December 30th, 2010 by Don Dalrymple
Many of your customers are not ready to buy when they first meet you. They are in the research and education phase of their buying process. If you are a sales organization, your process typically revolves heavily around selling to ready customers. The lens becomes narrowly focused on who is ready. These are the minority. The majority might be ready in 90 days and beyond.
It’s amazing that organizations will pay a person salary plus benefits often totaling $70K+ per year not including the management responsibilities. The majority of this person’s time is spent following up. And how does the typical salesperson follow up? They call and interrupt people. Buyers have become quite adept today at blocking out strangers, interruptions and things they are not ready for. Caller ID, spam filtering, do not mail, etc. are in place because of sales processes that miss the mark. They are selling rather than nurturing with value. It creates mistrust and brand damage.
A New Sales Process With Less Cost
So what if you re-engineered your sales process recognizing the dramatic change in how people buy today? Here’s how it could look:
Fewer Sales People That Focus On Closing
Have fewer sales people that focus only on the last leg of the sale – conversion. This is what a good salesperson is about. They know how to close. Allow them to be set up for success by economizing their time rather than filling it with a pipeline of largely improbability. Thus, they would be talking to those that are ready to move forward with your value proposition. They would be brought in to do their job in the most relevant conversation of their job.
More Nurturing
Allow your marketing automation system to nurture and make ready those who are unready today. Within the Loopfuse system, you can set up various campaigns, Lead Flows, metrics and action triggers to help a buyer become more ready. This system has far less cost than a salesperson and is much more effective because it brings value, is consistent and creates transparency to a buyer’s readiness.
You can design your automation processes to work with specific buyer profiles you have identified and nurture them in a custom and intimate way.
If you fail to nurture, are inconsistent or create interruption, you will lose the larger potential from a continuous closing pipeline.
The world has changed. Change with it by recognizing that nurturing is critical when you are not allowed to interrupt today. Your value, messaging and timing better be focused in order to win a customer who has many options.
Loopfuse Success
Tags: Loopfuse Success
Posted in Marketing Automation, Thought Leadership | No Comments »
December 23rd, 2010 by Roy Russo
It’s that time of the year again – when I throw seashells on the ground and translate the wisdom of the Gods regarding what is coming for the new year in marketing automation. 2010 was a banner-year for LoopFuse, and I forsee it being an even better year in 2011 for us… but this blog post isn’t about me…
- I will continue to be outspoken: It’s important that this be stated up front for those of you that get your feathers ruffled easily (stop reading now, if you’re one of those people). Although I do speak my mind often, and it is fact that the marketing automation industry has a disproportionate share of hypersensitive executives, I do believe that Jill Rowley from Eloqua may be a strong contender for most outspoken, as seen in the comments here. It is likely that I will lose my seat to her in 2011.
- Acquisitions will happen: As marketing automation continues to mature, acquisitions will come from different and complimentary spaces – look for CMS, CRM, ERP, and Email Marketing companies to jump in to the game. Future acquisitions will likely be carried out over the need to compliment a technology offering, thus disregarding consultant-ware vendors. Simply put, look for pure tech buys that fit an acquirers current business model.
- SalesForce.com will not buy (a company): SalesForce.com will either build marketing automation capabilities in to their products on their own, or simply buy the technology that gets them to market quicker. SFDC has a history of acquiring technology. SFDC does not acquire consultant-ware. Just to clear this up with the previous point; SalesForce.com is not a services company, it is a technology company. Did I mention that LoopFuse is built 100% on Java technology and runs on Tomcat/JBoss (just like SFDC) and integrates seemlessly via Appexchange plugins and natively using the SFDC API?
- David Raab will continue to get it right: David covers the marketing automation market and complimentary markets with a rare level of insight and unbias. Although he and I don’t agree on a host of issues, I do find his arguments to be educated and supported by facts. The fact that David remains untainted by the current flurry of buying-up industry pundits and analysts by vendors, is a bright spot in our market, and I hope it continues to shine.
- A shift away from consultant-ware: There is a lot of noise in the space leaving buyers with confusion and facing a high-barrier to entry. On one hand, the “industry leaders” claim to have the easiest-to-use marketing automation system on the planet. On the other hand, they claim you will need to add extra head-count, train your staff, and hire professional service consultants to use the system. So which is it? The logic puzzle will end as this market continues to mature, with easier to use products that are low-cost and offer the same capabilities as higher-cost alternatives. As in every space during this young stage, we will be moving toward commodity and the segmentation-line will be drawn between companies that are service-based and those that are tech-based.
- Food-fights will continue: Let’s look at 2010: LoopFuse and Genius go freemium – Marketo CEO opens-mouth-inserts-foot. Marketo and Eloqua fight over sales guys. Silverpop gets h4×0r3d (hacked) and then clams-up. This won’t change. There are too many companies chasing too much money in a startup wild-west atmosphere. Until the market matures past the startup phase, the fireworks will continue.
With that, I store away my seashells for another year and wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the folks at LoopFuse!
Tags: Marketing Automation
Posted in Marketing Automation | No Comments »
December 23rd, 2010 by Don Dalrymple
In Kevin Maney’s book, Trade-Off, Why Some Things Catch On And Others Don’t, we learn about two categories of products and businesses – Fidelity and Convenience. High fidelity businesses are inconvenient. They typically have cachet and price points which make it more desirable for upper end buyers.
High convenience businesses are easy to get in terms of cost and access. Maney’s message is that to succeed, you must position and commit to one or the other. Otherwise, you are destined to fail. Ted Leonsis, former president of AOL, sums it up, “A successful business is either loved or needed.” The problem is when you try to be both. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Automating the Buying Process
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December 16th, 2010 by Don Dalrymple
The promise of marketing automation is to create a repeatable, predictable process for nurturing unready leads. In so doing, you gain the advantage of creating an automated funnel. Your leads become ready for your sales process and in turn, previously neglected leads become valuable for a continuous pipeline. Read the rest of this entry »
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December 15th, 2010 by Roy Russo
This coming weekend (Dec 18th), we will be releasing LoopFuse OneView v3.29. The coming release focuses on adding Conversion Analytics to our existing Lead Capture Forms, and Inbound Marketing / Search Engine Marketing functionality. These new features enable marketers to analyze which referring sites, search engines, and keywords are leading to the highest level of lead capture form conversions.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: conversion analytics, Customer Acquisition, Demand Generation, Inbound Marketing, lead capture
Posted in Inbound Marketing, Lead Management, Web Analytics | No Comments »
December 10th, 2010 by Don Dalrymple
Closed loop marketing involves seeing information within and through the sales funnel. Your different marketing channels constitute costs in terms of dollars and effort. Measuring this within Loopfuse can be done with the inbound marketing tool sets provided in Loopfuse in real-time.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Loopfuse Success
Posted in Inbound Marketing, Thought Leadership | No Comments »
December 7th, 2010 by Cindy Ryan
Several folks from the LoopFuse team are here at Dreamforce at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and enjoying a great show. Dreamforce, salesforce.com’s annual tradeshow, is delivering on all their promises so far. We are excited to leave the cold weather of Atlanta for the sunny 60 degree weather that San Francisco, the host to Dreamforce 2010, is providing. Announcements such as the launch of Salesforce Database.com, chatter free and an appearance by Will.i.am have created quite a buzz.
So far I have enjoyed seeing several LoopFuse customers and partners.
Many thanks to Salesforce.com for putting on such a great show where we have the opportunity to get some one-on-one time with many of our customers and partners while meeting a lot of new friends along the way. This year’s show is packed full of exciting, educational and networking events. Hope to see all of you there and let us know if you are interested in meeting up (@loopfuse) while we are here in San Francisco.
Tags: Dreamforce
Posted in Salesforce.com | No Comments »
December 3rd, 2010 by Sean Dwyer
With the Loopfuse Exchange launched starting with Taking Your Website to the Next Level, we will now cover a very hot topic in marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO). No doubt, SEO is on the mind of all marketers these days as they look for a cost-effective way to promote their website. Search Engine Optimization: Best Practices covers topics such as:
- Anatomy of a Well Optimized Site
- Human readability versus Indexing Engine readability
- You don’t have to optimize every page for the same term
- Optimizing for different search engines – Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo, etc.
- What Term(s) should You Optimize For?
Plus, we feature Oco, the only SaaS BI provider to deliver business analytics, multiple-source data integration, and data warehousing as a comprehensive, integrated solution and a Loopfuse customer, in this article with great examples on how to SEO your website.
Download Search Engine Optimization: Best Practices
Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
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November 30th, 2010 by Tom Elrod
Although Marketing Automation is a hot topic these days, many marketers wonder what specific aspects of marketing should be automated. This is a good question to ask because in general, there is no substitute for direct person-to-person interaction when it comes to building a business relationship. However, there are many communications performed on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis where you would use a template for the correspondence, even if it is just a mental template. These correspondences are usually good candidates for automation.
An example of automation almost everyone uses is an auto-responder when someone submits a Lead Capture Form. This is important to do, so that the person filling out the form gets immediate confirmation that the information has been received and to set expectations on when they can expect to hear a reply. An auto-response email also provides a good opportunity to include extra information about your product or service that can help them along until they get a direct response based on their inquiry. For example, if someone submits a registration form to contact marketing about a press event, the auto-responder email could contain a link to your press kit.
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Tags: lead capture, lead nurturing, Marketing Automation
Posted in Marketing Automation | No Comments »
November 30th, 2010 by Don Dalrymple
A well-designed Loopfuse Lead Flow will funnel traffic from your inbound marketing channel. Your presence in cyberspace and the content which drives engagement creates an avenue for a click. That click starts the opportunity to connect in a relevant, personal and timely way with a stranger. Turning that stranger into a friend is the art and science behind the powerful Loopfuse demand generation engine. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Loopfuse Success
Posted in Inbound Marketing, Thought Leadership | No Comments »
