With summer officially upon us and the World Cup fever raising temperatures around the globe, it's time to catch up on the hottest blogs of Q2. As we saw in Q1's top blogs, the popular trend was all about capitalizing on flexible technologies to streamline processes, create more quality opportunities, and ultimately, drive growth through delivering value. This quarter, we honed in on tactical articles that provide actionable takeaways for achieving business outcomes. These are six blogs you must read this summer:

Customer Obsession

Customer Engagement Learns from Sports CRM
Most fitting with the vigorous FIFA World Cup competition this summer, this blog outlines four essential strategies for club managers and business executives alike to capitalize on engagement with supporters and customers.

Marketing

Build a Lead Scoring Program in Four Steps
Improve your sales and marketing alignment, increase your sales productivity, and lower cost of acquisition — need we say more? Check out this tactical blog to learn how to build your own lead scoring model to reap all of the aforementioned benefits.

Sales

Best Practices for Effective Sales Stages
Greg Kaplan shares his insight into best practices for optimizing sales stages to move the right opportunities through the funnel. Complete with tactical examples and tips, learn how to build "forecast accuracy" into your sales compensation plan, and ensure that you are deploying the right resource at the right time to your opportunities.

IT

Unify Your Data For a Successful Salesforce Org Merge
Discover what “lean data” can do for your data unification process during an org merge. Quickly derive value from your acquistion — without the headaches that come with IT system merges.

Salesforce

Salesforce: Why New Players Dominate Over Traditional IT Giants
Among salesforce.com’s five main partners, three of them did not exist fifteen years ago. Why have traditional IT giants failed to capitalize on the rise of cloud technology — one of the biggest transformations in IT history? Laurent Dupuytout explores reason why new comers to the scene are dominating the salesforce.com ecosystem.

Meet the Pack

In His Own Words: Shane Sugino On Leading Bluewolf's Higher Education Practice
Amid the press storm surrounding Shane Sugino joining Bluewolf as Director of Higher Education, I sat down with Shane to get his take on opportunities at the intersection of higher ed and cloud technology. Find out what he thinks will be the future of cloud and highered — or “higher education nirvana” — straight from the horse’s mouth.

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