Passed to Sales

New features include:

Call OnDemand (Text-to-Speech) and SMS: Deliver reminder messages or drive prospects to a landing page via mobile and landline phone.

RSS: Enable prospects or customers to subscribe to a channel that allows you to reach prospects for those of whom you don’t have email addresses.

Fax: Reach customers or prospects via fax from directly within the Eloqua environment.

Call Based Data Services: Send unknown company visitors from your website and enrich their profiles so they can more easily become useful leads to your organization.

Email Testing: Improvements to the workflow for sending out draft emails

Inline Theme Editor: Availability of the WYSIWYG editor for eCollateral themes creation and editing

Search & Select: Standardization of the Quick Search of items and easy selecting of items

Forms and Hypersites: Refinements in Form Layouts and Hypersite Editor

Reporting & Dashboards: Additional Report descriptions added to top reports. Contact Activity Overview Dashboard and drill-downs on Contact Dashboards available

Eloqua for Microsoft Outlook®: Support for Microsoft Outlook® 2007 on Windows XP®

Content Asset Replacement: Functionality that allows you to replace a content asset (e.g., PDF) so you don’t have to update existing links

Recently, I had an opportunity to sit in on a working session with the internal team to setup the link between two different instances of SFDC.  These two environments are part of the same company so we are not looking to send leads over to our channel or 3rd party vendors.  We are looking at the PRM application but I will save that for another day.

If you are familiar with any PRM application, the connection between two SFDC installs behave the same way.  You are sharing lead information between two parties, in hopes of have it get “worked”.  What is different about PRM and the SFDC to SFDC connection is that the link is broken when the lead gets converted.  Why?  It is quite obvious.  From a technical standpoint, the act of converting a lead in SFDC is pretty much generating a new contact record with its own unique ID.  If you were to convert the lead from one stance of SFDC, you do not want to have matching IDs but different objects.  It doesn’t work that way!  Additionally, from the business side,  business process varies from one organization to another.  Some folks may be using the SFDC to SFDC connection to pass leads to their channel while others are using it internally, although some might even think the SFDC to SFDC connection is based on the same architecture as their PRM module.

For each individual lead, in order to break the connection, you must either delete, convert or manually inactive the sharing of the lead record.  From what I understand, we should expect new enhancements throughout the year as part of their Summer and Fall ‘08 Release.  So far, so good.

For those of you that are in the Silicon Valley area, check out MOCCA and the SVAMA user groups.  They tend to have lively discussions on all things marketing.  Check out their website for more information on these two user groups.  Maybe I’ll see you in the next user group meeting!

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/MOCCA_bayarea/

http://www.svama.net/

I recently spent some time playing around with Eloqua’s Winter 08 Release.  This is definitely a major release as they are growing up now, and moving towards quarterly release cycle versus weekly fixes.  First and foremost, there are now dashboard reporting for almost all of their ‘entities’.  Personally, I think it is a great step forward although it isn’t as sophisticated as Salesforce.com, but it is definitely good for their first outing.  Dashboard reporting relies on their reporting architecture and it refreshes data from the last 30 days.  If you’ve worked with Eloqua before, you will know that they don’t store data beyond 1 year.  If your buying cycle is more than that, good luck trying to store customer or prospect activity information.

Another update to their application is the WYSIWYG editor for Forms.  Often times, I tell marketers that they need to know some basic HTML before using Eloqua or else they will get frustrated.  Marketers want a tool to launch their campaigns instead of trying to fight with it!!!  One solution is to have your administrator setup “templates” for users to copy from where the underlying processing steps and fields are already defined.  Their new form editor eliminates the need to setup templates (although it is still a good idea) because you can drag fields right into your form.  Free text areas are available to drop in your content.  A big winner…. is the ability to have…. field validation without ever having to go into the HTML code and write up javascripts.  FANTASTIC!!

One last item that I want to touch on briefly is their Campaign Management module.  I will speak more in future entries but think of it as SFDC’s Campaign Hierarchy combined with Eloqua’s foldering structure; however, their hierarchy design isn’t the same as SFDC’s so you’ll have to be a bit creative on how you setup your campaigns!

There are a bunch of little improvements to the system but it is hard to list to them all.  Most of the time, their release schedule is more of an easter egg hunt where you know the good stuff are hidden somewhere but they won’t tell you.

This past week, Salesforce.com rolled out its Spring ‘08 Release.  Two new enhancements to the Campaign object are Campaign Hierarchy and the ability to link Opportunity to the last campaign participated.  

Why are these two enhancements significant to marketing?  For one thing, you can now have multiple campaigns rollup into a parent or master campaign.  This is helpful if you are managing a multi-city roadshow or even multi-date web seminars.  You can associate campaigns up to five levels deep.  If your organization follows a set of go-to-market (GTM) strategies, then your master campaign(s) would fall into one of the GTMs.  Additionally, you can see an aggregate total of leads/contact/opps that were generated by your campaigns.  A caveat is that depending on how your SFDC environment is setup, you may have duplicate records– a common problem amongst many organizations.

As for opportunities that have campaign influence, with the Spring release, you can track the lastcampaign touched by the contact on the Opportunity record.  Your sales rep MUST convert a lead to a contact with opportunity in order for the Campaign Source to be automatically populated with the campaign name.  If your organization is like mine, this isn’t always the case.  Sometimes a rep do not like there will be an opportunity until later on down the road thus they will convert the lead (or even create a contact separately) without creating an opportunity.  Depending on which school of thought you’re from, this Campaign Source may not work for your organization.  Some organizations give credit to all campaigns while others give a weighted percentage based on the campaign type (tradeshow vs downloads vs whitepapers…etc).  Heck, some even think marketing generates all the revenue for their company!

A final note regarding the Spring ‘08 Release… Salesforce.com did make improvements to their custom reporting with the ability to create outer joins, however, it still falls short in allowing marketers to do completeclosed-loop reporting.   One report that I would like to see is the ability to join the Campaign object to their Leads with Converted Information report.  Why?  If I know the campaign association (or responded date) date, the converted date and the opportunity create date, then I would see how effective my campaign is PLUS I can create a formula field to calculate lead aging.  This would be the ideal path since it would apply to organizations with duplicate leads because you can merge the outliers if one of the duplicate moves all the way to the end of the funnel.

You can read more about Salesforce.com’s ‘08 Release here.

Marketing reports become a time consuming chore when you  have to dig through several different business systems in order to piece everything together.  We’re not just talking about legacy systems but other subsidiaries and divisions that do not follow corporate HQ’s business process.  Monthly reports for upper management would require at least half a day to put together and the staff would not even get through the first page!  Who really have the time to look at the details?  Not many but those that are responsible for generating the reports need to deal with it!

How many of you share my pain?

AMA recently revised their definition for Marketing.  Every five years, they go through the process of revising what we call “marketing”.  Today, marketing professionals are not only more accountable for how their campaigns impact the bottomline, but they are taking a more systematic approach with their campaigns (and tracking).  The holy grail in marketing is closed-loop tracking yet not all companies follow the same methodology- let alone use the same terminologies.  This is a good segway to an upcoming series on marketing automation and business process improvement.  I am hoping that many of you will share your ideas and also pains in reaching the holy grail.

To read more about AMA’s process revision process, click here.

The new definition reads:

“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

The previous definition stated:

“Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”