We had a great time with the CRM Idol 2012 gang on our recent briefing and enjoyed explaining who we are, what we do, and what makes us unique. You can read their review of that discussion in the official LoopFuse 2012 CRM Idol Review, but I wanted to highlight a few specific points we made during the discussion.
There is so much marketing effort going into marketing marketing automation systems (get all that?), that there is an increasing disconnect between what these systems can do for you to improve lead management, accelerate prospects through the sales cycle, enhance performance reporting and generally improve marketing operations and “out of the box” expectations. They do not, in and of themselves, magically automate all your marketing needs away. That is the challenge with calling it “marketing automation.” Gartner Group has moved away from this label preferring instead CRM Lead Management and wicked smart Aberdeen Group analyst Trip Kucera just published research on Marketing Lead Management (Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing did a really nice summary of the research results in his 8 Habits of World Class B2B Lead Management Programs.)
You are needed for this – meaning your knowledge of your market, understanding of your target customer, and familiarity with your existing sales process. If you don’t have these three things nailed, stop picking out software and start working on a white board with your team.
During the discussion with Paul Greenberg, Esteban Kolsky, and Brent Leary during CRMIdol, we boiled down the LoopFuse marketing software as follows:
- Tracking Sources (where are leads coming from – web, email activity, etc)
- Executing Actions (lead nurturing, lead scoring, email campaigns)
- Analyzing Results (leads generated, sales results from activities)
We do these three things extremely well and cost effectively for our customers. Our company is made of up marketers so we understand a great deal about process as well as technology and love these discussions but we also lean heavily on our customers to understand their businesses and how best to use marketing software in them.
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