[ 2 -3 min read ] Dallas, TX, March 25th, 2021 – AI-for-sales company Cien.ai expands its advisory board and introduces a new API to fix dirty CRM data. Cien Inc., a fast-growing provider of AI-driven sales performance solutions, today announced the addition of Jim McGuire to its board of advisors. Mr. McGuire is a […]

[ 2 -3 min read ] Dallas, TX, December 15th, 2020 – AI-for-sales company Cien.ai expands its advisory board, and introduces new AI-Driven Assessment for B2B sales teams.   Cien Inc., a fast-growing provider of AI-driven sales performance solutions, today announced the addition of Kelly Breslin Wright to its board of advisors. AI-for-sales company Cien.ai […]

  Several years ago, in my last position as a major account executive, my brand new first-line sales manager asked me to sit down with him so he could give me my new quota for the year. I told him that I did not care what quota number he assigned to me and that the quota […]

Firms can earn big returns by effectively measuring each step in the sales and marketing process Do you hear your Sales leaders complain to Marketing that their teams are not getting enough high-quality leads?  Are the Marketing folks pointing to the high volume of leads that fit the Ideal Customer Profile criteria and have shown […]

Why do we accept 60% quota attainment? It seems every day I see another news story read or an article discussing the fact that somewhere between 40% and 50% of B2B sales reps in the US fail to attain their quota numbers. Why is that? There is a plethora of tools and applications available to […]

Think back to the last board meeting you attended that addressed sales. The directors likely looked at the sales numbers, compared them to plan, and probably noticed some room for improvement.   But for board members of early-stage or high-growth companies, a higher-intensity focus on sales is necessary since these organizations may not have the […]

A few days ago, I had a conversation with a member of our Board.  As a Director who sits on several high tech start up boards, she has attended more than her share of Board reviews. Her comments could be summarized in saying that Sales Leaders who are not making their numbers all say the […]

Dallas, TX, November 20th, 2019 – Cien Inc., a leading provider of AI-powered sales performance solutions, today announced the launch of its new Hidden Revenue Assessment.   Cien’s Hidden Revenue Assessment applies over 100+ AI models to a company’s CRM data to reveal the factors that are preventing their teams from achieving their sales quotas. […]

While selling has never been easy, it hasn’t become harder either. Selling has become a more refined process where efficiency is key. Increasing sales performance requires operational awareness of the quality of leads generated from marketing as well as the performance of individual salespeople. With artificial intelligence (AI), your business can understand the deeper dynamics […]

Quota attainment went from 63% in 2012 to 53.8% in 2018 – that’s nearly a 15% drop. Today, we constantly hear that “sales are harder than ever before”. The question is – is this just a perception or reality? To understand how much sales have changed and how managers can improve their teams’s sales performance, […]

  All reps are not created equal. By applying AI to their data in Salesforce, sales leaders can detect changes in selling skills before they impact revenue. How do you quantify a rep’s product knowledge or engagement ability? Leveraging data from 140M+ daily sales predictions, Rob Käll, Cien CEO, appeared on Donald Kelley’s The Sales […]

Everyone has issues with their CRM data, but not everyone has to suffer from it. Instead of treating poor data hygiene as a fatality, forward-looking sales organizations can make use of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing to make sense out of their data in ways that were previously impossible. Here are four of […]