LoopFuse Blog

These are interesting times for the U.S. and World economy, to say the least… housing market collapse, stock market volatility, growing unemployment, and talk about spreading the wealth. It’s enough to negatively affect the purchasing and hiring plans of even the most well-funded of businesses. And against the back-drop of the economic chaos, I’ll publicly boast, We’re growing… Fast!

Over 2008,  we have seen our employee ranks increase by 30% and demand for our marketing automation suite has never been higher. It is evident that during times of economic uncertainty, now more than ever, marketers are hungry for a low-cost, high-return, and easy-to-use product in the marketing automation space. So the build-out continues with key hires in executive positions and game-changing product innovations in 2009.

With that, I introduce our newest addition to the executive ranks at LoopFuse…

We Hire

We are proud to welcome Frank Merenda to our ranks, as our new VP of Engineering. Frank joins us from Red Hat, where he created the JBoss Customer Support Portal and became the development team lead for enterprise support at Red Hat. Frank brings over twenty years of IT experience to LoopFuse. Frank will be responsible for continuing execution and build-out of our core product, LoopFuse OneView.

They Fire.

Now I’m not one to kick a competitor when he’s down, (Oh, who am I kidding, of course I am!), but unfortunately, this period of economic malaise hasn’t been good to everyone in our space. Having to slash its headcount by 20%, it seems like Eloqua’s feeling the payne. In a market that’s changing fast with lower-cost and easier-to-use products, I’d say the reign of terror over customers may be drawing to a close.

Crumbling old companies aside, the state of the marketing automation space looks extremely bright. I believe the next few years will be pivotal, in separating winners from losers, and only those with superior products, designed to solve marketing and sales solutions during a market downturn will survive. But hey, what do I know?

Today, LoopFuse announced a dramatic change in the way our pricing model works. We’ve always  maintained that our product is the most full-featured and easiest-to-use marketing automation suite on the market. The change echoes our drive for innovation and simplicity by allowing marketers to focus on campaign and program initiatives without worrying about artificial quotas and overage fees, that limit their ability to execute.

In keeping with our mantra of simplicity, I’ll spell out the basics of the pricing model change:

• Unlimited Seats
• Unlimited Support Incidents
• Support Package with 24/7 access to our Customer Support Portal
• Rollover Credits™

The concept behind Rollover Credits™ is simple… you don’t need to ever worry about exceeding limits on page-view tracking or email sending, as all unused credits for a given month will roll-over to the following month. Website traffic and email campaigns are not fixed variables, so why should bandwidth usage and email usage fees be fixed?

LoopFuse has always maintained strong partnership ties with it’s customers. With that belief as a base, we felt that our pricing model should support, rather than hinder, our customer success’. What we found with our old pricing model (still in use by our competitors ) is that we were penalizing growth by limiting usage. As customer of our munchkin-loving-competitors will notice, they are hindered by the artificial barrier to growth in usage, seats, and support cases, leading to lost sales opportunities and increased costs.

More information on the new pricing model, can be found here.

Today, our friends at Drupal announced the release of the LoopFuse OneView integration module for Drupal. The module, now available from the Drupal website, allows for pluggable integration between the Drupal CMS and the LoopFuse OneView Marketing and Sales Automation platforms. This is a natural pairing for two technologies that are widely used throughout the internet - Our products have a considerable overlap in who they appeal to… Marketing and Sales executives.

The original impetus for this module, was started by Chuck D’Antonio under the Acquia umbrella. Much of it came about as Acquia became a LoopFuse customer and felt a tighter integration that would benefit the community would be fruitful. This is OSS, as it was meant to be. I couldn’t agree more.

Taking the press release at face-value would be a mistake, as there is an important message here, regarding the future direction of both companies. I believe it is evident that Drupal has continuously set itself apart from other Web CMS  by appealing to a more sophisticated crowd. The same is true for LoopFuse. At the same time, however, I would state that both companies have a fair understanding of what it means to have mass appeal… allowing a simple user to get up-and-running in minutes, yet enabling high-end users with unlimited flexbility and scalability. This is a delicate balancing-act for any company, but one that I believe our friends at Drupal/Acquia know very well how to master.

With our OneView 3.6 release, LoopFuse enables marketers deeper and richer insight in to the Lead Funnel through an easy-to-us and intuitive user-interface. With our Closed-Loop Reporting enhancement, marketers are now able to visualize the entire Lead Funnel and pin-point the time involved in having prospects and leads move through the funnel at different stages. We can honestly say that this level of reporting is unseen in any competing product. (hurry up guys, you’re playing catch-up now)

So what do the new reports include and why should you care?

The idea? behind this addition to our flagship product, is simple:

• Empower marketers with unprecedented insight in to the Sales Cycle.
• Supply knowledge in to what marketing initiatives are working and what isn’t.
• Visualization that supports the further alignment of marketing and sales goals.
• Contrast and compare marketing and sales performance during different times in the company’s history.

Funnel Analysis allows you to answer the most important question a marketer has - At what rate are my prospects moving along the lead funnel?. LoopFuse OneView provides key metrics, such as the rate of conversion between First Contact to Conversion, or Lead to Opportunity. With better insight in to these key metrics, OneView then allows you to better tune your nurturing and campaign initiatives.

For a full listing of the 3.6 enhancements, click here.

In one of my initial blog posts, I commented on the rapid pace of innovation that LoopFuse was going to bring to the Marketing and Sales Automation industry. Clearly, we’re delivering on our promise to inject better reporting and usability in to a a stagnant market…. this release is proof-positive that the LoopFuse machine continues to out-pace the competition with a better product, better support, and affordable pricing.

Keep your eyes on this space for future release announcements, which will include major enhancements to our flagship product and have LoopFuse moving in to new online markets.

Being a former member of the JBoss ranks, I can’t help but laugh when I read folks from Sun and IBM endlessly pontificating in the blogosphere about OSS business models and “The Community”’s role. This focus on OSS and “Community” seems to be a new M.O. for both of them, after years of being proprietary vendors, and outright Anti-OpenSource.

So What exactly makes this so funny, and why the about-face?

Sun: You’re great at building hardware - Fantastic and trend-setting hardware that blows away just about everything on the market. Your software has generally sucked. We can’t even measure the amount of suck, its so large. At some point you decided that JBoss was hammering away at your software and figured it would be in your best interest to fight fire-with-fire. ie. throw the software over the wall in to OSS-land and hope for the best. (I won’t even comment on how the (JCP) Java Community Process, is akin to the World Bank, with vendors talking behind closed doors, NDA’s, and little active input from the Java community.)

IBM: You’re a consulting company… err…. “Global Services” Company. Just because you bought that mess Geronimo and throw some developers in the Apache ranks, doesn’t make you a carrier of the OSS torch, but keep blogging and we’ll keep laughing at you.

So how did we all end up in bizarro-world… where Sun and IBM are now the mouth of OSS?

The JBoss impact

JBoss took a big bite out of the industry. BEA (as much as they won’t admit it) crumbled largely because they could not compete with JBoss’ innovation, price, and adoption rate. IBM had their hand forced in to buying Geronimo - a fight fire-with-fire approach. Sun’s organization has always lacked and simply couldn’t compete with JBoss at all, and so it was slowly dying.

… and now the deck is shuffled. Red Hat buys JBoss and proceeds to let the fruit rot on the vine, thereby creating a vaccuum for these two to dive in. Of course, they’re diving in without any clue on how to run an OSS business. Remember, these are the same guys that were on the losing end of the OSS fight for years, and have zero talent in their executive ranks on how to run an OSS business.

There is a vaccum in Java OSS, as Red Hat leadership has been largely impotent - not knowing what to do with JBoss. The JBoss “mouth” in the community is gone and so is their drive. I have hopes that the new leadership inside of Red Hat can clean house - Leave JBoss alone, give it more money, energize the ranks, and PLEASE clean up the mess within Red Hat mangement. There is no reason why Red Hat could not be bigger than Sun and maybe IBM one day, given the proper vision and execution. Red Hat has a large bulls-eye painted on its back, because of its own doing and now has IBM, Sun, Oracle, Canonical, and others aiming at it.

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I do get annoyed listening to blow-hards talk about “The Community” and how to run an OSS Business, when just a year ago they were both large megacorps intent on fighting OSS (and getting their butts handed to them). I tend to ignore the public discussions they fuel, as they’re largely wrongheaded, and their opinion on OSS business models is backed by zero experience and education. My only advice to the “New Leaders of OSS”, is to perhaps hire some proven OSS talent. Sun did well buying MySQL - perhaps MySQL’s vision can infect Sun. IBM is just utterly clueless as usual, and trying to find a way to push more bus-loads of $400/hr consultants - things never change at Big Blue.

So who should you listen to on OSS Business Models and Community issues these days? The companies that aren’t sucking up all the air in the room, but are quietly making it happen: SugarCRM, SpringSource, Hyperic, Zenoss, Alfresco, Zimbra, MySQL, and Zend. These guys have it right. They’ve been at it for years and have learned how to grow a community and execute on the OSS Business Model (which isn’t a one-shoe-fits-all).

Thats my $0.02. Now grab some popcorn, sit back, and keep reading the Sun/IBM dynamic-duo expouse their pearls of wisdom…

UPDATE: The looniness gets loonier with the IBM guy now advising Sun on how to pull together “like” products in to a “family”. He’s citing WebSphere CE as a success story. Maybe the guy from Sun will respond on the success of JavaDB and we’ll truly have an idiot convention on our hands.

I continually hear from marketers how difficult it is work with their sales team. This is an issue that exists in most organizations and is something I have talked about in the past (see more on the “silo effect”). So I wanted to provide some advice on how help build those bridges…

First off, sales people care about selling… If you are not helping them sell, you are not helping them. This is a simple statement, but important to understand. So in that vein, here are some ways that you can help the sales team using a Marketing Automation solution:

1. Make that first contact for them – create a lead nurturing program that will automatically send out an introductory e-mail on their behalf after a lead has registered on your web site (i.e. for a trial, download, etc.). These are basically boiler plate e-mails anyhow, so can send an e-mail with personalization for the lead’s information (i.e. Hello Bob) as well as including the sales person’s direct e-mail address, phone number, etc. in the e-mail header and the e-mail signature (this way if the lead replies, is going directly to their sales person).

2. Give them the info where they want it – sales people live in the CRM. They do not want to log into multiple systems to get information and often won’t. So you need to make sure your Marketing Automation solution pushes all the leads’ activity (i.e. email opens, form registrations, web activity, etc.) into the CRM.

3. Tell them what a lead is doing, when they are doing it - sometimes making a sale comes down to timing. Being able to catch an elusive lead while they are at their desk is often difficult, so having a Marketing Automation solution that sends out an e-mail to the sales person when their lead is on your web site or opens your e-mail will give them the advantage.

There are plenty of other things that can be done with a Marketing Automation solution that will make your sales team happy, such as the basics of qualifying leads before sending to the CRM and automatically nurturing the leads that are not yet qualified, but that is for another post (maybe even a book).

Having just returned from San Francisco and reading many of the blogs/press on this year’s OSBC, I felt it was a good time to present an unfiltered and honest review (opinion?) of OSBC 2008:

• Great Topics with Great Panels - the show gets better every year. Unfortunately, I missed some of the all-star panels (Mickos, ShuttleWorth, Roberts), but every single panel I attended was full of audience participation, and interesting/educated panelists.
• Good news: Less attorney-blabber. I refuse to attend their panels for fear I’ll be billed $500/hr. to listen to them. This is the mundane sort of task that I already pay our own attorneys for.
• It sure is damn nice to look over a crowded conference hall and be able to see that a large and growing percentage of the marketers in the room are existing LoopFuse customers.
• It sure is damn nice to look over a crowded conference hall and be able to see that a shrinking percentage of the marketers in the room are existing Eloqua customers. (They’re easy to find… just look for the marketers that are broke and pissed off.)
• As usual, Matt Asay’s keynote has a perfect blend of interesting and inspirational.
• I wasn’t around for any of the other keynotes. I would’ve liked to have heard Red Hat’s Whitehurst. As for listening to the HP keynote, I paid my dues while at JBoss… ’nuff said.
• Rob Bearden and Larry Augustin were among my favorite sessions. Perhaps the fact they plugged LoopFuse may have had something to do with it.
• My panel was a solid mix of talent. Sitting next to Ian from Alfresco was an experience. Keeping on topic was a futile effort.
• RingSide Networks launched at the show. I’m still not sure what my ex-Jbossians created, but Bob Bickel is involved and David Skok invested, so it must be good?

Roy’s shout-outs:

• Matt Asay, thanks for spending a whole of 30 seconds with the Loopies.
• Chris Harrick (SugarCRM) - Stand-up and incredibly knowledgeable guy. I think we got off on the wrong foot, but thats how I roll.
• Raven Zachary (451 Group) - thanks for moderating and sharing hair-styling tips, but you’re still wrong on MySQL, Zimbra, and JBoss.
• Dave Rosenberg (MuleSource) & Bill Karpovich (Zenoss) : These guys are dangerous in the same room together - Statler & Waldorf.
• I finally met Javier Soltero (CEO, Hyperic) - He’s probably our #1 fan, one of our most active users, and great at offering unfiltered startup advice. He may also be close to being a bigger smart-ass than I - we’re neck and neck.
• Mark Hinkle (Zenoss) - Good to finally meet him in person. Thanks for the blog.
• The Hypericans - These guys are the official San Francisco welcoming committee. Always a good time.
• Myself (LoopFuse) - I’m proud that I managed to sit through a whole session without insulting anyone in the room (that I know of). This CEO thing is changing me. I refuse to play golf…

From inception, LoopFuse has maintained a belief in its inevitability of success. I realized recently that there was one thorn in my side, from all the recent press coverage, that I had to address. Overwhelmingly, the media, prospects, and customers took to the message; the immense value we add to internal marketing and sales dynamics. However, one interview, didn’t sit well with me… where an interviewer asked the geniuses at Eloqua for their take on LoopFuse. Being who I am, and never backing down from a fight (that I can easily win), I felt compelled to answer inaccuracies put forward by our competitor.

The article in question, can be found here, and features a rather smarmy rebuttal from Thor Johnson, SVP of Marketing at Eloqua. Now let’s dissect the FUD:

“Still, Johnson said he was unconcerned with LoopFuse, noting that he already has a plethora of smaller rivals.”

The facts show otherwise… our own LoopFuse OneView product shows a “concerned” Eloqua frequently scouring our site for information:

Perhaps its difficult to be concerned, when you’re in a constant state of panic? Considering that our LoopFuse site only has about 20 pages on it, what on earth could they be spending over 11 hours on it for? Did they lose something? Customers, perhaps? Maybe they’re all looking for jobs after the ship sinks? Dunno.

“That pricing compares favorably to Eloqua. Its service starts at $3,000 per month for a team of about five users, but with no limits on e-mail or page views”

This is a joke, right? Is this pricing before or after you nickle-and-dime them to death with hourly support expenses? Is it before or after you up-sell them the following year on multiples over the previous year, because (as we all know) you hold their data hostage. The truth is that we are consistently a fraction of Eloqua’s yearly Total Cost of Ownership, and offer a far broader and easier-to-use product (and you’re free to take your data with you at any time).

Oh, and Thor, thanks for the free press. Next time, remind yourself that the LoopFuse founders used your “product” for 3 years, and will correct you when you feel like spreading the FUD around.

LoopFuse has been invited to attend a panel on “Converting the Open Source Lead Funnel” at this year’s Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). Although I would never pass up a chance at listening to Matt Asay blabber on about the wonders of OSS, backed by a slide deck with such OSS visionaries as Homer Simpson, this year’s OSBC aims to provide a wealth of information beyond that to any and all OSS companies; from competitive advantage topics, marketing essentials, community relations, and legal issues. This is a must-attend conference for any OSS entrepreneur and OSS executive.

The panel I will be taking part in, is similar to last year’s “Downloads to Dollars” panel, where OSS marketers discussed what works/doesn’t in OSS marketing initiatives. The 451 Group’s Raven Zachary will be moderating the panel. I will be joined by some heavy hitters in the OSS world - from Alfresco, Zend, and SugarCRM.

So if any of you are wondering, “Can LoopFuse crack the open source conversion conundrum?“, as the 451 Group’s Matthew Aslett asks, this is the place to get answers. Attendees are always free to ask me how we “cracked” it at JBoss, using a dysfunctional marketing automation product, and how our current OSS customers are leveraging our knowledge with a superior product/service offering today.

So ends yet another cycle of coding, testing, deployment, and overall innovation. Although I’m starting to get tired of constantly out-innovating our bobo competitors and watching them cry like little babies, I never get tired of bragging about it or taking their customers - such is business, the American way.

This past weekend, the LoopFuse team deployed the latest release [press] of our On-Demand offering to our Tier-1 network operations center. This release marked a major milestone for LoopFuse, as it added several significant features to an already feature-rich and flexible product suite, designed to improve marketing and sales efficiency (ie. Increase revenue and lower costs). Below is a short description of what you’ll find in the latest release:

• Automated Lead Nurturing: This isn’t your grandmother’s lead nurturing tool. OneView’s Lead Nurturing module touches every part of the LoopFuse system and your CRM, allowing you to create the richest lead nurturing programs for your organization imaginable. You can instantly build workflow’s that encompass a lead’s web activity, email activity, and CRM activity and have that workflow automatically send email campaigns and modify that lead’s fields within your configured CRM. The additional reporting capabilities built around lead nurturing also allow you to not only gauge how your programs are performing, but provide the necessary information to better-tune them for maximum efficiency in warming up your prospects until they’re ready to buy.
• Activity History CRM integration: Now in 3.0, OneView automagically enters in real-time information in to your CRM for specific leads. The as-it-happens activity history injection is triggered whenever a lead visits your site, opens an email campaign, or completes a lead capture form. This is an important addition, allowing sales personnel to have real-time actionable data from within your CRM and continuing to provide a 360-degree of a particular prospect’s activities and interests.
• Lead Capture Reporting: What good is a process if you can’t measure it? To answer that question, we’ve augmented our reporting capabilities with a real-time look at your lead capture information. Marketers can now gauge their lead capture activity for specific lead capture forms and also view trend information over time.

So thats my elevator-pitch on the recent additions to the LoopFuse platform. All great additions to help round-out our marketing automation solution.

Looking forward to February, we will be releasing Google AdWords API integration, allowing marketers to better measure ROI against their Google AdWords spend. Although this is possible currently, the addition of the API integration will make the process seamless and increase flexibility for our users… and inevitably make our competitors cry some more.