Over the past couple years I have spent a considerable amount of time on the road meeting with customers to learn what they liked and didn’t like about LoopFuse. One of the more surprising discoveries for me is how many of these companies’ CEOs log into our product. Candidly, our product was never designed specifically for the CEO but rather for the marketing and sales teams. Primarily the CEOs are infatuated with the visibility provided by the real-time dashboards. It can be kind of hypnotic, like watching the stock ticker on CNBC because the dashboards automatically refresh themselves every few minutes (configurable). One of the executives I met with kept the LoopFuse dashboard running on his 2nd monitor throughout the day during large campaigns or major announcements to track the buzz generated throughout the day.
Another feature that CEOs tend to love is the Visiting Companies dashboard tab. Every time someone views a website his/her company’s IP address is exposed to the website owner. Online databases can provide reverse IP-lookup and often identify the company who owns that IP address. By aggregating this data we can provide visibility into which companies are currently spending the most time on the website. While the sales and marketing teams are primarily concerned with companies that are prospective customers, the executive suite is often looking for companies who may be competitors, investors, partners, and suitors.
It’s a good lesson for all companies, but especially for software & SaaS companies. You may think that you know who your users are, but make sure that you are truly watching and listening and you might find that your software is fulfilling a need you didn’t even know existed. And that spells opportunity.
Tags: CEO
CEOs can be critical to influencing the adoption of Marketing Automation. As with any information technology endeavor, whether hosted within the enterprise or in the cloud, “Executive Buy-In” has always been a determining factor in the success of a in implementation.
Anecdotally, everyone in the Marketing Automation ecosystem says that once you have a Marketing Automation platform implemented, you never want to give it up. Clearly Matthew’s observations on CEO behavior attests to that and I believe it to.
However, if you’re not there and you need to give a nudge to your CEO to buy into the Marketing Automation trend, Have him review “The CEO’s Quickie Guide to Marketing Automation,” which will quickly give him/her an overview of why it is important ot the C-level executive:
http://allinio.com/resources/the-ceos-quickie-guide-to-marketing-automation/
Cheers,
Joe Zuccaro