LoopFuse Blog

How to make friends with the sales team

April 24th, 2008 10:20 pm by Tom Elrod

I continually hear from marketers how difficult it is work with their sales team. This is an issue that exists in most organizations and is something I have talked about in the past (see more on the “silo effect”). So I wanted to provide some advice on how help build those bridges…

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First off, sales people care about selling… If you are not helping them sell, you are not helping them. This is a simple statement, but important to understand. So in that vein, here are some ways that you can help the sales team using a Marketing Automation solution:

1. Make that first contact for them – create a lead nurturing program that will automatically send out an introductory e-mail on their behalf after a lead has registered on your web site (i.e. for a trial, download, etc.). These are basically boiler plate e-mails anyhow, so can send an e-mail with personalization for the lead’s information (i.e. Hello Bob) as well as including the sales person’s direct e-mail address, phone number, etc. in the e-mail header and the e-mail signature (this way if the lead replies, is going directly to their sales person).

2. Give them the info where they want it – sales people live in the CRM. They do not want to log into multiple systems to get information and often won’t. So you need to make sure your Marketing Automation solution pushes all the leads’ activity (i.e. email opens, form registrations, web activity, etc.) into the CRM.

3. Tell them what a lead is doing, when they are doing it - sometimes making a sale comes down to timing. Being able to catch an elusive lead while they are at their desk is often difficult, so having a Marketing Automation solution that sends out an e-mail to the sales person when their lead is on your web site or opens your e-mail will give them the advantage.

There are plenty of other things that can be done with a Marketing Automation solution that will make your sales team happy, such as the basics of qualifying leads before sending to the CRM and automatically nurturing the leads that are not yet qualified, but that is for another post (maybe even a book).

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Posted in Demand Generation, LoopFuse | Comments Off

OSBC 2008 Review

March 31st, 2008 9:33 am by Roy Russo

Having just returned from San Francisco and reading many of the blogs/press on this year’s OSBC, I felt it was a good time to present an unfiltered and honest review (opinion?) of OSBC 2008:

Great Topics with Great Panels - the show gets better every year. Unfortunately, I missed some of the all-star panels (Mickos, ShuttleWorth, Roberts), but every single panel I attended was full of audience participation, and interesting/educated panelists.
Good news: Less attorney-blabber. I refuse to attend their panels for fear I’ll be billed $500/hr. to listen to them. This is the mundane sort of task that I already pay our own attorneys for.
It sure is damn nice to look over a crowded conference hall and be able to see that a large and growing percentage of the marketers in the room are existing LoopFuse customers.
It sure is damn nice to look over a crowded conference hall and be able to see that a shrinking percentage of the marketers in the room are existing Eloqua customers. (They’re easy to find… just look for the marketers that are broke and pissed off.)
As usual, Matt Asay’s keynote has a perfect blend of interesting and inspirational.
I wasn’t around for any of the other keynotes. I would’ve liked to have heard Red Hat’s Whitehurst. As for listening to the HP keynote, I paid my dues while at JBoss… ’nuff said.
Rob Bearden and Larry Augustin were among my favorite sessions. Perhaps the fact they plugged LoopFuse may have had something to do with it.
My panel was a solid mix of talent. Sitting next to Ian from Alfresco was an experience. Keeping on topic was a futile effort.
RingSide Networks launched at the show. I’m still not sure what my ex-Jbossians created, but Bob Bickel is involved and David Skok invested, so it must be good?

Roy’s shout-outs:

Matt Asay, thanks for spending a whole of 30 seconds with the Loopies.
Chris Harrick (SugarCRM) - Stand-up and incredibly knowledgeable guy. I think we got off on the wrong foot, but thats how I roll.
Raven Zachary (451 Group) - thanks for moderating and sharing hair-styling tips, but you’re still wrong on MySQL, Zimbra, and JBoss.
Dave Rosenberg (MuleSource) & Bill Karpovich (Zenoss) : These guys are dangerous in the same room together - Statler & Waldorf.
I finally met Javier Soltero (CEO, Hyperic) - He’s probably our #1 fan, one of our most active users, and great at offering unfiltered startup advice. He may also be close to being a bigger smart-ass than I - we’re neck and neck.
Mark Hinkle (Zenoss) - Good to finally meet him in person. Thanks for the blog.
The Hypericans - These guys are the official San Francisco welcoming committee. Always a good time.
Myself (LoopFuse) - I’m proud that I managed to sit through a whole session without insulting anyone in the room (that I know of). This CEO thing is changing me. I refuse to play golf…

Posted in Open Source | No Comments »

Bulls on Parade

February 15th, 2008 10:30 am by Roy Russo

From inception, LoopFuse has maintained a belief in its inevitability of success. I realized recently that there was one thorn in my side, from all the recent press coverage, that I had to address. Overwhelmingly, the media, prospects, and customers took to the message; the immense value we add to internal marketing and sales dynamics. However, one interview, didn’t sit well with me… where an interviewer asked the geniuses at Eloqua for their take on LoopFuse. Being who I am, and never backing down from a fight (that I can easily win), I felt compelled to answer inaccuracies put forward by our competitor.

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The article in question, can be found here, and features a rather smarmy rebuttal from Thor Johnson, SVP of Marketing at Eloqua. Now let’s dissect the FUD:

“Still, Johnson said he was unconcerned with LoopFuse, noting that he already has a plethora of smaller rivals.”

The facts show otherwise… our own LoopFuse OneView product shows a “concerned” Eloqua frequently scouring our site for information:

Perhaps its difficult to be concerned, when you’re in a constant state of panic? Considering that our LoopFuse site only has about 20 pages on it, what on earth could they be spending over 11 hours on it for? Did they lose something? Customers, perhaps? Maybe they’re all looking for jobs after the ship sinks? Dunno.

“That pricing compares favorably to Eloqua. Its service starts at $3,000 per month for a team of about five users, but with no limits on e-mail or page views”

This is a joke, right? Is this pricing before or after you nickle-and-dime them to death with hourly support expenses? Is it before or after you up-sell them the following year on multiples over the previous year, because (as we all know) you hold their data hostage. The truth is that we are consistently a fraction of Eloqua’s yearly Total Cost of Ownership, and offer a far broader and easier-to-use product (and you’re free to take your data with you at any time).

Oh, and Thor, thanks for the free press. Next time, remind yourself that the LoopFuse founders used your “product” for 3 years, and will correct you when you feel like spreading the FUD around.

Posted in Demand Generation, LoopFuse, eMail Marketing, Market Talk | 2 Comments »

LoopFuse @ OSBC 2008

February 13th, 2008 10:33 am by Roy Russo

LoopFuse has been invited to attend a panel on “Converting the Open Source Lead Funnel” at this year’s Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). Although I would never pass up a chance at listening to Matt Asay blabber on about the wonders of OSS, backed by a slide deck with such OSS visionaries as Homer Simpson, this year’s OSBC aims to provide a wealth of information beyond that to any and all OSS companies; from competitive advantage topics, marketing essentials, community relations, and legal issues. This is a must-attend conference for any OSS entrepreneur and OSS executive.

The panel I will be taking part in, is similar to last year’s “Downloads to Dollars” panel, where OSS marketers discussed what works/doesn’t in OSS marketing initiatives. The 451 Group’s Raven Zachary will be moderating the panel. I will be joined by some heavy hitters in the OSS world - from Alfresco, Zend, and SugarCRM.

So if any of you are wondering, “Can LoopFuse crack the open source conversion conundrum?“, as the 451 Group’s Matthew Aslett asks, this is the place to get answers. Attendees are always free to ask me how we “cracked” it at JBoss, using a dysfunctional marketing automation product, and how our current OSS customers are leveraging our knowledge with a superior product/service offering today.

Posted in Demand Generation, LoopFuse, Open Source, eMail Marketing, Market Talk | No Comments »

LoopFuse OneView 3.0 Announced

January 29th, 2008 3:25 pm by Roy Russo

So ends yet another cycle of coding, testing, deployment, and overall innovation. Although I’m starting to get tired of constantly out-innovating our bobo competitors and watching them cry like little babies, I never get tired of bragging about it or taking their customers - such is business, the American way.

This past weekend, the LoopFuse team deployed the latest release [press] of our On-Demand offering to our Tier-1 network operations center. This release marked a major milestone for LoopFuse, as it added several significant features to an already feature-rich and flexible product suite, designed to improve marketing and sales efficiency (ie. Increase revenue and lower costs). Below is a short description of what you’ll find in the latest release:

Automated Lead Nurturing: This isn’t your grandmother’s lead nurturing tool. OneView’s Lead Nurturing module touches every part of the LoopFuse system and your CRM, allowing you to create the richest lead nurturing programs for your organization imaginable. You can instantly build workflow’s that encompass a lead’s web activity, email activity, and CRM activity and have that workflow automatically send email campaigns and modify that lead’s fields within your configured CRM. The additional reporting capabilities built around lead nurturing also allow you to not only gauge how your programs are performing, but provide the necessary information to better-tune them for maximum efficiency in warming up your prospects until they’re ready to buy.
Activity History CRM integration: Now in 3.0, OneView automagically enters in real-time information in to your CRM for specific leads. The as-it-happens activity history injection is triggered whenever a lead visits your site, opens an email campaign, or completes a lead capture form. This is an important addition, allowing sales personnel to have real-time actionable data from within your CRM and continuing to provide a 360-degree of a particular prospect’s activities and interests.
Lead Capture Reporting: What good is a process if you can’t measure it? To answer that question, we’ve augmented our reporting capabilities with a real-time look at your lead capture information. Marketers can now gauge their lead capture activity for specific lead capture forms and also view trend information over time.

So thats my elevator-pitch on the recent additions to the LoopFuse platform. All great additions to help round-out our marketing automation solution.

Looking forward to February, we will be releasing Google AdWords API integration, allowing marketers to better measure ROI against their Google AdWords spend. Although this is possible currently, the addition of the API integration will make the process seamless and increase flexibility for our users… and inevitably make our competitors cry some more.

Posted in Demand Generation, LoopFuse, eMail Marketing, Web Analytics | No Comments »

SpringSource makes a big move

January 29th, 2008 2:55 pm by Tom Elrod

It was announced today that SpringSource is acquiring Covalent. For those who are not interested in the happenings in the technology space, no reason to read further. For those that are, this is BIG news.

For those not familiar with Covalent, they are the commercial entity behind several Apache projects, Apache Web Server being the most notable. Although not as flamboyant as other open source business, they are THE guys you would want to go to for Apache Web Server support. Heck, they are the guys that JBoss partnered with so can include Apache Web Server support alongside Tomcat and JBoss support.

To me, this acquisition signals intent to broaden the reach of SpringSource towards being the source for a larger stack. So compared to the much talked about LAMP stack (i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL, Php/Perl), another popular stack is LAMJ (i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL, Java). Spring is already well positioned to be a top provider of the “J” in the stack and now the “A” as well.

Posted in Open Source | No Comments »

Forecasting beyond the pipeline

January 21st, 2008 10:39 am by Tom Elrod

After reading one of Will Prices’ blog posts that touched on the impact of forecasting, it started me thinking about how most companies look at sales forecasting (btw, Will’s blog is a great read in general). Today, most companies use their CRM to forecast their future revenue stream. This is a perfectly acceptable practice and is frankly one of the primary reasons for using a CRM. Actually, when you look closely at CRMs, will see that they are designed more towards providing insight to management than actually helping the sales force close deals (but that is for another blog).

While many of these companies using a CRM are able to produce short term forecasting based off of the immediate sales pipeline, they often have little or no way to forecast beyond it. The main reason for this is that they usually don’t have the data needed and when they do, no way to analyze that data for predictability. I’m going to assume I just lost some people with this last sentence, so let me provide a simplified example.

Let’s say you are a B2B company that sells software primarily online. Most of your sales originate from people that visit your web site (which you know based off the lead source within your CRM). Your average sales cycle is 60 days (i.e. period from lead creation to opportunity closed-won… again, courtesy your trusty CRM). Your close rate is 50%, because are not doing a good job of qualifying leads (shame on you). Finally, your average deal size is $25K. So, in this example, if have 10 new leads created today, can estimate that will have $125K in revenue from them in 2 months time (obviously am over-simplifying this).

Since I know that most of my leads come from my web site, if I see that my web site traffic doubled since last month, I should also be able to safely assume that my revenue will increase as well. The problem is how much?

Now, let’s assume you have the capability to determine that 90% of your sales came from leads that visited your web site at least 4 times within 6 weeks of becoming a lead within your CRM. Given this indicator of sales, you can start predicting sales from web traffic. For example, if know that have 25 companies who have visited your web site more than 4 times within the last 6 weeks, then forecast a revenue of $562.5K in 3.5 months.

There are a number of data points correlating web traffic patterns to sales patterns that can be used to help forecast future sales. The key is to be able to derive these correlations based on historic sales information; otherwise all you are left with is a SWAG. Having a tool that automatically ties web traffic patterns to consequential sales opportunities also helps.

Posted in LoopFuse, Market Talk | No Comments »

On Hiring Talent

January 16th, 2008 12:11 pm by Roy Russo

Right on the heels of LoopFuse being proclaimed “like crack for marketers”, I happened across a CNBC special, “A history of video game industry”. Although it was a great summary show on the history of the industry, I found the few minutes covering the Atari developers mirroring something I have often experienced in the past and experience almost daily at LoopFuse. The short of it is that after Warner had purchased Atari, it’s small core of developers were responsible for creating, designing, and programming the actual video games. Where competitors and consumers alike, believed there were hundreds of employees involved in the production of these video games, in all cases it centered around 4 to 5 very accomplished programmers.

I know what you’re thinking… “Who cares? Atari died a painful death anyway.” Indeed, but the painful death occured after this small clan of developers decided to leave, and start Activision. You’ve heard of Activision, right? Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, Quake, and now (acquired Blizzard) World of Warcraft.

Ok, so now for how the relation happens… Not a week goes by that we don’t have a prospect investor, analyst, customer, or even bobo competitors wondering how LoopFuse is able to innovate so quickly. An astute observer will note that we have literally built an enterprise-class product within a year, comparable and very often exceeding the functionality and reliability of competitors that have been in business for over 7 years with mountains of capital behind them.

So the question inevitably pops up… “How do you do it?”

I still think people don’t want to hear the truth. The truth is boring, simple, and probably sounds like a lie… “We have the most talented and motivated people we can find working on the product”. Too boring, right? Yep, so Tom and I have resorted to asking people “Do you take your $120k Mercedes for maintenance to the dealership or Bob’s mechanic shop?”

So there you have it, folks. Theres our secret sauce, our kimono is wide open, and the cookbook is in circulation. We learned just a little bit of common sense while at JBoss… Marc taught us well, as he pushed for all-stars in every corner of the company; IT, Development, Sales, Marketing, and even Accounting.

Posted in LoopFuse, Market Talk | No Comments »

ZDNet gets clued in

December 15th, 2007 11:29 pm by Tom Elrod

Recently I came across this article by Dana discussing “why Sourceforge is losing ground with commercial open source players.” The answer lies within the question itself… commercial open source. Any business that does operations online, and especially an open source business, needs to be able to identify the different types of visitors that are visiting their site.

After an interview with Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator, it is apparent that Dana comes to this realization himself stating that having full information on visitors “lets them fine-tune their strategies, initiate sales calls, and create alliances quickly.”

The tooling required to do this effectively is just not present within Sourceforge and is a necessity, not a luxury, for open source companies. Did I mention that Appcelerator uses LoopFuse?

Posted in LoopFuse, Open Source | No Comments »

Market Talk: Marketing Automation in 2007 (2008)

December 13th, 2007 9:15 am by Roy Russo

As 2007 draws to a close, I thought I’d post my version of a “Year-In-Review” blog covering activity in the marketing automation space. Certainly its been an active year with some M&A and IPO activity, and new startups ramping up, and some complimentary market players diving in. This is, no doubt, a hot space to be in (kinda of reminds me of the early JBoss days), and what makes this an even more exciting time is that there are no clear leaders in the space.

What you will note is a common theme; that everyone (even those in complimentary markets) are moving toward the same objective - a complete and consolidated solution for all marketing (and sales) needs. Its a natural progression, I believe, as the email marketing folks are trying to differentiate themselves out of the race-to-the-bottom pricing effects, analytics companies are under pressure from cheaper and sometimes free alternatives, and marketing automation companies are looking to beat everyone else to be the first with this holy grail of solutions (I don’t believe anyone has it “right” just yet).

So here goes, what I believe were considerable moves in this space for 2007 that will set the stage for it in 2008…

Unica: Acquired MarketingCentral (7/07). A good play that helps round out their offering. Not really in the marketing automation space, but I believe to be slowly moving in that direction.
ManticoreTechnology: If I get one more resume from anyone working there, I’m going to blow a fuse. Seriously now, can someone just acquire them, and put them out of their misery already? I’m sure there’s something there worth buying, right? Aeron chairs? Foosball tables?
Omniture: Acquired WebSideStory (10/07), also launches closed-loop-marketing addition to their offering as a SalesForce.com plugin. I’m betting they’ll make big moves in to this space in ‘08, possibly through further acquisitions and likely with the intent to
- differentiate themselves with the other web analytics companies they have a history of competing with (enter B2B)
- seize this soft market in one fail swoop before anyone else can dream of it.
Eloqua: Closed a whopping $23m round (11/07) one year after their last round. New CEO seems to have cleaned house of the old guard that were taking the company in to the upper regions of the Canadian tundra (ie. nowhere). Even though they’re hobbled by a surprisingly dysfunctional and overpriced technology offering, they are eagerly locking unsuspecting customers in to multi-year contracts. Smart move, as you’ve been voted most likely to get steamrolled during the mad-dash to consolidate the space. I do sense IPO coming soon for them.
Marketo: Popped on the scene early this year with a bucket of cash. One half-baked and feature-lacking product later, they’ve resorted to employing tactics from the”3D Startup Manual”. You haven’t heard of the 3D Startup Manual? It has one page, and it reads “Dillute! Dillute! Dillute!”.
Market2Lead: Injection of cash (10/07) by partner Rainmaker Systems may keep these guys afloat a while longer. Their technology is lacking, but its nothing $1m can’t fix, right?
SilverPOP: Ye old stomping grounds. Acquired vTrenz (05/07) marketing automation. A good play for the Pop, seeking to break away from the rest of the pack in email marketing. I blogged about this earlier.
WebTrends: I have no idea whats happening there. My guess is that 2008 has them following Omniture’s lead in to this space.
Aprimo: Filed for IPO (9/07) with a $50m run-rate. Clearly a potential leader in the space that has the potential to swallow up a large chunk of it on its own.

So thats my rather narrow view of the world (well, at least the bits I’d openly share). I won’t share any major plans regarding where LoopFuse is headed in ‘08, except to say that we will strive as hard as possible to shatter the dreams of all of those mentioned above by continuing to build a world-class platform, while providing solutions for our growing clientèle.

Posted in Demand Generation, LoopFuse, Market Talk | No Comments »

LoopFuse Blog

How to make friends with the sales team

OSBC 2008 Review

Bulls on Parade

LoopFuse @ OSBC 2008

LoopFuse OneView 3.0 Announced

SpringSource makes a big move

Forecasting beyond the pipeline

On Hiring Talent

ZDNet gets clued in

Market Talk: Marketing Automation in 2007 (2008)

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