The business ecosystem quilt, and how Demandbase fits in

(Dec 21 2009) Cloud Computing , CRM Blog

Categories:
Technologies: Cloud Computing, CRM, CRM Blog, ERP, ERP Blog, Green IT, on-demand, SaaS, web-based

Quotes

  1. “ That goes up every time we add new customers. ”
    By Chris Golec

Authors



  1. By Chris Bucholtz


    A lot of folks think that getting a CRM solution is a one-stop answer to all their sales problems. It really isn’t – but it can be a great first step, especially if you view it not as a single, solid blanket but as a major patch in a sales/marketing/service infrastructure quilt. There are tools out there to help with specific aspects of the three pillars of CRM, and being clever and strategic about sewing your quilt can give you a real competitive advantage,


    For example, you can’t start the sales process until you have figured out how to get leads. Lead generation and evaluation remains much more of an art than a science. That makes sense in a way – we’re talking about people and their behavior here, and it’s hard to get technology to accommodate that. That has not curtailed the efforts to make technology a partner in lead generation, and the vast number of marketing automation vendors crowding the market attests to that.


    It’s really not enough to have a mountain of contact information alone any more. Your sales staff’s close rate doesn’t go up just because you’ve dumped thousands of more contact records on their desks. Getting leads to sales at the right time – when those buyers are ready to buy – is crucial to getting to most out of the sales team.


    A natural method for doing this is identifying behaviors that likely buyers share. One such behavior is spending time on your company’s website. The more pages someone looks at – especially when they are pages you know buyers often browse – the greater likelihood they’re good candidates for sales.


    That’s the basic idea driving Demandbase, a San Francisco-based company that recently introduced the third generation of its eponymous flagship product. Demandbase goes beyond telling users how many pageviews its site has and goes into which pages individual users looked at – and can identify where the viewer is coming from. “It’s not about quantity of analysis any more – it’s about quality,” said Chris Golec, the company’s founder and CEO.


    It’s also about speed. The system allows sales professionals to see who’s looking at a site in real time, so they can truly strike while the iron is hot. Early incarnations of the product offered a “ticker” across the bottom of the screen, a feature that Golec says was an effective sales tool to get the idea of real-time visibility into the minds of professional customers. The new version of Demandbase Professional, which debuted last week, is more like having an assistant monitor this data for you. When a potential customer demonstrates behaviors while browsing your site that suggest he’s ready to buy – behaviors you can define when you set the system up – a pop-up box appears on the sales rep’s monitor explaining who the lead is and what the lead’s done to trigger the alert.


    The “who” aspect of the system is based on Demandbase’s proprietary IP database, which can pinpoint IP addresses almost 80 percent on the time. “That goes up every time we add new customers,” said Golec. The “what” part is based on the system’s ability to walk users through a fairly simple process of defining the parameters that signal a ready lead. This sort of thing signals a great opportunity for a sales-marketing summit – often, the two sides are misaligned, and the introduction of a technology like this provides a chance for them to hash out some common definitions about leads.


    Demandbase can help identify new leads, but tracking people as they visit websites can also play directly into lead nurturing efforts. A lead that went cold some time in the past could signal that it’s heating up by visiting a webpage.


    The system also offers marketers a chance to see how effective on-line ads are. By keeping track of the data around who clicks on an ad, “it’s no longer about the number of clicks it gets,” said Golec. “It’s about the quality of the traffic,” a much more realistic measurement of success.


    Demandbase is the kind of application that couldn’t have been done economically before the advent of cloud computing. The volume of traffic handled now – in excess of 100 million page views per month across the company’s customers – continues to grow; without the cloud, scaling support for the application would have been nightmarish and could have threatened the company’s viability. Instead, Demandbase can scale with the cloud and offer a solution that marketers and sales pros with imagination can in a myriad of ways – and it’s clear that the company has put much thought into how it fits into the sales/marketing/CRM ecosystems of its own potential customers. 




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