Posts Tagged ‘saas’

“Try before you buy” critical to marketing automation success

Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

At least we think so and that is why you can try (and use) LoopFuse directly and without any cost to you.  Much has been written about the “consumerization of IT” which is quite a mouth-full to describe the expectations to engage with a web-based product or service directly without friction (salespeople, qualification calls, etc.).

You can then make up your mind about whether or not is solves the problem or delivers the outcome you are seeking.  The role of the vendor in all of this is to support that process, make it easy to understand, and be ready to help where help is needed.  At least that is how we see it.

The thinking on this post comes from a very thoughtful two part post by Ori Yankelev entitled “My Marketing Automation Software Evaluation” over on the very well done OpenView Venture Partners blog.  Ori does a nice job laying out his requirements and grading the large enterprise marketing automation vendors on how they satisfy those requirements.

What struck me the most was this part:

We did not conduct a trial for this evaluation because they require serious resources commitments, and are not completely free from either vendor.

No free trial and requires “serious” resource commitments?  Those seem like huge obstacles for a customer to truly understand what they need and how a product may or may not address those needs.

Regardless of what marketing automation system you choose (and we, of course, want it to be LoopFuse), please try the product before you sign a contract.  If this is not possible then move on to the next vendor on the list.  It will save you time, money, and heartache.

Four Ways to Improve Your Marketing Efforts with Automation

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

Traditional Marketing Management courses talk about the “Marketing Mix” and how different elements come together to form a marketing plan. Each company has a different corporate culture and approach to doing business so knowing how to balance these different marketing pieces is essential to creating a successful image that reflects the company’s goals. The well-known “Four Ps” model of marketing (price, promotion, product, and place) has been updated with the more customer focused “Four Cs” model (cost, communication, consumer, and convenience) but either way, marketing automation can make your company more successful by giving a power boost to your marketing mix. This is how LoopFuse can help you do better in each of these four areas. (more…)

3 Tips for Lovers (of Marketing Automation)

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

It really can go either way, you know. Either you come off looking like a hero, the greatest person in the world…or you come off looking like someone who just doesn’t really have a clue as to what’s really going on. It’s that time of year again when people look at their lives and decide how they are going to celebrate that significant other in their lives. Or is it time when you look at your marketing automation solution and give it some of the attention it deserves? I forget. Either way, they following points are important to remember when treading the paths of love or marketing automation. (more…)

Webinar: Get the Ultimate SaaS Sales Alert with LoopFuse + Salesforce.com

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

Join us for this discussion on Thursday, December 15th at 2pm ET on how to use LoopFuse Custom Events with Salesforce.com to create sales alerts for your team based on activity in your SaaS product.

Register Now!

Our recently released Custom Events dashboard lets you to turn your product into your marketing by seeing and acting on actions end-users are performing within your application.

We will showcase how we are using end-user actions to alert our sales team to increased activity by an account in our sales pipeline and also be taking your questions on how to connect the activities you track with actions from LoopFuse.

Don’t miss it – Register Now!


Turn your product into your marketing with LoopFuse Custom Events

Monday, November 14th, 2011

This last weekend marked the release of LoopFuse v3.34.  This new release includes deeper integration for custom events within the LoopFuse feature set to include a new custom event dashboard, integration of custom events within lead nurturing programs, and scoring rules based on custom events.

Custom Events Explained

custom_eventFor those of you that missed the announcement of custom event support in our previous release, custom events allows LoopFuse customers to capture what actions their end-users are performing within their applications.  These actions, or custom events, can be anything that a customer wants to track within their application per end-user and are completely defined by the customer.

For example, a customer that has an online shopping cart would want to capture events related to checkout such as an abandoned shopping cart.  Another example would be a customer that offers an online service such as web-based video conferencing would want to capture events related to conducting a meeting such as creating a meeting and number of attendees for that meeting.

Custom Events Dashboard

The Custom Events dashboard allows LoopFuse customers to view which activities their end-users are performing over a specified period of time.  This dashboard also displays increases in volume of activities over a period of time and even which end-users are performing which actions.

custom_event_dashboard

Now both marketing and sales have visibility into what their end-users are doing, or in some cases not doing, in real-time.

Lead Nurturing using Custom Events

Visibility into what end-users are doing within your application is important, but being able to react to what end-users are doing is just as important.  LoopFuse customer will be able to build automated workflow programs that can include custom events within logic of their programs.

For example, using one of the previous examples of an abandoned shopping cart, a program can be built to not only detect this type of event but also email out to that end-user a special offer to bring them back and complete the transaction.

Lead Scoring based on Custom Events

Lead scoring is a great way to quickly qualify a prospect based on their actions such as viewing a pricing page or downloading a specific PDF file.  Being able to impact a prospect’s score based on their actions related to your application is also very useful.

create_meeting_scoring_rule

For example, using one of the previous examples of creating an online video conferencing meeting, a scoring rule can be created to assign 5 points for every meeting an end-user creates up to a total of 15 points.  Using scoring rules such as this can quickly identify a prospect that is actively using the service to the sales team.

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.

Marketing automation is key to SaaS sales success

Tuesday, September 6th, 2011

If you run a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business or happen to be the Vice President of Marketing at one, you need to have marketing automation in place.  Why you may ask?

Most, if not all, SaaS companies offer a free trial of some kind whether that is based on a period of time or staying below a usage threshold.  Either way there is a large volume of user registrations at the top end of the funnel and these can vary from curious passers by to genuinely interested sales opportunities.

Sorting and segmenting out those opportunities from the rest can be time consuming not to mention highly frustrating for the sales team as they lack an understanding of just how interested each “lead” is in the product and can end up wasting time on unqualified opportunities. (more…)