I would like to congratulate Zimbra, the popular e-mail and collaboration company (and a division of Yahoo!). Since they started using Loopfuse OneView™, Zimbra has increased its Sales and Marketing efficiency by 50% – special thanks to Greg  Armanini and John Robb of Zimbra for collaborating with us on the case study.

With over 41 million paid mailboxes worldwide, there is no doubt that Zimbra is redefining the email and collaboration space.  Achieving such web business success requires the right strategy coupled with the right partners to make it happen – especially with over 200,000 unique web visits a week to its homepage, www.zimbra.com.

While Zimbra initially chose Eloqua for marketing automation, they subsequently replaced them with LoopFuse OneView, which is easier for the Zimbra team to use and it tightly integrates with Salesforce.com, its CRM partner.

According to Greg, Zimbra is using LoopFuse’s demand generation, email marketing and lead scoring capabilities to keep the Zimbra sales team focused on “the most likely prospects in order to function efficiently and profitably.” I look forward to following Zimbra’s continued success.

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).

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.

After reading one of Will Prices’ blog posts that touched on the impact of forecasting, it started me thinking about how most companies look at sales forecasting (btw, Will’s blog is a great read in general). Today, most companies use their CRM to forecast their future revenue stream. This is a perfectly acceptable practice and is frankly one of the primary reasons for using a CRM. Actually, when you look closely at CRMs, will see that they are designed more towards providing insight to management than actually helping the sales force close deals (but that is for another blog).

While many of these companies using a CRM are able to produce short term forecasting based off of the immediate sales pipeline, they often have little or no way to forecast beyond it. The main reason for this is that they usually don’t have the data needed and when they do, no way to analyze that data for predictability. I’m going to assume I just lost some people with this last sentence, so let me provide a simplified example.

Let’s say you are a B2B company that sells software primarily online. Most of your sales originate from people that visit your web site (which you know based off the lead source within your CRM). Your average sales cycle is 60 days (i.e. period from lead creation to opportunity closed-won… again, courtesy your trusty CRM). Your close rate is 50%, because are not doing a good job of qualifying leads (shame on you). Finally, your average deal size is $25K. So, in this example, if have 10 new leads created today, can estimate that will have $125K in revenue from them in 2 months time (obviously am over-simplifying this).

Since I know that most of my leads come from my web site, if I see that my web site traffic doubled since last month, I should also be able to safely assume that my revenue will increase as well. The problem is how much?

Now, let’s assume you have the capability to determine that 90% of your sales came from leads that visited your web site at least 4 times within 6 weeks of becoming a lead within your CRM. Given this indicator of sales, you can start predicting sales from web traffic. For example, if know that have 25 companies who have visited your web site more than 4 times within the last 6 weeks, then forecast a revenue of $562.5K in 3.5 months.

There are a number of data points correlating web traffic patterns to sales patterns that can be used to help forecast future sales. The key is to be able to derive these correlations based on historic sales information; otherwise all you are left with is a SWAG. Having a tool that automatically ties web traffic patterns to consequential sales opportunities also helps.