Archive for the ‘CRM Integration’ Category

Dreamforce is finally here!

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

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.

Lead Scoring: Deliver Pre-Qualified Leads to Sales

Friday, October 15th, 2010

I recently attended the Atlanta Salesforce User Group where Loopfuse was sponsoring and one of my founders, Roy Russo, was speaking. The topic on hand – enhancing your CRM with Loopfuse.  One of his first comments was “what makes a lead qualified?” We have several customers who believe all leads that perform any activity on the site should be considered qualified and routed to the CRM and the sales team. And then there are others, present company included, who use lead scoring to determine which leads will be followed up on by sales. By using lead scoring within Loopfuse OneView, you are allowing your prospects to self-qualify themselves based on criteria you set. Loopfuse OneView will then assign each prospect a grade based on their score.

First step, talk to your sales team. Get an understanding of what they are seeing come through the pipeline. Who are the most qualified prospects? Is it webinar attendees? Or is it simply companies based in a specific industry or geography are the hot leads. They are the experts in talking to leads day in and day out and can really give you an idea of how to set up your scoring.

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The Loopfuse Exchange: Sales & Marketing Best Practices

Monday, October 4th, 2010

With the highly successful launch of our Loopfuse Freeview offering in June and our innovative Partnership program in August, we have had several requests to share information amongst our community.  So today, I would like to informally introduce the Loopfuse Exchange.  The goal for the Loopfuse Exchange is to share the best practices from some of the best sales and marketing professionals in the business who give their companies a competitive edge.  The Loopfuse Exchange will be the place to visit for the most up to date sales and marketing best practices, and central to the Exchange will be a series of articles on various marketing functions — contributed by Loopfuse customers, partners and friends — that will help new and experienced marketers alike increase their effectiveness generating market awareness and demand. Topics will include Website construction and design, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, Lead Nurturing and Scoring, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay per click (PPC) advertising, Social Media and Networking, E-mail marketing, Event marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Reporting and more.

Later this afternoon, we will have our first guest blog post for the Loopfuse Exchange by one of our partners, Greg Malpass of Traction Sales and Marketing.  Stay tuned for more exciting information on the Loopfuse Exchange.

Webinar: CRM Integration – Exploring the flexibility of options available

Monday, September 27th, 2010

Thursday, September 30th, 2010 2:00PM EST

Join us for the second installment of our new webinar series “Light the
Fuse.” This series is intended to provide you, the LoopFuse user, valuable
tips and tricks on how to use LoopFuse OneView to grow your business.

Learn about the different options available when integrating your CRM with
LoopFuse from Tom Elrod, co-founder of LoopFuse. He will walk you through
the CRM integration process, start to finish, and give you tips along the
way on how to use LoopFuse more effectively.

How will this help grow my business?

By integrating your sales and marketing tools together you have taken the
first step in closing the loop between marketing and sales. You can give
your sales team visibility into the hottest leads by providing lead
activity and scoring right in your CRM.

You will learn how to:

  • Configure your CRM and the different options available
  • Create the CRM interaction rules best suited for your business
  • Send real-time activity inserts to your CRM
  • Set up lead nurturing flows to specify what lead information is synchronized with your CRM

Click here to register for the webinar.

Get Fused!

Marketing Automation Buyer’s Guide to Lead Nurturing

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Lead Nurturing is the corner-stone of today’s marketing automation and automated email marketing processes. With it, marketers are able to lower their costs of new customer acquisition, build interest and awareness for their product and services, and help retain existing customers; all in an automated fashion requiring little effort from marketing staff.

Before making a purchase decision for a marketing automation platform, buyers should research and accumulate knowledge on successful lead nurturing programs, and more importantly, what types of lead nurturing programs they plan to implement. Of all features found today in marketing automation systems, it is important to note that with lead nurturing you should choose the system that is right for you and not simply buy the prettiest, cheapest, or what-the-consultant-tells-you. Implementing a Lead Nurturing program is a serious undertaking that seldom get right the first time. A system that can grow with you and can produce measurable and refinable results will suit you best in the long-run.

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How you can make life easier for your sales team

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

Getting qualified leads to your sales team cannot happen fast enough. When I think back on the days when I used to send spreadsheets full of leads to each individual member of my sales team based on territories, I cringe. That was the best way I knew how to show them where a lead came from, where it had been or simply what type of company they worked for. This type of information is invaluable to a salesperson. But so is there time – time is money and so back to my original point.  You need to get qualified leads and all the information that goes with them to your sales team as soon as possible. We all know that spreadsheets flying all over the place is not the answer.

What is the answer, your CRM, the place where salespeople live and breathe. Make the information accessible to them the minute they login to their place of record for everything they do – log calls, log emails, convert leads and forecast their pipeline. By providing your sales team with this information every time they call on a new lead you are making both of your lives easier. They are presented with all the qualifying information they need to have an interactive conversation with the prospect and you are not troubled with the manual processes of sending sales members spreadsheets full of leads.

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New Salesforce.com Plug-in Provides Sales Personnel with Real-Time Activity

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Earlier this week, we announced a new Salesforce.com Plug-in for Loopfuse OneView, our flagship SaaS offering.  This new addition provides real-time activity information for Loopfuse customers on any lead or contact in their database, enabling salespeople to rapidly assess the quality of each sales lead at-a-glance.  In short, we are helping sales teams focus on the most important, qualified leads and thus close deals faster by viewing information such as:

  • The number of page views visited on the site
  • The number of lead capture forms submitted
  • The number of opens and clicks on all email marketing campaigns

This new tool is hosted on Salesforce.com’s Appexchange and can be accessed at here (note:  you need to have a Loopfuse instance running and a free trial is available here).

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Q&A with Laura Ramos – Part 3: Implementation & Keys to Success

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Following up on the interview with Laura Ramos, I am releasing the third and final part of my interview:

7.  Dwyer:  Who should be involved in the implementation of the Lead Management Automation platform?

Ramos:  Lead management automation should include marketing and sales as equal partners in the requirements gathering, selection, and implementation process. IT will be involved, too, but will play a more minor if the company chooses an on-demand solution. IT must make sure that integration with existing customer support, database, and sales automation systems goes according to plan and that the new system doesn’t introduce any security or unforeseen technical problems in the current environment. Marketing and sales folks shouldn’t have to take on the burden of understanding the existing technical infrastructure and the “what’s needed” to make marketing automation work.
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Make Marketing Intelligence Actionable

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

And now the fifth way marketing automation provides job security for marketers from 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers.  Below is the excerpt from the white paper:

“5. Make Marketing Intelligence Actionable

For most marketers, the challenge with channel proliferation is not a lack of data, but a lack of data integration.  Disparate systems (email marketing, web analytics, landing page creation tools, digital asset management, and CRM) often fail to bring critical information together in one centralized location.  Marketing automation tools should integrate with CRM solutions (e.g. Salesforce.com) to deliver a centralized source of multi-channel analytics for one version of the truth in simple, drill down dashboard reporting designed for marketers.

Website Analytics allow organizations to quickly assess website trends with accurate statistics covering a wide-range of metrics. This type of real-time insight is critical to marketers so they can identify areas of improvement and better tune the website to increase message response.  Likewise, marketers can measure response and engagement by incorporating call to action website links in email campaigns.

It’s also important for marketers to track the success of their email campaigns, in real-time, to make adjustments or additions to a campaign based on user response. Marketing automation can provide comprehensive reporting across CRM and marketing tools, so marketers can see a complete picture of recipient activity, email bounces, bad email data, link activity, geographic breakdowns, as well as associated opportunity. Comprehensive reporting allows marketers to adequately judge the effect of marketing campaigns on real dollars.

Job Security Scorecard:

  • Drill down reporting gives marketers the confidence to say “We have that information” instead of “I’m not sure” when the CFO or CEO ask for more granularity on trends in the data.
  • Centralize prospect behavior across marketing channels.  Marketing becomes an offensive asset in the organization. Rapidly adapt to changes in the market and streamline marketing campaign execution.
  • Real-time dashboards standardize key metrics: funnel analysis, call-to-action, click-through rates, the number of qualified opportunities, website performance, and collateral downloads.”

Download a free copy of 5 Ways Marketing Automation Provides Job Security for Marketers

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