool, described in Nature on 28 March1, is not the first software to wield artificial intelligence (AI) instead of human skill and intuition. Yet chemists hail the development as a milestone, saying that it could speed up the process of drug discovery and make organic chemistry more efficient. “What we have seen here is that this kind of artificial intelligence can capture this expert knowledge,” says Pablo Carbonell, who designs synthesis-predicting tools at the University of Manchester, UK, and was not involved in the work. He describes the effort as “a landmark paper”. Chemists have conventionally scoured lists of reactions recorded by others, and drawn on their own intuition to work out a step-by-step pathway to make a particular compound. They usually work backwards, starting with the molecule they want to create and then analysing which readily available reagents and sequences of reactions could be used to synthesize it — a process known as retrosynthesis, which can take hours or even days of planning. Self-teaching system The new AI tool, developed by Marwin Segler, an organic chemist and artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of Münster in Germany, and his colleagues, uses deep-learning neural networks to imbibe essentially all known single-step organic-chemistry reactions — about 12.4 million of them. This enables it to predict the chemical reactions that can be used in any single step. The tool repeatedly applies these neural networks in planning a multi-step synthesis, deconstructing the desired molecule until it ends up with the available starting reagents. Share this:The post Need to make a molecule? Ask this AI for instructions appeared first on Statii News. from Statii News http://news.statii.co.uk/need-to-make-a-molecule-ask-this-ai-for-instructions/ from https://statiicouk.tumblr.com/post/172442631582 |