Brian Giese's Blog

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration (CDI), and campaign management. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise have been performed manually much more efficient, and makes some new processes possible. Marketing automation is an integral component of customer relationship management (CRM).

What is PaaS?

Salesforce.com announced at their Dreamforce Developers Conference last week the industry’s first platform as a service (PaaS) they call Force.com. With the Force.com platform, you can build any application, any database, any logic, and run it all on demand on a secure infrastructure. Now salesforce.com customers can create and run any application and even any user interface using Force.com. Here's a video of the Force.com announcement delivered by Mark Benioff, CEO.

Marketer of the Year Awards

Eloqua, the on-demand application platform for B2B marketers, announced thier awards for the best business-to-business marketers at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week.  Here are the winners:

The Marketing Innovation Award – Postini

The Best Lead Management Award – Cognos

The Best Lead Scoring Award – InQuira

The Global Marketing Effectiveness Award – Sybase

The Interactive Marketing Award – Kofax

The Marketing Visionary Award – Angela Kauffman, Aon

The Marketer’s Choice Award – NetQos

Should you have a hosted or in-house CRM?

The first step to fully realizing the benefits of a CRM is conducting a careful evaluation of your business needs. Factors such as budget, user-base, company size, and customer needs will determine whether a fully integrated, enterprise-level CRM solution or a hosted CRM solution will better fit the needs of your company.

For small or midmarket companies, a hosted CRM solution is attractive because it enables organizations access to best-of-breed technology at a cost-effective price, allowing the companies to stay focused on their core businesses, rather than on their software applications. For enterprise companies integrations to the supply-chain and back office are important.

Here are some things to consider when choosing the right CRM solution:

The Ability of the User Population:
One of the biggest challenges with any CRM deployment, including hosted offerings, is getting salespeople to actually use the product. Most hosted CRM solutions are browser-based, and familiar to the user base, making adoption much easier and the learning curve shorter. A real benefit with a hosted solution is that training can be conducted in a matter of hours, rather than days.

Length/Speed of Deployment:
The average deployment of an in-house CRM solution is between three to nine months, whereas the average deployment of a hosted CRM solution is a few weeks (in some cases users can start using the service in real time as soon as they sign up). With a hosted CRM solution the infrastructure is available immediately. There is no hardware or server software to install and maintain, ensuring fast deployment and worry-free maintenance. This gives the IT department the necessary time to configure the product to fit your business. The speed of deployment of a hosted CRM solution speaks any company that is concerned with keeping costs down, while making the best technological investments for its needs.

Your Budget:
The purpose of a hosted CRM solution is its ability to bring affordable access to brand name applications at a fraction of the cost and with all the functionality of an in-house solution. The beauty of some hosted CRM solutions is that they have been built to work in either a hosted or an in-house environment. A company looking to initially invest in a hosted solution is able to enjoy the functionality of an in-house solution with the ability to bring the solution in-house in the future. If you're looking for a large-scale CRM deployment, but don't have the IT budget to sustain it, a hosted CRM solution is what you need. Available with low, predictable monthly fees, a hosted CRM solution eliminates large capital outlays and unpredictable IT expenses; simple pricing makes it easy to budget and affordable for every business.

Your Company's IT Strategy:
If you are looking for a solution that easily integrates with your back-office and third-party applications as part of a strategy to integrate your applications across the organization, a hosted CRM solution is the choice for you. The value proposition of a hosted CRM solution is its ability to expand the available information to the entire organization, including through integration with other applications. The ability to integrate with mobile phones, for example, provides salespeople with the necessary tool they need when they're on the road. This ability may be the deciding factor for an organization that needs a mobile CRM solution that is both flexible and easy to use.

Take a look at these apps for more information...Salesforce.com, Netsuite, Eloqua, Rightnow, SugarCRM, and OracleOnDemand

4 Ways to Boost CRM Performance

Today, CRM solutions are going deeper into the enterprise, offering to  support the entire business infrastructure. The trouble is that it's getting further and further away from the salesperson they originally claimed to help! So here are some things to consider when you are building a customer-centric CRM that salespeople might use:

1. Eliminate Data Entry. Traditional CRM has taught us that salespeople are most effective when they are free to engage prospects. Data entry is a reality, no matter what the solution, but it shouldn't impede selling. CRM should keep salespeople in "selling mode" rather than "data entry mode." Solutions designed to provide real support to salespeople should capture data dynamically behind the scenes to automate the process or come with services that can offload this mundane task from their daily lives.

2. Increase High-Touch Selling. CRM should deliver highly interactive tools that help develop a personal relationship with the buyer, without overloading the prospect with constant phone and e-mail follow-up. For example, enabling you to track buyer interests and deliver the right marketing content at the right time is far more productive and effective than the hassle of ongoing follow-up.

3. Provide Step-by-Step Guidance During the Selling Process. You  want to know what works -- what seals the deal? You shouldn't have to depend on one-time sales training or orientation to understand the successful selling practices in a company. These activities should be visible and built into sales software so that the guidance you want is always a click away.

4. Maximize Productivity and Profit. According to an old sales axiom, "20 percent of the sales force generates 80 percent of the leads." Imagine the difference if a company could boost new salespeople effectiveness  even if they are inexperienced? CRM should engage and guide you to have better conversations with your prospects, increasing customer satisfaction and profits.

For those of us looking to maximize productivity across an entire sales team, the key is to select a CRM designed for the individual salesperson. It should adapt to the existing workstyles of salespeople, bringing them real value and help in closing deals, so that just as easily as they reach for their BlackBerry or cell phone to engage buyers and close deals, salespeople will turn to their software to help them get the job done.

Salesforce.com expands Apex

Salesforce.com has further opened up its programming platform, AppExchange, allowing users to enhance and change the way its application functions.

The Apex programming language, a key to Web 2.0, is already used for Saleforce's hosted CRM, but was not available to outside developers but is scheduled for release in mid-2007. Apex will allow users to change the way buttons, searches and even entire services within Salesforce operate. With Apex, users will have access to programming tools that will allow them to change the way the Salesforce service behaves by adding, for example, customized search procedures or buttons that categorize information in a specific way. 

Salesforce hopes that this annoucement will drive collaboration and innovation with Apex, as well as give users an incentive to move away from in-house I.T. development and the large operating costs that come with it.

Salesforce.com buys into Google AdWords

Salesforce.com has acquired a tiny company that created an add-on to its hosted services for purchasing and managing Google-driven Web advertising campaigns. This is a really cool idea and one that is clearly overdue. The acquisition brings the operations of Kieden, a four-person operation with 45 customers, to Salesforce.com. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Kieden co-founder Kraig Swensrud detailed the purchase at a press and customer event in Boston last week. Swensrud said that the service, called Salesforce for Google AdWords, lets people launch a Google AdWords advertising campaign from a Salesforce.com application. It will cost $300 per company per month which is problably too much to launch a new product in the on-demand market. We'll see.

The service allows marketing and advertising managers to analyze ongoing campaigns by viewing which people who click on Google AdWords keywords become sales leads. It compiles information, such the amount of sales resulting from Google AdWord clicks and presents it in charts and a dashboard-like interface. Really cool, take it for a test drive.