No good salesperson blames the buyer for poor results, but that doesn’t mean buyers aren’t sometimes a problem. In fact, this study from Zip found that 79% of accounting and finance professionals said their company has challenges in its B2B purchasing process. One reason: 48% say their firm requires at least six cross-functional approvals for a new software or vendor purchase.
This GoodFirms survey focuses on digital transformation projects. It found that 78.6% of executives say they’ve already digitized their business processes and most of the rest are working on it. In an interesting distinction, improved customer experience was the top benefit cited while better marketing ranked last.
Data access vendor Hightouch has released Personalization API, which provides real-time access to cloud databases. Don’t get too excited: the data will only be as current as the underlying data warehouse, which is rarely itself updated in real time. And, as the company notes in a very interesting accompanying blog post, the data is actually loaded into an intermediate “distributed, multi-region data store”, not read from the warehouse directly.
Salesforce kicked off its big Connections conference yesterday, and if you’re surprised the focus was on generative AI, you haven’t been paying attention. Still, the focus this time was on marketing applications that draw on Salesforce CDP data, so it’s right up our alley. They also announced direct access to Google BigQuery data, ticking the “zero-copy” box as well.