Sales 2.0, Marketing & Sales Systems trends
If you've been following the marketing or sales industry press you'll have picked up that there are several topics that are percolating down from pioneers to mainstream:
- Hosted Applications - Web, SaaS or Cloud application delivery is now mainstream
- Marketing Automation - particularly email marketing automation and precision marketing
- Multi-channel marketing - combining social media, email, direct mail, mobile and more
- Multi-media marketing - combining text, video, SMS and more
- Mobile marketing - exploiting geo-positioning and profiling to deliver targeted solutions and offers
With an eye on the future, and the protection of your investment not just in the software but in the implementation and training and integration, it is useful to have a view on which of these are or might be important to you in the time-frame you are considering for the pay-back period of the application you are considering.
Let us help you identify and prioritise future steps and prepare a roadmap or blueprint with you.
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Marketing & Sales application trends
The terms differ depending on business sector and size but typically these are key
- Inbound marketing, attraction marketing, traffic,
- Lead capture, demand generation, list building,
- Lead nurture, lead scoring, precision marketing, behavioural marketing,
- Lead conversion, pipeline management, sales forecasting,
- Customer life-time value, acquisition cost, Return on Marketing Expenditure
- Marketing and sales integration, Sales 2.0,
These terms are used by many technology and application vendors, so it can be helpful to gain an appreciation of what they mean and how the application helps you to achieve the benefits claimed.
Marketing & Sales application evaluation
The apparent cost of most marketing and sales applications has dropped to petty cash levels. The increase in 'Free', Freemium, and low monthly cost Hosted applications may see very attractive. However this can quickly lead to a 'trial and error' approach to selection and implementation.
There have been many high profile cases where medium and large businesses have failed to gain business benefit from CRM and similar application implementations. There are many reasons, including project scope creep, data and integration issues, user adoption (or rejection) issues, computerising inefficient or ineffective marketing and sales processes, loss of momentum for Phase 2+ after a difficult Phase 1 and so on.
Most Marketing and Sales applications are attractive at first sight. However it is only after detailed drilling down that the degree of fit (or lack of fit) between the application and the business emerge. It doesn't take too many '30 day trial' evaluations to add up to a serious dent on marketing, sales and business productivity.
Let us mentor, coach and support you through the evaluation, and maybe the implementation too, so you save time and keep focused on the key activities of your business.
