Brian Giese's Blog

Does CRM Really Work?

I was just reading a blog entry by Jim Dickie from CSO Insights on the effectiveness of CRM. The headline reads "What Does CRM Really Do For Salespeople?". In it Jim says, "We asked participating sales executives to assess the impact that technology was having on their sales performance. A consolidated review of their responses found that 71.9 percent stated that CRM was improving their performance, 18.2 percent said it was having no effect, and 9.9 percent didn't know."

I have to agree that CRM is "improving perfomance" but still has a long, long, long way to go. A few months ago I led a rountable discussion at the Direct Focus Conference in Salt Lake City on the effectiveness of CRM. Of the 12 VP Sales and CMO's present only one (that's 1) said it's CRM was viewed as effective by it's salesforce. And you guessed it, the VP was from Seibel... I mean, Oracle. ;)

Google releases "Checkout"

Google just announced that it has launched Google Checkout, a secure online payment process. The new service gives shoppers purchasing ability with a Google login. It also works with the company’s AdWords search advertising program to enable merchants to process all or a portion of their sales for free. They say that for every $1 you spend on AdWords, you can process $10 in sales through Google Checkout at no charge. Does that make sense? Maybe, we'll see.

The service is currently available to U.S. marketers, and Google said it is working on making it available to merchants internationally.

"By integrating the checkout process with search and advertising, we're helping our users complete the cycle of searching, finding and buying," said Salar Kamangar, VP-product management at Google.

Are you being uhh Googled?

Salesforce.com announces Partnerforce

Just read this announcement on Yahoo News...  It seems that Salesforce.com unveiled Partnerforce saying it is its  new on-demand product that connects enterprises, channels and partners. Available in July, this enables a company to deliver salesforce.com’s CRM and marketing services to any of its sales and marketing partners, such as distributors and VAR's. This will give a consolidated view of the sales pipeline across direct and indirect channels. Looks promising.

Good Ideas for Direct Marketing Campaigns

I just got off a teleconferance webinar discussing how to make business-to-business direct marketing campaigns work. Here are a few of the take-a-ways from the group.

Design all campaigns for measurement. Every campaign MUST have a clear process for collecting, measuring and tracking performance.

Kill underperforming programs. Sometimes even the coolest programs just don’t produce. Don’t fall in love with the creative if it’s not working. Tighten the rope on the measurement of these programs.

Don’t rely on a single third-party software platform. As with CRM systems, the expectation that a single technology will solve the measurement problem is unrealistic.

Some good ideas.

New stuff for marketing

AdAge published its annual Largest National Advertisers report. Great info for every marketer and any company that is using an advertising business model.

ProBlogger published an A to Z list of products, services, tools, etc. for bloggers. Interesting stuff if you’re into blogging. Also get Debbie Weil's new book on business blogging.

An interesting article from DM News on "Pay-per-text" about the montization of text messageing. A new, emerging and soon to be profiable frontier.

B-to-B marketers lack confidence in customer data

A large majority of b-to-b marketers (87%) have little confidence in their customer data, according to an on-site survey of attendees at the Direct Marketing Association's DM Days New York Conference and Expo this week.

Fifty-four percent of those surveyed by Extraprise said the lack of collaboration between sales and marketing is their biggest challenge. A little more than  half (52%) said they integrate sales and marketing systems.Fifty-nine percent said customer data is housed in at least four different data locations internally, while 18% said data are in five to 10 different locations and 23% said data are in more than 10 locations.

We still have a long, long way to go.

CMO's Have 23 Months to Die

I just read this interesting article in Advertising Age about CMO job churn. Here's an exerpt...

"The shorter tenure is in part a reflection of the change from failing traditional-marketing approaches to less-defined and more dynamic approaches," said Jeff Bell, who jumped from Chrysler Group to become corporate VP-global marketing of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business this month.

No kidding. Marketing is moving to the Web and digits are meant to be measured. How about CMO's doing what their sales counterparts are doing and measure all activites that contribute to top-line revenue? Sales (and thier Marketing brothers) are accountable for results.  Those marketers that create closed-loop measureable campaigns will stay in the C-suite and those that can't shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Assembling the Pursuit Team

This is an podcast from Chapter 2 of my book I.T. Sales Boot Camp: Sure-fire Techniques for Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Companies. Enjoy!

MarketWatch Launches New Blogs for Technology Stocks

MarketWatch just launched a series of new blogs targeting readers who are interested in technology stocks.

These are written by some of MarketWatch's leading columnists and will appear regularly to provide commentary on issues facing tech investors. The interesting thing is that  these blogs offer MarketWatch a marketing opportunity for advertisers as the blogs will lead to more traffic on the Web site. Also, they provide external bloggers links which can further drive traffic. Blogging going mainstream, you gotta love it.

Here comes RSS!

Today, online marketers share some of the same concerns as the consumers they want to reach. Both groups want better control over the communications process. RSS delivers for both of them.

Although it is most often associated with blogs, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is morphing into an individually targeted marketing channel capable of offsetting many of the downsides of other mediums. Forrester Research, in its "RSS 101 for Marketers" report, said, "RSS is a powerful tool – albeit for the technologically advanced today – that marketers should test and deploy to proactively maintain relationships with their customers."

RSS is simply a technology used to distribute new content added to a Web site. RSS uses technology referred to as readers or aggregators to "pull" new postings from the sites and organize them into folders for users to review at their leisure. The technology is based on eXtensible Markup Language, or XML. The orange icons increasingly appearing on Web pages indicate that a site supports RSS.

To learn more about selling using RSS... click here.