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!

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.

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.

The problem is if you do not have a plan then you are planning to fail.  Old sayings often have a way of being true!  The way to key your eye on the ball and ensure you get to market in time to make the “marketing window” (before technology of a competitor passes you by) you need to know when you are going to get to market and what your feature set will be.  The best way to do this is with a project plan.

For as little as $18 a month you can go with cloud-based 5PM.   You can even start with their free trial to see if it does make financial sense for your company.

The two best things about 5PM are its price, and its simplicity.  The last thing you need to do while you are starting a new business is get bogged down learning new technology.  You can easily waste cycles “becoming productive” while your time and money burns up.   What you need to make money is a tool that can jump start you quickly and painlessly — giving you more time to be productive.

5PM has five great attributes. It helps with  project tracking to keep you focused, it keeps you organized, information flows among you and your team mates — and of course it does  project management.

Here is a screen shot — you can see that the layout is intuitive and very straight forward.  Most of the stuff you need to know about a project stays on the front page so at a glance you can see where the project is (on time, in trouble. . .).

This is a good and inexpensive project management tool which is great at keeping teams together in.

It is not alone.  There are three other good tools to consider if you are looking for a quick project management solution.   Basecamp is another.    Big companies like Kellogs and Addidas use Basecamp, but it is also a great choice for freelancers or start-ups.  On their home page they proudly proclaim that Over 5 million people worldwide have used Basecamp to collaborate on over 4 million projects, track 57 million hours of work, share 46 million files, and complete 43 million to-dos.

Basecamp is actually more well known than 5PM.   You can import data from Basecamp to 5PM.   You can get a 30 day trial of Basecamp but then it is pricier than 5PM.  $49 to $99 a month compared to a starting price of $18 for 5PM.

Two other options are PB Works and Wizhive.

Recently Microsoft acquired YaData, a company with a software tool that  provides advertisers with richer targeting capabilities than they could otherwise have — CRM business intelligence.  This software makes money for its users by more pinpoint targeting of what sells and how to offer complimentary offers.

Marketers for years worked with anecdotal information (a successful sale here being exploited in ads, or marketing what the competitors are selling.  With micro-segmentation science is now clearly identifying what sells.

One great thing about YaData is that it includes segment discovery.  Normally data mining (being able to make “what if I did this?” type of questions based on existing data) requires us humans to make the initial assumption.  The problem with this is that our assumptions may be wrong and we waste a lot of time going down a path that is not fruitful.

YaData has behavioral targeting tools within its online advertising platform, which lets marketers provide more focused and relevant advertising.    The benefit includes  better ROI for advertisers, higher yields for publishers and more on target advertising for consumers.  The software discovers and managemes market segments (rather than having people identify the segments as with traditional data mining). YaData uses a search engine, and the system is designed to discover consumer behavior patterns and then sort them into segments.  This actually has a name all its own:  segmentation relationship management (SRM).   The YaData engine can analyze companies’ quantitative databases on the basis of hundreds of variables, in order to create clusters.

Interesting enough, YaData originally received much of its funding from Oracle, only to be sold to Microsoft!  Strange world!

I’m very late on my congrats — as this happened in January.  Oops, sorry it took me so long to notice, Hal!  Still, no one deserves it more.

Speaking of the Dynamics family, there is news on that front from Convergence 2010 Europe.   Both the ERP products and the CRM offer have done very well, and the CRM product has penetrated the Fortune 500 — not its initial target.  It was initially aimed at small and medium sized businesses.   Unlike many CRM platforms, Dynamics does not cost a fortune to implement.  The “big boy” CRM suites cost at least $1 in professional services to integrate it and customize it for every $1 spent on the purchase.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM integrates with Outlook so most people can be productive on day one — it is not a huge learning or integration curve — although it can be customized and integrated if need be.   Now at Convergence 2010 Europe the long awaited cloud (SaaS — software as a service) version is said to be available very soon.

This aims Microsoft Dynamics CRM squarely at Salesforce.com — the leader in SaaS CRM.    Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will have launch events sometime in January 2011.   The beta of Dynamics CRM 2011 is currently available, having been released in September.  If you want to check it out, now is a perfect opportunity!

Since this blog is about making money (or saving money) with technology — which is the goal of good customer relations facilitated by CRM — definitely take a look at the beta of CRM 2011 and also consider the very attractive  promotional price for Dynamics CRM Online of $34 (31 Euros) per user per month for the first year of service.   This price is available to new customers and will start when Dynamics CRM Online is launched in January. The offer will end on June 30, 2011.

Again, congratulations Hal!

The U-3 also ignores people who have looked so long with no success that they have stopped looking for work out of sheer frustration.  It also ignores people who have taken freelance work or temp work or minimum wage work just to have some money coming in.

There are so many people I know who used to have six figure jobs in sales, marketing, PR, award winning journalists, researchers for the like of the Gartner Group, Senior Vice Presidents at AT&T, and more who are now either forced into retirement they can’t afford or in low paying jobs.  At the same time I know foreigners from various third world countries who are living in America on Green Cards of H1B visas who are doing jobs Americans would LOVE to do.  The employers are paying the foreigners less than they would pay Americans — and yet the wages are higher than what these Americans are forced to take (if they can even FIND work).   Employers keep lobbying the Congress (don’t get me started with what I think of our government!) to keep hiring foreigners claiming they can’t find qualified Americans. . .

This is just so much BS.  There are many qualified Americans and those who don’t have a 100% match on qualifications can easily be trained on new skills rather than hiring foreigners either imported to America or outsourced to other countries.

Part of the problem definitely lies with the government who taxes businesses making it cost effective for them to hire foreigners or ship our jobs overseas.  The government is hurting efforts to get America working again, not helping.

The REAL unemployment rate is nearly one out of four Americans out of work.  Yes, one out of four, or if you want to be optimistic, one out of five Americans can’t find work.  The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate shows between 20-25% unemployed (see the chart).

Elections are coming soon.  Who you vote for is up to you and I’m not going to recommend any party or candidate over another — I do ask that you do a little research and discover just who your candidate has taken money from, and if they are currently in office just what have they voted for?  The cost of H1B visas have been raised by Congress, but “big deal.”

US Senator, Mr Chuck Grassley, tried to pass a bill restricting abuse of H-1B and L1 visas, but it was killed on the Senate floor.   It was blocked by Democrats he said.  Don’t blame the Dems.  The Offshoring Act (designed to block jobs from being outsourced over seas) was blocked by Republicans.   Bad news for Americans looking for jobs — but no doubt the Dems and Republicans in question got fat fees from the foreign countries wanting American money and jobs.

I’m sick and tired of seeing our economy flounder.  As Ross Perot said years ago, “that sucking sound you hear are your jobs going over seas.”   Good old Ross was right!

Then I checked around for shared hosting.  I know I can host it myself, and given my technical background probably should — but I just don’t want the hassles right now.  I did a lot of research and decided that Hostgator sounded both inexpensive and fairly good as far as up-time, response time and so forth.  I found a one month trial deal, also for a penny.    That is expiring soon, so I don’t know if I’ll stay there.  I can get a one year deal for around $5 a month which isn’t bad — and Hostgator has been really great support wise. . . so I need to decide soon.

Lots of people on the internet “pitch” Hostgator because they get PAID if you sign up through them.  I’m not one of them.  This is not a paid advertisement.  My opinion of them is that they are fine and I’ve had no trouble with them, but this is just my opinion.

I actually used their online chat a few times and they responded right away to fix a few things that were broken (like my domain transfer from GoDaddy not showing up).   Very easy to do business with.

So if they’ve been so nice why not stay there?

I found a cool little shared host with a proprietary platform that offers a free web hosting service if you use their domain.    The company is Wix and they have beautiful templates that are very (and I mean VERY) easy to modify.  You can even add videos with a click of a button — no coding.   I can host there with my own domain for about the same cost as Hostgator.  So I am debating it.

My Hostgator site does not look that great.  I am not a designer (OK, I’m very talented, but not when it comes to design!).  You can see it if you want, but be forewarned that I am not proud of it.  Check out my site, “It-SME.”

The Wix site looks nicer, although I’d appreciate feedback as to whether you like it or not.  Maybe it is too “cutesy”?  Here is a link to my Wix site.

Any way, not a lot of substance in this post, just a lot of “The interior defense dines under the sabotage.” which doesn’t make real sense.   Just wanted to let you know I am busy — and when it comes to making money with technology, saving money is making money, too.  If you are interested in setting up a website and want to know what coupons and deals are “out there” you should check out Retailmenot which lists coupons and such.   I don’t see a current penny deal at GoDaddy, but here is the link for the current coupon codes for GoDaddy, found at Retailmenot.

I’ve noticed that Wix, Hostgator and other web hosts always have “deals,” so if you are looking for a host do check out the deals.

Many Social Media pundits have stated that “email is dead.”    Social media applications like Facebook and Twitter have killed email.

With 500 million users on Facebook it may not be a stretch to understand why all the “Chicken Little’s” are going around the chicken coop yelling “the sky is falling!” on email marketing.   But Chicken Little was wrong, and so are the “experts.”

Email marketing still makes money in a relatively low cost way.   There are numerous online vendors for small and medium size businesses which offer free or low cost email marketing tools that include analytics (so you can see what works and what does not work).  I use MailChimp which promises it is always free for less than 500 email addresses, and I’m quite impressed with its abilities and the staff’s responsiveness.   One great thing about MailChimp (and a competitor, Constant Contact) is that both have recently integrated Social Media into their offers. Constant Contact announced Social Stats which tracks Facebook “Likes,” tweets, Linked In posts and such.  Social media statistics are shown on the email analytics report.  With MailChimp their social sharing tool lets you post your email marketing campaign on your social  networks with one click in your campaign dashboard.  Be careful, though.  Social Network users HATE “sales pitches” and you can destroy your credibility.   Like Constant Contact, MailChimp lets you you can track the activity on those networks, too.

I’ve mentioned Constant Contact and MailChimp which are great for small and medium size companies, as is iContact.  There are even more out there:  AWeber and Vertical Response are two more.

According to Forrester Research, email marketing is growing, not dying. 

Considering that you can email for free (MailChimp) then Forrester’s research should impress you that you can indeed make money via email marketing.  Their research shows that ROI is two to three times higher with email marketing than with any other form of direct marketing.   Two thirds of the marketing executives interviewed concurred that email marketing is the most cost-effective marketing tool they have.

So much for the death knell!

Far too often techno-geeks (and hey, I like to think that I AM one) decry the death of a technology when something new comes along.  Fact is that it takes a while to kill things off.   There are still people using land line telephones, TVs with picture tubes, and even horse buggy whips.   Direct mailers still “snail mail” catalogs.  Billboards still blight our nation’s highways.  Newspapers still get printed.

So, no, email is not dead.   When it comes to making money with technology, email (with opt-in permission so that you are not SPAMMING) is a very efficient way of communicating sales or new offerings to your customers.

Social media is a fantastic communications media, but it is not meant to be a sales tool (well, not directly).  If you pitch a sale on Facebook you are likely to get flamed and slammed.  Social media is all about conversations, and if along the way people come to hear of a great new product, and buy it — terrific!  Yet, Facebook and others are more likely to be a passive, indirect sales channel rather than an immediate one.  The only difference is an entity like Dell Outlet who may tweet a special sale on Twitter — but most of us are not Dell.   You have to be in a unique position to be able to use Twitter or Facebook as a sales platform directly.

Email marketing and social media are not an “either / or” decision of email OR social media for making money.  Email marketing is still a very strong approach for staying in touch with customers and cross-selling and up-selling into your base.  Social media is a wonderful way to stay in touch more often than you can via email (without irritating your base).  Both are complimentary if used properly, and the email marketing tools with their integration efforts can help you do that — as long as you abide by the “rules” of both email marketing and social media and enhance your customer’s experience.  Don’t over stay your welcome in either venue.

The blog is moving.  If you like the blog, please visit us at http://www.it-sme.com/blog .