Archive for the ‘Marketing Automation’ Category

Introducing Closed-Loop Reporting

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

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. ;-)

Making friends with the sales team

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

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).

Bulls on Parade

Friday, February 15th, 2008

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 @ OSBC 2008

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

LoopFuse has been invited to attend a panel on “Converting the Open Source Lead Funnelat 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.

LoopFuse OneView 3.0 Announced

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

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.

Forecasting beyond the pipeline

Monday, January 21st, 2008

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.

Market Talk: Marketing Automation in 2007 (2008)

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

As 2007 draws to a close, I thought I’d post my version of a “Year-In-Review” blog covering activity in the marketing automation space. Certainly its been an active year with some M&A and IPO activity, and new startups ramping up, and some complimentary market players diving in. This is, no doubt, a hot space to be in (kinda of reminds me of the early JBoss days), and what makes this an even more exciting time is that there are no clear leaders in the space.

What you will note is a common theme; that everyone (even those in complimentary markets) are moving toward the same objective – a complete and consolidated solution for all marketing (and sales) needs. Its a natural progression, I believe, as the email marketing folks are trying to differentiate themselves out of the race-to-the-bottom pricing effects, analytics companies are under pressure from cheaper and sometimes free alternatives, and marketing automation companies are looking to beat everyone else to be the first with this holy grail of solutions (I don’t believe anyone has it “right” just yet).

So here goes, what I believe were considerable moves in this space for 2007 that will set the stage for it in 2008…

  • Unica: Acquired MarketingCentral (7/07). A good play that helps round out their offering. Not really in the marketing automation space, but I believe to be slowly moving in that direction.
  • ManticoreTechnology: If I get one more resume from anyone working there, I’m going to blow a fuse. Seriously now, can someone just acquire them, and put them out of their misery already? I’m sure there’s something there worth buying, right? Aeron chairs? Foosball tables?
  • Omniture: Acquired WebSideStory (10/07), also launches closed-loop-marketing addition to their offering as a SalesForce.com plugin. I’m betting they’ll make big moves in to this space in ‘08, possibly through further acquisitions and likely with the intent to
    • differentiate themselves with the other web analytics companies they have a history of competing with (enter B2B)
    • seize this soft market in one fail swoop before anyone else can dream of it.
  • Eloqua: Closed a whopping $23m round (11/07) one year after their last round. New CEO seems to have cleaned house of the old guard that were taking the company in to the upper regions of the Canadian tundra (ie. nowhere). Even though they’re hobbled by a surprisingly dysfunctional and overpriced technology offering, they are eagerly locking unsuspecting customers in to multi-year contracts. Smart move, as you’ve been voted most likely to get steamrolled during the mad-dash to consolidate the space. I do sense IPO coming soon for them.
  • Marketo: Popped on the scene early this year with a bucket of cash. One half-baked and feature-lacking product later, they’ve resorted to employing tactics from the”3D Startup Manual”. You haven’t heard of the 3D Startup Manual? It has one page, and it reads “Dillute! Dillute! Dillute!”.
  • Market2Lead: Injection of cash (10/07) by partner Rainmaker Systems may keep these guys afloat a while longer. Their technology is lacking, but its nothing $1m can’t fix, right?
  • SilverPOP: Ye old stomping grounds. Acquired vTrenz (05/07) marketing automation. A good play for the Pop, seeking to break away from the rest of the pack in email marketing. I blogged about this earlier.
  • WebTrends: I have no idea whats happening there. My guess is that 2008 has them following Omniture’s lead in to this space.
  • Aprimo: Filed for IPO (9/07) with a $50m run-rate. Clearly a potential leader in the space that has the potential to swallow up a large chunk of it on its own.

So thats my rather narrow view of the world (well, at least the bits I’d openly share). I won’t share any major plans regarding where LoopFuse is headed in ‘08, except to say that we will strive as hard as possible to shatter the dreams of all of those mentioned above by continuing to build a world-class platform, while providing solutions for our growing clientèle. ;-)

Sales Alerts, its all about timing

Monday, November 12th, 2007

In the last LoopFuse release, we added sale alerts per a customer’s request. This new feature would allow sales persons to be notified via e-mail if any lead they owned visited their web site or opened an e-mail from them (immediately after the event occurred). I admit, I didn’t fully understand why it was so important for the sales person to be notified in real time, but as the saying goes, the customer is always right.

Recently I was on a call with the same customer about some of the other new features we had added. I felt compelled to ask about why it was so important that they know about lead activity as it was happening. He proceeded to tell me about a lead that he been trying to reach for a week. He had left voice mail, sent e-mails, etc. and could never get in touch with his lead. Then a few days later (thinking the lead had gone cold), he got an e-mail alert that his lead was on their web site at that very moment. He immediately called the lead, knowing that the lead was at his desk and thinking about his company. His lead picked up the phone and he was able to engage his lead and start a meaningful conversation about the value his company could provide to the lead.

Silverpop acquires Vtrenz

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

Several people have emailed me about my thoughts on the Silverpop acquisition of Vtrenz (press release), so I felt compelled to write this blog entry. Overall, this is a snoozer of a headline… average player merges with average player that couldn’t quite make it on its own. Allow me to sleep through this one.

Context: I should say at this time, that both Tom (CoFounder, LoopFuse) and I, once worked at Silverpop many moons ago.

The interesting thing about this acquisition is not that an email marketing company buys a demand generation solution. What it shows is that email marketing companies are eager to differentiate themselves. Although being able to send out mass emails is impressive, as a communication method it provides little-to-no value for the sophisticated marketer wishing to implement a closed-loop solution, increase efficiency in his sales and marketing organization, and qualify potential leads. Possibly the most compelling case for differentiation is the email marketing industry itself. It is crowded by an enormous number of companies offering the same services, while undercutting each other for 1/100th-of-a-penny-per-email cheaper than the other. In essence, its a race to the bottom. How long will that last?

Judging by the great appeal of our hosted and commercially licensed (OEM) solution, I can safely say there are many email marketers that are following this line of thinking. Its a natural progression for email marketing companies to grow in to a full marketing and sales solution. Clearly, being an open source solution affords us some luxuries that our competitors cannot benefit from. For the average email marketing company, being able to take our software, re-brand it, and have full training and support services from our staff is a win-win. They benefit from instant differentiation with a low-cost and full-featured demand generation solution, backed by proven 24/7 support services.

I applaud Silverpop for thinking forward, but I’m still sleeping through the news. ;-)