The CRM Advisor
You ask the questions, and our resident CRM guru shares her wisdom.
This week’s question:
“I’m currently evaluating email marketing solutions. If I choose a hosted solution, how secure will my customer contact information be?”
A: The good news is that most third-party vendors are aware of concerns like these, and have addressed them quite successfully. Read more »
By Jim Ward - President, BrainSell
My first summer read was a book called “The Four Agreements”*. Really, a holistic self improvement read — though it struck me that “The Four Agreements” are the very same Four Disciplines that lead to successful business careers, initiatives and a general business creed for your employees of any company. In fact — you might find it’s a differentiator when you think about how your competitors do business.
The Four Agreements described below seem so obvious, yet it’s something that bears repeating and is worth having in front of your company’s team as they perform their daily activities. Don’t take these disciplines for granted and expect that everyone lives by these disciplines daily, they may try to however you’ll find that these disciplines are a constant improvement program. If you make these disciplines a company expectation and everyone’s onboard — it reflects a consistent means of doing business with clients, prospects and vendors.
“Infusion CRM has a revolutionary digital, interactive filing system that allows me to stay organized, follow up automatically and know who I need to bill, who has paid, and who I need to contact and why—and I never lose an email or any client-related detail.”
– My Wedding Film founder, Darby Schnepf
My Wedding Film is a small business with big ideas well-positioned in an explosively growing market: weddings. Based out of Arizona, My Wedding Film thrives on excellence in filming, editing, and customer relations. The company has grown through smart marketing and strong customer relations with so much success that their biggest lead source comes from referrals.
This unique business began using Infusion CRM soon after founder Darby Schnepf’s launched the company in 2001. Infusion CRM empowers Schnepf to manage the details of customer relationships almost effortlessly.
Through constant and diligent research and development they have created a “Wedding Film” so unique as to allow them to travel nationally and internationally to film weddings and events.
SugarCRM Launches New Release
Sugar 5 includes powerful new capabilities that allow for rapid and effective design and creation of customer CRM modules, as well as a new AJAX email client, and a robust “multi-instance on-demand” framework. Find out more.
CoreMetrics Offers SMB Solution
The provider of marketing optimization software and services, which already has a sizeable customer base in this market, has introduced a package designed specifically to help small and mid-sized firms optimize their online marketing efforts and drive increased ROI across all marketing programs. Find out more.
Oracle Continues Aggressive Acquisition Activity
In July, the CRM giant completed its 32nd merger in almost as many months, with the acquisition of Bharosa, Inc., a Califormia-based provider of fraud detection and identity theft prevention software. With no slowdown in sight, industry pundits wonder who will be next to become part of the Oracle empire.
Companies of all types and sizes have come to rely on email as a means of enabling fast, cost-effective communication, collaboration, and information-sharing. Email correspondence has, for many organizations today, become the primary method for corresponding with colleagues, customers, and business partners.
But, email is fraught with risk, such as viruses that can corrupt mission-critical documents and applications, hackers that will try every trick imaginable to obtain confidential information, and spam that can impact the performance other components within the communications infrastructure. These threats have the ability to wreak havoc on operations – stopping business systems and the mission-critical activities they support dead in their tracks.
Below is an overview of some of the most common email security threats, and a summary of how today’s email security technology solutions can help prevent them. Read more »
Chuck Schaeffer – CEO, Aplicor
It seems that when surveying the software as a service (SaaS) business applications market, surveyors often either feel there are too many similar vendor solutions or believe that there are still many market voids. I suspect the differences stem at least in part from the depth of the particular survey.
If you only look at the SaaS CRM or ERP markets from a broad perspective, there can appear to be a number of seemingly like business software solutions. However, if a deeper investigation continues, the primary differences among the SaaS solutions become apparent and the market voids become visible.
My view and investigation of the SaaS business software market shows strategic differences among SaaS vendor solutions in seven primary areas – architecture, customer target market, software scope or breadth, software depth, hosted delivery, information security and continuous uptime capabilities.
Big Help for Small Business: Developing Your Brand: Why Bother?
The only thing your competition can’t copy or under-price is your behavior, and how you serve your customers. THIS is what branding is about. And if you’re not doing it, you’re losing business – period!
Branding is one of the most misunderstood concepts in business. The top four misunderstandings about branding include:
1) Brand = logo
2) Good brand = logo that you see a lot
3) Branding = spending a lot of money
4) You can tell people what your brand is
You can’t “tell” people what your brand is. Your brand is a set of values granted to you by your customers based on their experience with you. And “you” means all your employees that touch the outside world. You have a brand whether or not you know it. If you want to find out what it is, ask your customers:
• What is your impression of us?
• What do we always do consistently?
• How does our sales process make you feel? What do you observe when we’re selling?
• How does the way we respond to problems make you feel?
• What do you notice about the way we present ourselves? In our store? On our website?
Background
When Microsoft Canada unveiled Windows 2000 in April 1999, the beta version was ready to ship immediately but the final release was still months away. Using market research figures, Microsoft estimated that companies take an average of nine months to make a final decision about a software upgrade.
In order to shorten that time frame and prepare companies for ordering as soon as the final release was available, Microsoft ran a campaign to get end user customers to use the beta version for testing and evaluation purposes. In this way, Microsoft Canada would be able to process orders and generate sales of Windows 2000 immediately — as soon as the final release was ready to ship.
Challenge
Microsoft decided to run a major lead generation campaign with a select group of fifty reseller partners. The campaign consisted of two parts: lead collection via the web and telemarketing. The challenge was finding a tool that would efficiently distribute more than 1000 leads to these partners and also provide the tools needed for effective lead tracking.
Read more »
Where the CRM Experts Meet
One of the best ways to gather important information about CRM solutions, techniques, and trends is to hear about them directly from the experts themselves. This Fall, many exciting and educational industry events will enable you to do just that! Below is a list of some of the coming season’s biggest conferences:
Gartner CRM Summit
September 17-19, 2007
Hollywood, FL
The 9th Annual Help Desk Professionals Conference & Expo
October 22-24, 2007
Phoenix, AZ
Achieving Contact Center Excellence
October 22-24, 2007
Park City, UT
SSPA Services Leadership Conference
September 30-October 1, 2007
New Orleans, LA
The North American Conference on Customer Management
September 30-October 3, 2007
Orlando, FL
Jason Kort is the Director of Marketing for SoftVu, a marketing automation leader that delivers personalized, relevant, and timely communications to help businesses close more sales. He leads the Interactive Services division which provides marketing strategy and creative content for SoftVu clients. In addition to guiding the company’s marketing direction, Jason is responsible for all lead generation, lead nurturing, and customer retention programs.
Jason brings over 13 years of marketing and advertising experience working with clients like Sprint, Blockbuster, and Wal-Mart. Prior to joining SoftVu, Jason was Marketing Director for Sunlight Saunas where he helped grow the online start-up to over $15 million in sales in less than 3 years.
Jason is an advocate for marketing automation and his writings can be seen in a variety of business publications and blogs. Read more about Jason on his blog.
