Enterprise Software Executive Blog

Answering the Call of the Social Enterprise

2012-01-16T19:55:49-05:00

The New Year is always a great time to introduce change. I am pleased to announce that I have joined the Social Enterprise revolution at Salesforce.com. While I have always had the highest level of respect for SFDC, I didn't entirely appreciate or understand how far ahead the SFDC products and solutions had moved from the competition. What started as a leading edge product to assist sales people in their team selling has transformed into the biggest game changing technology in the last decade. Stay tuned for more great features in the the February release of Spring '12 and watch this video on the new featuers specific to Service Cloud.

The Truth About Email Marketing

2011-08-16T13:07:57-04:00

I have been testing out an email marketing / marketing automation solution from Genius.com with excellent results. This is not to say that this is the only player in town. Marketo, Pardot, and Eloqua all have excellent solutions. For this pilot, the Genius.com solution allowed me to track demand generation email activity without a lot of IT intervention. So, it served as a quick get-up-and-running effort. During my testing, I found an interesting best practice that I am now measuring in various demand generation campaigns using A/B testing. All of the leading marketing automation vendors provide email open tracking, but I have just started testing the concept of disabling this tracking feature. The concern with many advanced tracking features is the increased likelihood of spam engines to filter out the emails. So, check back in a few weeks to learn whether or not you should consider disabling those small .gif images, as well, to increase email delivery rates. In the meantime, I would suggest reading this white paper on Genius.com's site on The Truth About Email Marketing.

Social Media Tools for Enterprise Software Sales

2011-07-20T10:38:41-04:00

Whenever a new technology or platform emerges such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, every enterprise salesperson immediately tries to figure out how they can hijack that tool to improve their sales. Luckily, our new Web 2.0 world requires a more transparent and quality driven approach than past tools like banner ads, robo-calling, email campaigns, and outsourced telemarketing. Today's tools require quality content that educates and informs buyers with the best results granted to those who deliver on this promise. We are finally entering a world where great products, excellent information, and quality training mean something to the market. On the other hand, developing and delivering quality content requires time and resources. As you start down this journey, one of the easiest ways to incorporate social selling is to leverage new social media sales tools. The CEO of InsideView is Umberto Milletti, and he has outlined one of the best tools for social selling and sales intelligence in his blog post. If you have a CRM / Salesforce Automation solution such as Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, or any of the others, the quickest and best way to receive value from social media and social selling is to review what InsideView can do for your enterprise software sales effectiveness. As a SugarCRM client, Sword Ciboodle will begin using InsideView bundled with Sugar Professional next month when it is pushed down seamlessly to all Sugar Pro On-Demand clients. I'll report back several interesting insights at that time, but do yourself a favor and review InsideView today for your company.

Crowd Sourcing and CRM

2011-07-19T22:51:04-04:00

Crowd Sourcing is all the buzz this year, and my company, Sword Ciboodle has a product called Ciboodle Crowd that has me thinking about where Crowd Sourcing best fits within a CRM strategy. Wikipedia defines Crowd Sourcing as the process of outsourcing activities or tasks that are usually performed by an internal resource to the external community or crowd. The common use case for CRM vendors is the product management and product roadmap strategy process. Crowd Sourcing is commonly used to gather requirements and wish lists from the customer base to help drive the product roadmap. However, think of all the CRM related Crowd Sourcing that any business to consumer (B2C) company could employ. For example, a company selling insurance could use this product to help drive their product bundles. In a recent Progressive Insurance ad, ad, the lovely and energetic "Flo" creates insurance product bundles, but this is exactly where Crowd Sourcing works at its best.

Another great use is the customer service end of the equation. Use the Crowd Sourcing or community to answer questions or address challenges with creative answers. This is a common practice on forums for tech geeks, but moving this type of behavior to the masses is a far greater value to most organizations. Try to think of unique Crowd Sourcing solutions in your business this week and add them as comments to the Enterprise Software Executive blog. We know there are a few VP Sales and VP Marketing resources out there who have some great ideas to send our way.

Sales and Marketing Strategies

2011-07-19T11:10:08-04:00

In enterprise software, it is common for sales and marketing teams to be consumed with the task of generating leads through cold calling and sales rep driven activities. However, Jon Miller with Marketo has an excellent overview video describing how Marketo looks at the relationship between marketing and sales. In summary, Jon Miller makes sure that Marketo uses their website content to nurture all leads to a certain point so they are "sales ready" which lowers the cost of sale and increases close rates. It slightly increases the cost of marketing, but it greatly descreases the cost of sale which ultimately results in a better ROI. The video of Jon Miller's presentation is worth watching, and I suggest it as a very good use of your time. I am going to work with the Sword Ciboodle team to ensure that we implement many of Jon's suggestion and weave his recommendations into the fabric of our multi-channel customer centric contact center software marketing campaigns.

Quick Case Study - Bally Total Fitness Contact Center

2011-07-15T14:13:40-04:00

Recently, Bally Total Fitness spoke to CIO Insight Magazine about their great experience deploying Ciboodle One in their call center. Ciboodle One provides a multi-channel contact center which allows agents to work across telephone, chat, web self-service, and email in a seamless integrated and unified desktop. Bally viewed this solution as a superior solution to other competitors in the contact center / call center industry such as Salesforce.com, Rightnow, and Pega. Take a few minutes to read the CIO Insight Magazine - Bally Case Study or read more about Ciboodle One.

Marketing Automation Has Improved in the Last 2 Years

2011-07-15T13:47:27-04:00

When we last discussed lead management vendors, there were a few players like Eloqua and a couple others upstarts. Now, the industry has matured with Marketo and Genius.com leading the pack with several other strong players. These lead management vendors have evolved their solutions from basic lead management solutions to full marketing automation vendors. In my current role, I focus on selling high volume, customer centric call center software for Sword Ciboodle. Our focus on driving greater lead flow has created a renewed focus for me on lead management and marketing automation vendor solutions. Over the next several months, I will be testing out Genius.com for lead management, and testing several other technicques focused on increasing leads contact center lead flow for Sword Ciboodle. Stay tuned for updated report, reviews, and findings from the field.

Back to the Future - CRM and Lead Management

2011-04-04T10:12:03-04:00

After taking to 2 year sabbatical from posting to www.enterprisesoftwareexec.com, I have returned to find that my favorite topics of sales, social networking, enterprise social networking, lead management, lead nurting, and opportunity management, have not changed as much as I would have predicated back in 2009. I have moved on from working at a stand-alone CRM vendor, but I still spend a significant amount of time following the CRM and Marketing Automation industries.

What has changed in two years?

In the last two years, we have seen the CRM market expand to include integrated social networking integrations and recent acquisitions such as Salesforce.com's Radian6 purchase will continue that trend. On the marketing automation side of the equation, Eloqua, Marketo, and Genius.com have emerged as the leaders in lead management and marketing automation. Each vendor has expanded their lead management / lead nurturing offering to include more comprehensive and integrated solutions that bring the marketing department closer to the sales team. This has become a hot area within the marketing industry, but I am still shocked that most major B2B sales and marketing organizations are not utilizing these solutions. While CRM software has grown through departmental purchases using credit cards, it is clear that marketing departments at large enterprises are less interested in blazing trails without deep IT involvement.

What is still the same as two years ago?

Despite the integrated social networking and social CRM integrations built into the recent releases of major vendor solutions, there is still a loose connection between social networking and B2B sales and marketing on the lead side. Several Web 2.0 vendors are doing a great job of using social networking to build their own brand and market their solutions, but it is still rare for the average business person to use Twitter and Facebook for their CRM challeges. LinkedIn has emerged with a few social networking centric users as a place to post questions in addition to several other sites. However, I tend to see the same people asking and answering questions, so I am not prepared to say that social networking has arrived as a true contact channel for the average B2B lead or prospect. Many will disagree with the last statement, but I would estimate that less than 10% of prospective buyers are searching across Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to find and interact with their suspects, prospects, and customers. For the most part, B2B companies are represented by individual employees who typically have two personalities. They are well represented in their personal life with Facebook/LinkedIn, but their business life is a separate story and not represented on similar networking sites. In theory, a marketer would claim that this is the same person, but I'd suggest that keeping the two worlds separate makes it very difficult to reach these people given their lack of business connections. In other words, the VP Sales at company XYZ often has a network that consists of friends and family that has no connection to their corporate world. With the exception of paid advertising targeting them based on their connections that show a high propensity to be interested in specific solutions based on their network, many target prospects are not reachable by vendor marketing organizations via their social networks by their own design and privacy settings. On the flip side, those individuals that choose to blend the two worlds are very active and often see no difference betwen their personal and business brand. The dirty little secret that many of them do not know is that the rest of the network has already blocked their updates and removes them from networks after seeing too many work related posts. It is a fine line to walk for anyone trying to join their two worlds, and most unknowingly cross it. So, for now, I'm suggesting that social networking's impact on CRM and lead management has changed only slightly in the last two years. In subsequent posts, I'll highlight some of the new technology in this area and success stories where we are making progress as an industry.

Enterprise Social Networking - A Great Place to Start

2009-02-21T10:34:36-05:00

Recently, there has been a lot of press covering the Enterprise Social Networking industry. I have my own definition, but I have included the Wikipedia definition below:

Enterprise social software, also known as Enterprise 2.0, is a term describing social software used in "enterprise" (business) contexts. It includes social and networked modifications to company intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication. In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes structure prior to use, enterprise social software tends to encourage use prior to providing structure.

The Association for Information and Image Management(AIIM) defines Enterprise 2.0 as "a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise".

Regardless of your specific definition, it is clear that today's companies need a clear and targeted Enterprise Social Networking strategy. For some companies, it is part of their DNA and has never been formerly defined. For example, I work for an open source provider of CRM software that quickly grew from an idea in 2004 to one of the most successful startups in this decade. EnterpriseSocial Networking was never a formal strategy for the company, but it was critical to the growth and success. The company started with three dedicated and focused founders who began creating and developing their vision for next generation CRM software that leveraged thoughts and ideas from around the world. To harvest these thoughts, ideas, and contributions, they build a "community" to help them share in their goal and achieve their objective. The community was leveraged for product ideas/features, product roadmap feedback (ranking ideas/voting), submitting ideas/code/extensions, and quality assurance testing of the product during development. In many cases, the community became so dedicated to their mission that they even helped debug and fix areas of the product for the founders. The community forum quickly grew from a source of information and sharing between the founders and developers into a larger community that supported a variety of purposes ranging from consultants for hire/career/jobs to client - to - client discussions sharing the best practices for implementation and customization of the software. Over time, the community became equally important to software company and resulted in the founders becoming another peer in the community rather than driving the community. Each release was driven by the product ideas, product feedback, and assistance from the overall community. However, there is no stated Enterprise Social Networking strategy at the company, rather it is a critical part of the company culture. It is hard to quantify the value of the community because without the community, there really is no company. The community today has over 100,000 members with over 12,000 specifically focused to developing and assisting with technical details. Through the community, there have been over 5 million downloads of the software which has helped to drive more than 5,000 commercial clients using the commercial/fee based edition. Those numbers are proof that there is a huge ROI behind Enterprise Social Networking. However, the common question I receive from client is really simple. "How do I start?"

Step 1: Define your target audience. Does you company want to improve client interactions or harvest employee knowledge, or both? Research topics on the "voice of the customer" to make sure that you are "listening" to all the relevant clients, community members, partners, and stakeholders in your business.

Step 2: Review currently deployed tools and review your strategy with a holistic approach that incorporates existing communication channels such as your corporate website, demand generation programs, affiliate marketing, support portals, intranets, email campaigns, and forums. Very few companies are starting from a complete "green field" scenario, so it is important to incorporate and refine existing interaction channels.

Step 3: Deploy, test, and refine. Start with a phased approach, but move quickly enough to make an impact on your business. Start small, but grow quickly.

Step 4: Encourage your employees to adopt "social networking" tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to get them thinking along the lines of new Web 2.0 communication tools. While I noted a great example for how my company leveraged the community and forums for growth, I have a similar example where marketing failed to leverage Web 2.0 tools. At a recent user conference, the company announced a Twitter feed for news related to the user conference. The company posted only one single tweet, and that was on the topic of announcing the new Twitter feed. The lesson for all is to make sure your employees embrace, understand, and become comfortable with using these new Social Networking tools before they take them into the "Enterprise" where your company often doesn't get a second chance if they fail with communication.

In summary, many of the same concepts which drive intelligent use and adoption of social networking tools can be applied to Enterprise Social Networking. Encourage your company to begin reviewing their strategy and interacting with clients, partners, and employees using these revolutionary new tools and strategies to improve your business.

Twitter for Business, really?

2009-02-13T13:02:40-05:00

There has been a lot written about the use of Twitter for business and marketing in the enterprise recently, and I think most of the blogs / articles highlight key concepts and ideas. However, sometimes companies need to look outside their industry to really learn best practices. When enterprises today are looking for new and interesting ways to interact with their clients, look no further than the cycling community and Lance Armstrong and friends. So far, Lance Armstrong known as @lancearmstrong has almost one hundred thousand "followers". For fans of Lance Armstrong's products (i.e. Trek Bicycles, Lance Armstrong Foundation, Team Astana, etc...) there are thousands of devoted followers who follow everything from product release info to product previews to cross promotional offers/news. There is no reason why every company shouldn't take a page out of Mr. Armstrong's Twitter strategy to provide exciting and relevant "sneak preview" news and updates prior to them hitting the "newswire". I would suggest that the VP Strategy, CTO, or CEO is the perfect person to begin Tweeting to all those customers who really do care about your products and love your company.