Posts Tagged ‘marketing budget’

Two Truths and A Lie About Marketing Automation

Wednesday, July 31st, 2013

The game of “Two Truths and A Lie” is often used as an ice breaker when a new group of people gets together or as a way to introduce yourself to others with a bit of humor and thought.  We thought it would be a great way to describe marketing automation as there is no shortage of claims about what technology like this can do for you to justify spending a piece of your marketing budget on it.

The rules are simple – we tell you three things and you have to pick the one lie out of the three.

Ready?  Here we go!

  1. All leads get timely and actionable follow up through automated email lead nurturing that can be personalized by the assigned sales representative with content mapped to exactly where they are on the buying journey.
  2. Sales teams become more efficient and close deals faster with better prospect intelligence and prioritized leads.
  3. The technology alone is all you need.  Don’t worry about your goals and the processes needed to achieve them.

So, what are the two truths and what is the lie?  Cast your vote in the comments and we’ll update the post shortly with the answer!

Update:  Ok, you caught us!  #3 is the “lie.”  Marketing technology is an enabler so you need to know what outcome your are seeking, how you will measure it, and what process you want to automate before you jump into marketing automation.

We would love you to try out LoopFuse here.

To find out exactly what LoopFuse does, click here.

You can try Nearstream for social lead generation here.

To add LoopFuse to Salesforce.com, click here.

You can follow LoopFuse on Twitter here or join us on our Facebook fan page here.


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Building the business case for marketing automation

Thursday, March 28th, 2013

Marketing budgets are limited and always smaller than we’d like them to be in a perfect world.  As a result, marketers have to make hard decisions about what to invest in and how much to invest along with an understanding of the expected return on that investment.

The decision to invest in marketing automation requires the same scrutiny both in terms of whether it is appropriate for your business and will it deliver a return greater than your investment.

We think these questions and the resulting business case are easy to address with LoopFuse.  Why?

  1. We offer an unlimited time free trial that provides the ultimate “try before you buy” experience.  You experience the product directly and we are here to help with tutorials, demos, help content, and direct support from our team.  Our free trial version has all the capabilities of our paid versions minus our Webservice API.  If you need to test that piece of the product, we’re happy to enable it for a limited time.
  2. One of the fastest paybacks in the industry with plans that start at just $295 per month.  The efficiencies gained by implementing a simple email drip campaign, scoring leads to better prioritize sales outreach, and just knowing more about your prospects (site visits, referral sources, etc.) more than justifies this monthly investment.  We deliver a lot of bang for the buck!
  3. A lower overall total cost of ownership (TCO) with no need for long and expensive implementations or additional staff to manage the system day-to-day.  Our customers are up and running in hours if not minutes (see #1 above) and we don’t believe you need to hire a dedicated “marketing automation administrator”  to manage LoopFuse.  Anyone on your marketing (or sales) team can be a power user with limited training and we become an extension of your marketing team and lead management efforts vs. adding overhead costs.  We even offer affordable QuickStart packages to get you up and running that start at just $500.

So there you have it.  Build your business case for marketing automation by actually using a marketing automation system.  We’re confident you’ll see immediate results and that the business case will almost write itself!

We would love you to try out LoopFuse here.

To find out exactly what LoopFuse does, click here.

To add LoopFuse to Salesforce.com, click here.

You can follow LoopFuse on Twitter here or join us on our Facebook fan page here.

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Better Value, Easier to Use Marketing Automation

Friday, July 27th, 2012

We hear this over and over from our customers and prospects about why they chose us or why they are looking at us as their marketing automation and lead management choice.  More recently we are seeing quite a few customers coming to us as their contracts with more expensive and more complex solutions are coming up for renewal.

Our goal is (and always has been) to better align sales and marketing activities leading to more customers and more revenue for our customers.  LoopFuse is designed to be an extension of your team and not a product requiring dedicated full-time administrators or a heavy professional services burden to get you up and running.  That sort of defeats the whole purpose.

Marketers are becoming more savvy and those making use of marketing automation systems are the cream of the crop.  That said, we are still just scratching the surface of the value that results from more sophisticated approaches to lead management via email nurture, lead scoring, etc.  The days of batch and blast email campaigns are far from over but we see forward thinking marketers wanting to take advantage of the intelligence and targeted engagement that a marketing automation system provides.  They also want it to make sense to their marketing budget and, most importantly, demonstrate tangible contribution to the sales pipeline in terms of more opportunities, better qualified leads, more engaged prospects, and better insight into what is working and what it is costing.

So thank you for thinking about us as “better value, easier to use” marketing automation.  We gladly (and humbly) accept that description!

We would love you to try out LoopFuse here.

To find out exactly what LoopFuse does, click here.

To add LoopFuse to Salesforce.com, click here.

You can follow LoopFuse on Twitter here or join us on our Facebook fan page here.

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Not another year end list

Friday, December 30th, 2011

The year 2012 is right around the corner and we see big things ahead.  Not just for us here at LoopFuse but for anyone involved in sales or marketing.

Marketing as a discipline is experiencing big changes as it becomes increasingly more quantitative, is being enabled by powerful technologies, and is using both of these things to create direct and two-way conversations with influencers, prospects, customers, and partners.

Over the past few years we’ve spent a great deal of time explaining marketing automation, why it is important, and the huge value it delivers.  Thanks to companies with much larger marketing budgets and megaphones like Marketo, Hubspot, and Eloqua, the market is increasingly understanding what this is all about and the benefits that are possible.  You don’t have to be a huge enterprise or have a big IT budget to experience the benefits from smart lead flows, helpful content, and prioritized sales opportunities.  That’s why we’re here and that’s why we have done our best to remove all the friction to getting started with marketing automation with a free version and a paid version that is definitely friendly to the marketing budget.

We believe 2012 will be a huge year for marketing technology as some of the companies above have their IPOs and marketing professionals continue to raise the bar at their companies with new levels of prospecting, engagement, and performance measurement.

Here’s to a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2012!

We would love you to try out LoopFuse here.

To find out exactly what LoopFuse does, click here.

To add LoopFuse to Salesforce.com, click here.

You can follow LoopFuse on Twitter here or join us on our Facebook fan page here.

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