Back on February 13, 2010, we reported that Salesforce had raised $575M in order to fund a more aggressive acquisition policy over the next few quarters that would involve a string of small-to-mid-sized deals, with potential for larger acquisitions. The first of these new acquisitions occurred earlier this month with that $142M purchase of Jigsaw. This [...]
Netsuite Adds New Marketing Automation Vendor
April 26, 2010 Leave a Comment
LeadForce1 has joined Pardot and Silverpop Engage B2B on Netsuite’s SuiteApp.com. SuiteApp is Netsuite’s answer to Salesforce.com’s successful AppExchange. ”The integration of LeadForce1 and NetSuite brings a new dimension to customer lifecycle management,” says Sushil Jha, Chief Revenue Officer at LeadForce1. “It helps marketing and sales teams collaborate more effectively in targeting prospects, and it [...]
A Strategic Look at Selecting a Marketing Automation Vendor
April 16, 2010 Leave a Comment
Astadia provides deeper guidance on how to select a marketing automation vendor on their company blog. In this post they are advocating to look beyond functionality and think about how marketing automation fits from an overall strategic standpoint. Full disclosure: Astadia consults on a variety of SaaS solutions like Salesforce.com, Eloqua, and Xactly but this is still good [...]
Salesforce.com Chatter Preview
April 13, 2010 Leave a Comment
Salesforce.com is still in the process of beta testing Chatter with customers and here is a nice review of it’s functionality by David Tiber at CIO. The artice is entitled Why Salesforce.com Chatter Matters. Enter Chatter, Salesforce.com’s offering that applies social networking metaphors to the problem of collaboration. It has the immediacy and feel of [...]
Marketing Automation Meets Sales 2.0
March 21, 2010 Leave a Comment
Jep Castelein at The Connected Marketer discusses how marketing automation dovetails with concepts discussed in Sales 2.0… Buyer Education The automated email campaigns in Marketing Automation systems are a great tool for buyer education. Based on a lead’s profile, interests and responses you can engage in a dialog focused on knowledge transfer. Once the lead [...]
LoopFuse Launches CRM Integration Tool
December 25, 2009 Leave a Comment
LoopFuse’s new CRM Integration Wizard enables Marketing staff to kick-start their CRM integration by themselves, without having to rely on IT staff or wade through lengthy implementation manuals, or take the historical approach of spending additional budget in costly consulting engagements. According to LoopFuse, the CRM Integration Wizard is a simple 4-step, event-driven process that [...]
Garner Says CRM Usage Increasing
July 20, 2009 Leave a Comment
Worldwide CRM market revenue totalled $9.15 billion in 2008, a 12.5 percent increase from 2007 revenue of $8.13 billion, according to Gartner Inc. Analysts said that market growth was driven by enterprise investments in technologies focused on customer retention, analytics and on-demand solutions. Software as a Service (SaaS) continued to drive the market forward, representing [...]
Marketing Automation versus CRM
June 16, 2008 Leave a Comment
I have often found that many CRM (Customer Relationship Management) companies say they do marketing automation. While this may be true on some features, most come up short when you look at their out of the box capability. For example, Salesforce.com limits the amount of email sent to 500 per day per user. Just to [...]
How to Implement Your CRM
March 27, 2008 Leave a Comment
One key element of any marketing automation soution is a solid customer relationship management (CRM) system. Having implemented Salesforce.com and Netsuite at 3 companies, I understand the pain of implementing a CRM into an organization. Patrick Cahill’s makes some great points in his article From Poor To Perfect: 6 Steps For Launching A New CRM [...]
The Best Graphic to Add to Your Company Emails
August 26, 2007 Leave a Comment
The #1 design change businesses should make is adding their sales rep’s face and contact info to them. You’ll want to use your CRM and marketing automaton system to segment your list by territory, so each prospect and client gets their own individual rep’s smiling face on their email. Best spot — in top left [...]
