Why PPC Management Software?
While highly effective in delivering qualified prospects, the management of pay per click (PPC) advertising on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN is increasingly complex. Many software marketers marvel at how their simple campaign with a hundred or so keywords has grown into a multi-national lead generation machine with thousands of keywords, across multiple search engines, and bidding strategies that sound a bit like war.

Successful PPC campaigns require extensive keyword lists, constant management and monitoring, sophisticated bidding strategies, and well-tested creative and landing pages to outperform the competition. Manually managing a PPC campaign of any significant size is nearly impossible.

Paid search marketing software helps software marketers manage their ad campaigns by consolidating campaign management, optimizing bidding, and eliminating tedious account management tasks to improve their marketing return on investment.

Signs Your Company May Need PPC Management Software
Is your marketing team spending more and more time monitoring your PPC campaigns? Have you shifted more of your marketing budget to PPC advertising? Or perhaps you have the opposite problem, a campaign that hasn’t been looked at in months? These are some of the indicators that send marketers in search of paid search marketing software. Another sign that it might be time to abandon your manual optimization efforts are competitor ads that continually outrank yours (and they are NOT spending more).

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The CRM Advisor
You ask the questions, and our resident CRM guru shares her wisdom.

This week’s question: “How important is the use of personalization in our email marketing campaigns?”

A: Email is one of today’s most popular marketing communication channels, and as a result, buyers receive hundreds of unsolicited promotions every week.

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By Lee B. Salz - President of Sales Dodo, LLC

There is a little test that professional buyers give to every sales person. It is a test to see if they are confident in the price they presented. They call it the flinch test. Will you pass the test?

After a lengthy buying process, the time has come to submit pricing. Countless hours are spent formulating a glorious proposal that details your comprehensive solution. Proud of your accomplishment, you present the proposal to the buyer. Skipping the sections about your company and your solution, she flips right to the pricing page. “Oh my gosh, I didn’t think it would be this expensive!”

What happens next determines whether or not you will get the business. When I say “get” the business, there are two sides to consider. The obvious is whether or not the prospect will award the business to you. The less obvious is whether your company will agree to their desired price level. The negotiation may get to a point where the prospect says they want to award you the business, but at a price unacceptable to your company. If you’ve ever been there, it is painful to say the least. As a sales person, you have a responsibility to facilitate the process in a way that leads to a mutually acceptable conclusion.

There is a trade secret in the purchasing world. They call it the “flinch test.” This is the test Procurement Agents and other professional buyers give to sales people when they provide pricing. “Wow! You are 25% higher than your competition.” These pros are trained to react with surprise so that they can see if the sales person is confident in the price they have put forward. It is nothing more than a straightforward negotiation tactic. Often times, they overstate the price difference such that you can do some quick math and see that the differential is bogus. I can recall a time where I was told that we were 50% higher than the competition. When I reviewed the numbers, this meant that the competitor was losing 18% based on fixed costs that we both had. It was highly unlikely that the competitor was signing up for this kind of an account. When I asked the Procurement Agent about that figure again, he flinched and we ultimately won the business.

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CRM In Action: Infor and CryptoLogic

Focused on integrity and innovation, CryptoLogic Inc. is a world-leading developer and supplier of Internet gaming software. CryptoLogic’s leadership in regulatory compliance makes it one of the few companies with gaming software that is certified to strict standards similar to land-based gaming.

As a provider of one of the most extensive Internet gaming solutions, CryptoLogic-developed software powers one of the largest poker rooms on the Internet and offers more than 260 online casino games and multiplayer bingo games, all in multiple languages and currencies. The company also offers back-office, player, and marketing support services to its customers.

As an international leader in online gaming, CryptoLogic operates in one of the most regulated industries. The company must provide solutions and services that both support its customers’ business growth objectives and meet the wide range of stringent government regulations that exist in most countries.

The business results of CryptoLogic are closely intertwined with the business results of its licensees. “Much of our revenue is based on the volume of online gaming activity that our licensees can achieve,” explains Patrick Siconolfi, manager, CRM Solutions, CryptoLogic. “Because of this, we have even more of a vested interest in seeing that our licensees succeed than most companies.”

In working with its licensees to optimize their marketing programs, CryptoLogic found many areas for improvement. “We found that their marketing dollars weren’t being spent as effectively as possible,” he says. “Many of our licensees were giving promotions to players who didn’t represent the most value to them.”

To correct this situation, CryptoLogic knew that it needed to implement an advanced customer relationship management solution that would help better segment players and do it in an a way that was efficient. The new solution also would need to provide analytics and reporting capabilities so CryptoLogic’s licensees could understand the results from marketing initiatives and continually improve their campaigns.

Getting Business Specific
CryptoLogic chose to implement Infor™ CRM Epiphany® Outbound Marketing to enhance its marketing product suite. “We purchased the Infor solution primarily to make our licensees’ marketing dollars go further and, ultimately, to make them more successful,” Siconolfi explains. “Of all the solutions available, Outbound Marketing clearly offered the best combination of advanced outbound marketing functionality, scalability, and ease of use.”

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The CRM Advisor
You ask the questions, and our resident CRM guru shares her wisdom.

This week’s question: “We are about to launch an aggressive email marketing program. Which approach is more effective – HTML or text?”

A: This long-standing debate is one that has yet to be resolved.  As the email marketing landscape shifts dramatically, the answer to this question isn’t so “cut and dried”, and even the top industry experts have yet to agree on which one works best. 

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By Jim Ward - President, BrainSell

Hired a person new to sales? Transitioning a promising employee to sales? Now what?

Let’s focus on business to business sales (B to B).

You may already have a training program for salespeople and if not, it’s probably a good idea to send them to a strategic and tactical sales training program.

Here’s the recipe I’ve followed over my career in sales and owning a number of businesses. And trust me, it’s been a learning process and continues to be.

One of my biggest fears is over-training. Just like training at the gym (not that I have any fear of this one for myself!), one can reverse the effects of what the training was intended. Creating a robotic, over cooked salesperson. One that can’t heal from the injury caused by over training. So use tactical training in moderation.

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By Katherine Jones, Director of Marketing at NetSuite

Many CRM systems begin to struggle as business growth expands across borders and currencies, resulting in poor visibility across the entire business organization. Consider a global organization: sales information and results cover the territory, the country, the region, and then have to roll up together at corporate headquarters.

With typical sales force automation point systems, sales, forecasts, quotas and commission calculations cannot be accurately consolidated as they cross borders or continents. If your growth plans include crossing country borders, be sure to use these criteria in checking your potential vendors:

• Sales reps and sales management in each country need control of their orders, forecast, quota and commissions in appropriate local currency.
• Accurate currency translation for roll-up of subsidiary costs, revenue, and commissions to regional and corporate headquarters.

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By: Patty Azzarello, president, Azzarello Group

Big Help for Small Business: How Companies Waste Leads

I have worked with many different sized companies and one of the universal truths I have seen is that sales people basically hate leads that are generated by marketing.

Unless of course, the prospect has money that he will lose if he doesn’t spend it today, and he is calling you to place an order.

Sales people only like HOT leads.

I don’t say this to take a shot at sales people. Effective sales people do a heroic job of cultivating their own business, and getting their own leads based on referrals.

Warm or cool leads generated by marketing by comparison are viewed as “action items”, which get in the way of developing the business they are working on.

So why bother generating leads?

If you are in the marketing role, generating leads is built into the DNA of your job description. It’s also makes for a clear measurement: how many leads did you generate and how much did it cost?

The basic goal is to spend the right amount of money and generate high quality leads that sales people use and turn into business.

The real goal is to leverage that same marketing investment to generate more HOT leads.

I have seen two basic practices make a huge difference.

Don’t Throw Away Warm Leads

This is one of the most well studied and most ignored marketing practices.

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By: John I. Todor, Author of Addicted Customers

Put Your Offering in Context—One Meaningful to Customers

Declining profit margins and limited customer loyalty, these are common concerns of many businesses. When customers treat product like commodities and shop on price or convenience they force businesses to aggressively compete with each other. Unfortunately, this just exacerbates the situation.

How can a business differentiate on value, keep margin high and win customer commitment? Decommoditize! Put their offering in a context that is meaningful and valuable to the customer.

What is context? Context is the interrelated conditions or situation in which something exists; the circumstances that define meaning or value.

How can a company put their offering in a context that is meaningful and valuable to customers? By looking at the offering from the customers’ perspective. 

Mimeo.com is a great example of a company that did just that.

Mimeo.com sells printing. In most instances, printing is a commodity. Printers compete on price. Most printers are struggling and in recent years many have gone out of business. Yet, Mimeo.com has been very successful.

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Jim Ward - President, BrainSell

What’s a Hybrid CRM Solution?

It’s the best of all worlds. Hosted and on-premise customer relationship management software. In fact — it’s the new market trend.

If you’re looking for are looking for the benefits of a hosted CRM solutions, such as low IT resource requirements and low cost of ownership, but you’re concerned about the security of your data (and you should be) since recent phishing scams have attacked some of the most well know pure hosting solutions, then a hybrid CRM solution is probably what you’ll require.

A hybrid CRM solution provides the ability to go with a purely hosted option, however it will also allow you to purchase the software and install the web solution on premise. Pure web solutions, like SageCRM, are easy to maintain (no client installs), can be maintained remotely by a business partner, and the total cost of ownership is so much lower than a monthly hosting fee. Do the math and you’ll likely find that in 2 years of hosting fees you’ve probably paid for the purchased system 2X or more depending on the size of your implementation. The cost of hosted CRM is one of the reasons why hybrid CRM is fast becoming the market trend.