With more and more customers establishing Saleforce.com as their marketing database, Dreamforce 2009 was a great opportunity to get tuned in to what Salesforce.com is planning for the marketing automation community. There was plenty of buzz, tons of vendors, and Colin Powell (a highlight of the conference). Read the Twitter stream at #df09 to get the personality of the show. I am going to focus on what I think were the key marketing automation takeaways.
Chatter – Chatter is the name for the new Salesforce.com Community Cloud, also referred to as the social network for the enterprise. Chatter looks a lot like Facebook, and allows you to watch conversations and post comments, and follow not only people, but other Salesforce.com objects. Marc Benioff’s vision (paraphrased) is to allow you to be as aware of what your co-workers are doing as you are of your friends. What was really interesting to me was that although the build up for Chatter by the Salesforce team was enormous, the reaction by the crowd was, how do I say this, subdued. My informal survey found no one that had identified a compelling business case for rolling it out. So why does it matter to a marketer? Because if Salesforce.com thinks it is important, it would probably be wise to keep your eye on it. Here is a pretty good post (Salesforce Chatter: Social operating systems emerge on the IT stage) that came out the day of the announcement that provides a nice perspective.
Campaign Management Features – There are a couple of useful marketing tools that have been released over the last 6 months that I think have some positive impact for marketers.
Campaign Member Types – Do want to capture different information based on the type of tactic that you are using in your campaign (what do emails, events, and web site traffic have in common – almost nothing)? Putting all those custom fields on your campaigns gives you a sea of empty fields in your user interface. Campaign Types are basically record types that allow you to assign specific page layouts to each type, and control the Campaign Member status pick list as well. Use this to capture more data without creating a usability problem.
Campaign Influence – Which is more important, the first campaign a lead responded to, or the campaign that caused them to convert? I don’t know and neither do you. The better approach is to make sure you can look at all of the influences that your customers and prospects have experienced and do tons of analysis to look for trends. Campaign Influence is all of the Campaign Member history that is associated with your contacts. If you tie weighting and scoring to each of these influences you can slice and dice the relationship between your contacts’ over all engagement with the resulting buying decisions in any number of ways. By the way, Jason Stewart of Demandbase did a nice job of explaining this, and he also has a great blog (Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation demandblog) that you should add to your regular reading.
Communities – Salesforce has provided a number of tools that can be combined to make a Salesforce based community platform a very attractive option for deploying an on line community. Salesforce showed their own community site, developed on the Salesforce cloud platform using such features as Ideas, Real Time Sites, and Programmable Cloud Logic. If you are anxious to begin communicating with your customers, but don’t have a place on your website to send them, you may not be as far away as you think. Look into the Force.com development platform as an alternative to expensive web development projects and start building your own online community by yourself, quickly and cheaply.
Salesforce is a great platform for using automation to develop more effective marketing to your customers throughout the customer lifecycle. With the momentum on display at Dreamforce 2009, both from Salesforce and its partners, the marketing community that uses Salesforce.com is in a very good place.
Take a look at the online demonstration of the Right On Interactive marketing automation solution: 5Buckets for Appexchange
My conclusion after reading Chris Anderson’s new book , “Free: The Future of a Radical Price”, is that Free is complicated. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great book and comes at a perfect time, since we continue to be greeted each day with fantastic new technologies without any hint of a sustainable business model in sight. Everything is Free. This is a problem in the Marketing Automation space, because the problems that we are trying to solve are complex, and the technology we use is expensive to develop.
Anderson has once again (as he did in The Long Tail) helped to make sense of a confusing array of factors in explaining how the “Free” model is not only inevitable but natural. Out of his numerous examples of historical precedence and recent trends two clear factors emerge from his book:
1) Information wants to be free – Knowledge is meant to be shared. Trying to hide it is like trying to hold a bowl of jell-o in your hands.
2) The force of economic gravity – Paraphrased, this states that as soon as the cost of a product is known, the price of the product will continue to drive downwards toward that cost.
These forces are very strong and acknowledgement of them should be at the forefront of your pricing and packaging strategies for your products and services. People will not expect to pay a premium for your expertise or your technology. That is why Free is so complicated, because that is where the cost lies. Anderson stresses that creativity is the only solution, and fortunately offers many examples and suggestions to help get the creative juices flowing.
What are the marketing automation takeaways? Here are mine:
- Quantify Time Savings – Time is still a valuable commodity that people will pay to preserve. If you are offering an automation solution, you better know exactly what you are automating and how much time you are saving our customers. You should be able to show this to your prospect s and back it up with some numbers
- Forget about Protecting Your “Secret Sauce” – Whether it is your technology, or your processes, you should operate under the assumption that everyone already knows it, or worse, nobody cares. Share your knowledge. Don’t spend your time trying to make it scarce, it is just not possible anymore.
- Search for Bigger Problems – As soon as you sense that solutions are becoming commodities, start looking for more complex problems to solve, that offer more value to your customers. Travel Agents, Newspapers, and Music Labels are just a few examples of industries that are being forced to find value, when their previously scarce products became free commodities seemingly overnight. Yours will follow sooner or later so don’t wait too long.
As I said, it’s complicated and I don’t have an easy feeling about how this is all going to play out. But at least it’s not boring.
You can get some other great perspectives on the book from two great minds, Seth Godin (read his post here) and Malcolm Gladwell (read his article here). Gladwell disagrees with Anderson, and Godin generally concurs. I encourage you to read these opposing viewpoints, and form your own opinion. No matter what your conclusion is, it is definitely time to figure out how a price of “Free” affects you.
| December 3, 2009 |
| 1:00 pm | to | 2:00 pm |
Blogs are fantastic inbound marketing tools to acquire new leads and prospects. Email is a fantastic tool to nurture and sustain these relationships. During the webinar learn how marketers are combining these two tactics to not only acquire new leads but nurture into closed business.
Join marketing leaders Chris Baggott Co-founder, CEO of Compendium Blogware, and Richard Cunningham, VP Marketing of Right On Interactive for a new webinar.
Learn best practices to:
- Generate leads through blogging
- Nurture leads to action
- Integrate blogging into customer lifecycle messaging
Register for the webinar now!
Title: Using Blogs to Generate and Nurture Demand into Closed Business
Date: Thursday, December 3, 2009
Time: 1:00 p.m. EST | 12:00 p.m. CST | 11:00 a.m. MST | 10:00 a.m. PST
Length: 1 hour
When I talk to customers about Marketing Automation, the idea that is most exciting is adding Customer Engagement to their segmentation mix. Thinking about communicating to your audience based on their interaction with you adds a whole new dimension to the conversation and really stimulates the imagination. The most important engagement is an organization’s customer lifecycle. But once you dig deeper within an organization’s data you will discover that almost every object has a lifecycle: contacts, opportunities, support cases, products, contracts, etc. By digging into these lifecycles you can really help narrow the conversation and make it even more meaningful.
Unfortunately most data bases have this “lifecycle” information scattered about in many forms, multiple true/false fields, start and end dates, transaction files that need to be summarized, etc. When trying to make sense of this, use the following guideline. There are three basic pieces of information that you need to find:
Status
Status Date
Status History
Status
Status is another word for Stage. Think of the process that the object goes through and identify the main stages of that process. I am going to use a slightly different example to help illustrate the point. Let’s say that your organization involves some of your customers in an Advisory Committee. Is there really a lifecycle for this?
Yes, it looks like this:
A committee is active but maybe your committees are actually formed annually, or around specific topics and so they are disbanded, or replaced. But the history is important; these committees are now just “Inactive”. This may not be too interesting, but there is another lifecycle here, the Committee Member status. When you add that it looks like this:
Committee members come and go. They are “Active”, then leave and become “Inactive” So now you actually have 4 statuses to play with, and in fact eight combinations of status that are interesting.
Date
When looking at an object you will want to not only its status, but when the object reached that status. Simple questions like ”Who has been on the committee the longest”, or even more interesting “Who became active this year, and how does that compare with the interest level of last year”? You see what I mean when I say that your marketing automation projects can suddenly take on a new life. But there is one more piece of information.
Status History
The best situation is when your database retains the history of when the object reached (or left) each stage, including the stages in which is no longer resides. This lets you answer the following question “How many people have served on committees for at least two years.” That could actually include people who are no longer active in a committee. In fact it could include committees that are no longer active. But that group of people was engaged with your organization for two years, and that information is interesting. So you are looking for information like this. As I mentioned above, as long as you know the sequence of stages (see diagram above) you only have to know either when an objected reached a stage or left a stage. You can construct the rest.
Good news for Salesforce.com users
Those of you that use Salesforce.com as your marketing database can use a simple tool to make capturing this information easier: Field History Tracking. First of all, make sure objects in your database have the following fields:
Status
Status Date
Identify the process that the object goes through and identify stages of the process (see the lifecycle diagram above). Make those Stages pick list items for the Status field (put them in chronological order rather than alphabetical order to enforce understanding of the process with your Salesforce users). You will also want to make the Status Date, which represents that date that the object entered that selected statge that the Status field represents, a required field.
Once these fields are created, set Field History tracking on the Status and Status Date field. Salesforce will automatically keep track of any changes for you (see below).
This information can be accessed through the standard reporting, by Selecting “Other Reports” and finding your object with the “History” option. You will be presented with the history shown above as fields that you can select and filter on.
The Marketing Automation takeaway here is to keep digging into customer engagement data. The more you find, the more you can target your message. And the more targeted your message is, the more likely it is to be heard.
