Transform your Marketing to Make Money with Technology

The world is certainly changing, and technology is ever more quickly transforming how sellers make money.  In the United States online retailers report sales are up 14% from 2011.    European online consumers this year will spend more than 305 billion euros, approximately $396.5 billion, up 20% from 254 billion euros ($330.2 billion) in 2011, according to a projection from Ecommerce Europe.   Tradition retail is flat. 

Trying to fight back, traditional “brick and mortar” retailers are using technology as well.  Email marketing, mobile shopping, and on-site promotions have all played an important role in traditional stores as they try to fight the online encroachment of their customers.

About 23% who took part in a Bizrate survey said that they used a smartphone or tablet to shop online during the much hyped “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” sales. Perhaps more impressive is that 70% of those surveyed said they went on to make purchases based on the online research / email that they had done.

The moral?  Customer market segmentation (good old CRM — customer relationship management) tools allow saavy traditional and online retailers to target customers most interested in their products.  Using a combination of business intelligence to identify who buys from you and then targeting them at the right time in the right way (less email, no calls please and yes send me a text when I’m in the store) results in higher sales at the register — whether it is the in store register or the e-shopping cart.

 

 

So you Think it is EASY to Make Money with Technology?

Maybe yes, and maybe no.   Have you checked the price of Facebook stock lately?    For all the huge number of global Facebook users there is still the issue of “how are you going to make money?”    Facebook is still struggling on how best to answer this question — and the stock price reflects the difficulty in turning eyeballs into purchasers.   The latest effort has to do with mobile users.  Forbes reports that of Facebook’s billion users 60 percent access Facebook at least monthly on mobile and 70 percent of these users are daily Facebook mobile users.

Now we’re getting closer.

Cell phones can track a user’s location via GPS (global positioning).  While you’re cruising Facebook you may be near a store having a sale who just sent you a special offer on Facebook.   Now we’re talking about using technology to make money!

Along with those ads Forbes tells us that “Facebook has a plethora of new mobile ad products including Mobile App Install and News Feed which is now taking in $4 million per day, 75 percent of which comes from mobile. Facebook Exchange allows businesses to capture users browsing history resulting in more targeted advertising.”

In this brave new world of technology which is changing at an ever increasing pace we have to change the way we think about marketing, sales and even the internet.   We have to grab our prospects in near real time and in near real space (where they physically are located).   It seems that Facebook may finally be finding a way to monetize those billion users!

Harvard studies Social Media

Harvard researchers have studied why social media has become so all prevalent.  How come so many folks are willing — even compelled — to share every thought, movement, like and want through mediums like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and Pinterest.   I’m even a bit “hooked” on Foursquare – which tracks my movement!

Researchers conducted experiments with the results showing that the act of disclosing information about oneself activates the same sensation of pleasure in the brain that we get from eating food, getting money or having sex. Who  knew?

This may help explain recent surveys of Internet use that show that roughly 80% of posts to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook consist simply of announcements about one’s own immediate experience.

It’s a Virtual World

I’m sitting on my sofa, with my notebook on my lap.   The TV is providing background noise, and when I search for a thought I look up, and out the french door to the beautiful, sunny day outside.   We’re living in a virtual world.

How many of us spend a day or more a week telecommuting?   I’ve been dong so for well over 15 years, and find that my days at home are far more productive than those in the office.  In the office people stop me in the hall to ask about my weekend, or how my son is doing in Track.   As I sit down to work I’m called into an impromptu meeting that turns into 90 minutes gone from the day with very little accomplished.   With impatience I realize that all these distractions will result in working at home tonight — just to get done the work I planned to do today.

The good news is that relationships are important — without the give and take nothing would ever really get done.  I realize this, and yet so much more solid work gets done when I can sit quietly, with the coffee cup beside me and the sun shinning outside my french door.

It is easier than ever to make money with technology!

Today it is easier than ever before to make money with technology.    In the “old” days one had to invest in very expensive mainframe or minicomputers – or in server farms.   Today with cloud based computing it is actually possible to make money with technology with nothing more than an inexpensive PC.

In the “old days” one had to spend time and money to learn complex programming languages (like C, COBOL, or Java), operating systems (UNIX, MVS, Microsoft), and networking platforms. . .  Today there are many tools that will do the work for you — just use a graphical interface and the program generates the code for you!

Today it isn’t even necessary to develop apps for smart phones or iPads — making money with technology can be as simple as making YouTube videos (have people buy ads on your page), or sell things on eBay — or do freelance writing from your home.

With a little bit of entrepreneurship it is easier than ever to make money with technology, and as we enter 2012 I will explore some of these avenues.  Happy New Year!

Teradata Buys Aprimo

Ten years ago (wow, how time flies!) I was a Director at Teradata Corporation.  Teradata   Teradata was the first relational database management (RDBMS) company to focus on crunching huge amounts of data for analysis.  Traditionally database software was used to access the same data (information) from various applications.

You see, in the “old days” data was stored inside of applications and this meant when you wanted to find out information about “Sandra Eisenberg” each application kept a copy of information pertaining to “Sandra Eisenberg” and there was much repetition,  duplicated data (taking up expensive storage space) and it was impossible to get one whole picture of a customer (or other data elements) outside of the one application.

Thus database management systems were born — and they were mostly (and still are mostly) used for accessing information on the spur of the moment — customer service reps, supply chains, financial data, etc.

Teradata had recognition that all that data was in actuality INFORMATION.  Valuable information.  An early customer was Wal-Mart who was able to determine that certain products sold better in certain locations (maybe Dayton, Ohio users like Colgate and San Francisco users like Crest toothpaste). . .  By knowing what was selling, how quickly it was selling Wal-Mart was able to stop offering sales on stuff that was selling any way and not give valuable shelf space to items that were not selling well in specific stores. . .  Information became power!

Teradata currently has over 1,000 customers and over 2,500 installations of its specialized database management software.   Wal-Mart is still a customer as are other major retailers.   Most large players in all industries, including Telecom, Hospitality, Travel, etc. are Teradata users.

This was and is the key to the success of Teradata.   Great company!

These days there are many competitors to Teradata — some the traditional database vendors  and some who focused directly on competing head to head with Teradata on its home front (like Netezza, now part of IBM) and Greenplum — so to stay ahead Teradata must continue to innovate and acquire.

Which brings me to this blog post.  Teradata recently purchased Aprimo for a cool half a billion dollars. 

Aprimo is an industry leader in cloud-based integrated marketing software – also known as Marketing Resource Management (MRM).  Aprimo claims over 150,000 marketers from 40 countries use its software –  including 36% of the Fortune 100.   In 2009 the company reported revenue of $69 million—f 15% growth from 2008 in an economy very few saw growth in.   Those customers have tapped into a market leading solution, recognized as such by the Gartner Group.    For the past three years Aprimo has also been a  “Leader” in Gartner Group’s Marketing Resource Management (MRM) Magic Quadrant report.

The acquisition leap frogged Teradata into a market-leading position in Integrated Marketing Management.    The cloud is key to the future, and the acquisition (if integrated properly) will tie Teradata’s leading analytics technology and Aprimo’s cloud-based marketing performance applications.   This should be a huge win for Teradata — who acquired both a leading edge and complimentary technology and a great customer base into which it can cross-sell and up-sell its data warehouse technologies.

The key will be how well Teradata executes bringing the two firms together — something it has not always done well in the past.    Only time will tell, but it was a great chess move.

Making Prospecting more Profitable

When you get right down to brass tacks making money means selling something PROFITABLY.   I capitalize the word “profitably” because far too many become enamored of acquiring new customers or up-selling existing ones, but they don’t keep the eye on whether they really are making money or if the cost of goods sold (COGS) means a loss of money.

The only time you should ever lose money on a sale is when you do so consciously.   It may well be that to garner a “marquee” name customer who can be referenced to encourage others in a given industry to buy from you sell something at a loss.  When and if you do lose money on a sale you should do so with eyes wide open aware that it is a sales tool itself to gain more profitable sales.

We’re all here to make money, and if you do not know the cost of making a sale odds are you are losing money.

Tools to keep you informed are many:  from financial software to manage your “books” which include ERP (enterprise resource plannng) and CRM (customer relationship management).    We’ve discussed a few of these tools in this blog — tools aimed at start-ups, mid-size companies all the way to the Fortune 100 — tools which can help you make money profitably if used appropriately.

Which brings me (finally) to the topic of this blog:  software that helps you optimize your CRM sales funnel.

A sales funnel is the concept that to make one sale you must have X number of sales “leads” (potential customers) who become  “suspects” (research shows they could use your offer) lined up that you can target and then winnow them down to “prospects.”  Prospects are qualified businesses who could benefit from your offers — whether they know it or not.  They have budget, they have a need and you can help them meet their own goals.  The key in funnel management is to turn those prospects into customers — and in each step of the sales process of many “suspects” you will find only a few “prospects” and even fewer of them will turn into customers.

Even in the age of social media you still have to identify potential customers and somehow you need to make them aware that you have a service or a product they will find valuable. . .  the methods for reaching them may be changing, but the fundamentals remain the same.

There is a very old saying in the computer industry — about as old as the industry itself.  Surely you have heard the term GIGO (garbage in / garbage out).   You must fill your sales funnel, but if you fill it with lots of names that do not have the potential to be a customer your “funnel management” is poor and your sales profitability will also be low.

To acquire profitable customers (new ones) or even identify what you can up-sell or cross-sell to existing customers you must have a way of identifying qualified leads from the very beginning.     Cisco (the leading communications vendor) credits a company named eTrigue with increasing their SMB (small / medium business) sales appointments by 25% through just such pinpoint targeting of potential customers.

Linda Fassig-Knauer, (a Cisco marketing programs manager)  is the one making the claim about eTrigue and  3Marketeers (advertising, marketing, and demand generation/lead generation) for better lead generation:

“eTrigue Intelligent lead scoring helps us determine which technology or offer the prospect is most interested in discussing with our sales teams and enables us to funnel those leads in a timely manner to our call center, who ultimately sends to our channel partners,” says Fassig-Knauer, “The information in eTrigue lead scoring gives us three times the information so our call center agents are much more prepared before a call. It also greatly increases the number of prospects we can identify as being interested in a solution because the system does not require the customer/prospect to register.”

Salesforce.com CRM users can view active prospects in eTrigue’s demand generation application within Salesforce — making it easy to use for sales reps.    eTrigue won an award from DemandGen for its work with Cisco.

Given the fact that the economy is still slow you need to find a way to do more with less.  Your sales reps need to be more efficient than ever.  Tools like the cloud based SaaS (software as a service) Salesforce.com teamed with a demand generation tool like eTrigue  can fill your funnel with  a higher number of better-qualified leads faster, less expensively and with fewer resources.

You need to identify suspects and then you need to pinpoint target valuable information to them (using CRM with integrated email campaign tools and social media tools as well as the good old fashioned telephone!).  Doing more with less in these times means working smart with inexpensive but highly valuable tools.   Take a cue from Cisco and from Codice Software, who saw a 225% increase in qualified leads, and a 50% increase in actionable sales leads when it used eTrigue.  Response rates went up by 160% versus the same period the prior year.

Another customer, Silver Peak, generated 30% more programs without additional staff.  The cost is much lower than hiring more people — although if you get enough good leads you may need to put more feet on the street!

If you are using Salesforce.com I highly recommend that you take a look at eTrigue and see if automating your sales funnel demand generation makes sense.