Driving Effectiveness - From Offer to Order
Cloud computing enables software companies to leverage marketing automation and grow their business.
By Barbara Angius Saxby, Accelent Consulting
Dec. 02, 2009
Cloud Computing continues to generate new and innovative business opportunities - not to mention, a great deal of enthusiasm. I was amazed that more than 19,000 people attended Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference last month, packing the aisles of the event floor. One of the topics drawing the most attendees was marketing automation with system Integrators demonstrating one-click synchronization of marketing and sales processes and lead data.
As a business consultant who has worked with several of these solutions, I have been excited about the benefits they deliver when integrated with CRM systems. The buzz at Dreamforce validated my beliefs that marketing automation, as a Cloud-based solution, will deliver significant business value throughout the organization. In particular, it will allow executives to better manage the business from "Offer to Order." Here are several ways in which marketing automation solutions, with analytics, can improve business efficiencies for CEOs, Sales VPs, CMOs, CFOs, and CIOs.
CEOs
Most CEOs would agree that the main focus in the organization is sales. They may be somewhat aware that marketing automation solutions can help generate higher conversion rates, more qualified leads, and shorten sales cycles. This is all good. Yet, they are more likely interested in whether the company is going to hit its quarterly targets and in keeping operating costs in line. They want to improve efficiencies and need better ways to manage, track and analyze how the business is doing and how it will grow.
By integrating sales and marketing systems, with advanced analytics capabilities, they can now monitor end-to-end process flows from Offer to Order. This means CEOs (and COOs) can track the business from when marketing defines a strategy, creates a campaign, captures a name, qualifies it as a prospect, turns it over to sales as a lead, and then how sales moves it through the pipeline to the quote stage and then to an order and new customer (as well as afterwards through service and support). The benefit of this visibility is that business is more predictable, cost versus revenue is more measurable, departments are more accountable, and customer data is richer than ever before.
Sales VPs
Traditionally, lead management in the CRM system starts when a sales rep is assigned a lead. There is an age-old dialog between sales and marketing about how well qualified the lead is - and sales often will reject (read: won't call) the leads they don't think are good, and instead, ask for more. Based on the lack of marketing's ability to really target and pre-qualify a prospect this is understandable; in order to meet their numbers, sales reps have to focus on the leads with the highest probability to move to a sale. There is also the question of who gets the mildly warm leads to qualify - Telemarketing, Inside Sales, Direct Reps or Channel Partners?
Now, with one-click integration of marketing automation with the CRM systems, sales can have up- to-the-minute information about the prospect as well as richer lead data. Marketing teams gather, pre-qualify and nurture leads and provide sales with vital updates on the behavior, interests, and intent of prospects, in real-time. Now, processes can be tracked from the beginning including the campaign strategy and prospect profile. And these systems can automate, based on the level of pre-qualification, where the lead gets routed for follow up.
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As a business consultant who has worked with several of these solutions, I have been excited about the benefits they deliver when integrated with CRM systems. The buzz at Dreamforce validated my beliefs that marketing automation, as a Cloud-based solution, will deliver significant business value throughout the organization. In particular, it will allow executives to better manage the business from "Offer to Order." Here are several ways in which marketing automation solutions, with analytics, can improve business efficiencies for CEOs, Sales VPs, CMOs, CFOs, and CIOs.
CEOs
Most CEOs would agree that the main focus in the organization is sales. They may be somewhat aware that marketing automation solutions can help generate higher conversion rates, more qualified leads, and shorten sales cycles. This is all good. Yet, they are more likely interested in whether the company is going to hit its quarterly targets and in keeping operating costs in line. They want to improve efficiencies and need better ways to manage, track and analyze how the business is doing and how it will grow.
By integrating sales and marketing systems, with advanced analytics capabilities, they can now monitor end-to-end process flows from Offer to Order. This means CEOs (and COOs) can track the business from when marketing defines a strategy, creates a campaign, captures a name, qualifies it as a prospect, turns it over to sales as a lead, and then how sales moves it through the pipeline to the quote stage and then to an order and new customer (as well as afterwards through service and support). The benefit of this visibility is that business is more predictable, cost versus revenue is more measurable, departments are more accountable, and customer data is richer than ever before.
Sales VPs
Traditionally, lead management in the CRM system starts when a sales rep is assigned a lead. There is an age-old dialog between sales and marketing about how well qualified the lead is - and sales often will reject (read: won't call) the leads they don't think are good, and instead, ask for more. Based on the lack of marketing's ability to really target and pre-qualify a prospect this is understandable; in order to meet their numbers, sales reps have to focus on the leads with the highest probability to move to a sale. There is also the question of who gets the mildly warm leads to qualify - Telemarketing, Inside Sales, Direct Reps or Channel Partners?
Now, with one-click integration of marketing automation with the CRM systems, sales can have up- to-the-minute information about the prospect as well as richer lead data. Marketing teams gather, pre-qualify and nurture leads and provide sales with vital updates on the behavior, interests, and intent of prospects, in real-time. Now, processes can be tracked from the beginning including the campaign strategy and prospect profile. And these systems can automate, based on the level of pre-qualification, where the lead gets routed for follow up.
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