The role of IT in the Sales and Marketing process has long surpassed the days of email volleys and Excel marathons. The sales automation successor products like Siebel CRM that smooth out the marketing and sales workflows have gradually given way to the SaaS avataars like Salesforce.com (SFDC). SFDC does a great job of improving workflow collaboration through an almost fun social-media like interface (Chatter) such that no lead information falls between the cracks as the handoffs take place. However, for both the seasoned marketer or the small business entrepreneur on a shoestring budget, the ability to improve performance today rests on strategic insights into the sales and marketing effort. Salesforce's native marketing metrics and lead analytics such as ROI, channel effectiveness, conversion rate and sales cycle time merely scratch the surface of what is possible in this age of integrated offline and digital marketing.
A new crop of companies such as Eloqua and Marketo in the Sales Performance Management club are offering SaaS solutions with out-of-the-box analytics that have native compatibility with SFDC. These products give the Chief Marketing Officer critical and unprecedented X-ray vision into every segment of the pipeline providing policy based lead scoring, graduated qualification, real-time assignment and auto-escalation. They also provide a mechanism to archive leads that are not yet ripe based on customer engagement behavior and then recycle them back into the pipeline when the customer is farther along in the buying cycle. Moreover they also divulge unknown loops and dead-ends in the lead qualification pipeline that must be avoided. When addressed duly, these techniques can increase the company topline and eek out more juice out of the sales and marketing spend as measured by the cost of customer acquisition (CAC). The marketing team can finally come out of the age black-box metrics and have a compelling conversation with the CEO backed by fine grained facts and improved capabilities.
Recorded at Dreamforce seminar - this presentation by the CMO of one such provider - Marketo - takes a behind the scene tour of how its done. If you are a seasoned sales and marketing manager but new to modern-day marketing management, you will be amazed how deep this rabbit hole runs.
A new crop of companies such as Eloqua and Marketo in the Sales Performance Management club are offering SaaS solutions with out-of-the-box analytics that have native compatibility with SFDC. These products give the Chief Marketing Officer critical and unprecedented X-ray vision into every segment of the pipeline providing policy based lead scoring, graduated qualification, real-time assignment and auto-escalation. They also provide a mechanism to archive leads that are not yet ripe based on customer engagement behavior and then recycle them back into the pipeline when the customer is farther along in the buying cycle. Moreover they also divulge unknown loops and dead-ends in the lead qualification pipeline that must be avoided. When addressed duly, these techniques can increase the company topline and eek out more juice out of the sales and marketing spend as measured by the cost of customer acquisition (CAC). The marketing team can finally come out of the age black-box metrics and have a compelling conversation with the CEO backed by fine grained facts and improved capabilities.
Recorded at Dreamforce seminar - this presentation by the CMO of one such provider - Marketo - takes a behind the scene tour of how its done. If you are a seasoned sales and marketing manager but new to modern-day marketing management, you will be amazed how deep this rabbit hole runs.
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