Today’s topics include trust outweighing technology when it comes to maintaining customers, and GitHub releasing new tools and its “Octoverse” report.
According to LinkedIn’s annual State of Sales report that surveyed more than 500 sales pros and 500 buyers in August, establishing customer trust outranks technology itself in attracting and maintaining customers.
LinkedIn Vice President of Marketing Justin Shriber says that for at least the past decade, buyers have been rejecting impersonal technology in favor of developing relationships and highly personalized communication. In the survey, 40 percent of sales professionals ranked trust over ROI and price as the No. 1 factor in closing deals, and 51 percent of buyers said trust was a top factor in their decision-making when it came to purchasing.
“Customers have Alexa and Netflix at home, and they expect salespeople to have that same familiarity of who they are and what they need,” Shriber said.
GitHub held its Universe 2018 conference at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco Oct. 16, focusing on helping its 31 million developers who use the company’s 96 million repositories of open source code each day build workflows that are easy to do, realistic and efficient.
The company introduced some futuristic features that included GitHub Actions and GitHub Connect advance development workflows and that break down barriers between teams.
GitHub also released new security tools with the GitHub Security Advisory API, new ways to learn across teams with GitHub Learning Lab for organizations and other items.
In addition, the company released its “State of the Octoverse” report, which illustrates what the GitHub community can do in a year—such as creating 2.9 billion lines of code and promoting teamwork across time zones.