by Kristina Knight
Breaches lead to increased content security
“Content security requirements get tougher. The need to protect information is not new but 2017 will see IT organizations pushing both peer businesses and partners to up the protection of proposal content. Often overlooked as sensitive, proposal content contains pricing, market strategy and product details. If trusted to the wrong partner or proposal solution, breach of this information could prove devastating to the company. Businesses will look to solutions that have strong data protection processes and controls, audited by outside firms for validation,” said Jeff Weil, VP Consulting Services, Qvidian.
CRM innovations will give sales teams more options
“With the introduction of Dynamics 365 in November 2016, and a nascent partner app store, Oracle Sales Cloud’s “zero cost” approach to partner app integration and Salesforce’s push to its new UI, it feels like 2017 is set up to be a transformative year in organization and partner thinking around sales user engagement with CRM. To me, it feels like consulting shops, software companies, system integrators and user experience professionals have blank canvases to paint on and a whole new box of crayons to work with. If the mindset really is on how to help the sales person vs. collecting data and these organizations and individuals focus right and unleash pent up creativity, we could see something totally refreshing in this space,” said Karen Meyer, VP, Products, Qvidian.
Digital options for increased integration
“Organizations will move to a fully integrated world. Integration is the key to an automated workflow. From content creation to pricing to proposal generation to updated information in a CRM, integrated solutions are the only way to maximize user adoption and productivity. 2017 will be a year where companies take what they have and start integrating them together to give their users a more seamless experience and a more complete and error free proposal to their prospects,” said Weil.