Business and Marketing

Demandbase's Sales Accelerator provides buyer alerts via Salesforce.com, which has made an investment in the company.

Demandbase, a tech company that helps B2B firms ID high-value prospects, today launched Sales Accelerator on the Salesforce App Exchange. Salesforce.com, in turn, announced its first investment in Demandbase, whose clientele tend to be big users of the cloud-based CRM company.

Built expressly for B2B sales and marketing teams. Sales Accelerator automatically pushes account insights from digital advertising and website traffic onto the Salesforce1 platform. B2B sales reps tend to stay locked into their CRM platforms, and the new app unifies results from across a company's marketing stack and presents them with alerts on pre-buying activity of key accounts on their dashboards. By leveraging the Salesforce1 mobile app, Sales Accelerator can deliver the alerts to reps' mobile devices, as well.

"Despite all the marketing tech investments B2B companies have made over the past several years, they still face a challenge in aligning sales and marketing initiatives," says Demandbase CMO Peter Isaacson. "Sales Accelerator ties together all the advertising and website activity and delivers it to the sales organization and alerts them to what they should care about most. In short, it identifies high-quality selling opportunities before the hand raise."

The app can also deliver new business teams alerts on prospects that are not currently in an enterprise's CRM system, since the company uses an IP address identification system that can pinpoint a product researcher's company.

The size of Salesforce's investment in Demandbase was not disclosed.

Business Breaking News: Most Small Business Owners Already Pay Above Minimum Wage

Where do small business owners stand on minimum wage? According to this year's Small Business Success Study by insurance company The Hartford, the majority are in favor of increasing it, and many already pay their employees more than the minimum.

Sixty-six percent of small business owners support increasing the federal minimum wage, the study found. And many small business owners wouldn't need to make any changes to meet an increased minimum; 58 percent would not or do not need to take any action if an increase were enacted, according to the report.

And of the 51 percent of small business owners that pay their staff hourly, 81 percent already pay above the current minimum wage, and 67 percent favor the proposal to increase minimum wage. [Minimum Wage Hikes: 4 Ways to Prepare Now ]

Commodity Online News: Fresh buying seen in Maize gains at 1051