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Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:05:50 -0700

Marketing Automation with Eloqua

My company has been having a sales boot camp this week, as we recently hired five inside sales people and a sales manager. The term "boot camp" is different from a "kick-off," which we hold on a yearly basis, in that the boot camp is a deep and intense five days in which the new hires getting presented every facet of the company by various managers, directors, and VPs from 8:30AM until 5PM every day. The kick-offs that we have had have been in a round-table discussion format, wherein all of inside sales, sales engineers, sales managers, and marketing folks gather to discuss what's working, what's not, any new messaging that may have been developed, and the large accounts on which people are working. Kick-offs tend to have a vastly more exciting setting as well; in 2007 about forty of us stayed at Caesar's in Atlantic City for three days of meetings ... and other things, of course. :)

Yesterday I, along with our VP of marketing, gave our presentation about what's happening with marketing now and what we plan to do in the future, and how it will affect the sales team. The VP gave the high-level overview, including some of our main objectives that are pretty standard in the industry - increasing downloads and registrations, to name one - and then I dove into a brief technical overview of the inner workings of Eloqua and the advantages of its integration with Salesforce.com.

Eloqua is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that prides itself on being the leader in marketing automation. I have used it since my third week at the company, and, through a mixture of fiddling with the software on my own and taking a three-day training course up at their headquarters in Toronto, I happen to be pretty comfortable with it.

Now, on top of the basic email campaigns we send out on a regular basis, I am able to track and nurture all online registrations prior to them reaching the sales team. I developed a program within Eloqua's Program Builder that fills in details we otherwise would not have gotten from a straight web site form, including where the leads came from (search engine, Google AdWords, partner site, etc.) and exactly what they downloaded. After registering, the system automatically sends a number of emails to each registrant over the course of a few months and tracks any subsequent web activity. All of this information is then fed into the Salesforce.com integration program, which sends them to the sales team for follow-up.

Read the rest: Marketing Automation with Eloqua

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Ingrid Catlin is a marketing professional based on the East Coast who specializes in search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing (SMM), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, trade show coordination, and lead generation.

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Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:04:04 -0700

Web 2.0, Start-Ups, and Social Media in a Recession

Brokers on Wall Street weren't the only individuals cringing over the crisis last week, nor was this the first verification that the U.S. economy is in a recession. The ramifications of large drops in the stock market, coupled with the mortgage crisis, have affected everyone from blue-collar factory workers to hundred-year-old investment banks, and not even those of us trying to earn a buck doing online work are immune.

The Deal, a provider business and financial news to corporate and financial dealmakers, advisers and institutional investors, interviewed a number of gurus and entrepreneurs at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City last week regarding the current state of Internet business in the growing recession and their reactions to such.

While venture capitalists see a bleaker future for start-ups seeking funding, CEO Miles Beckett of Eqal, the company behind Internet phenomena lonelygirl15 and KateModern, believes that sound money-management is key to surviving in a bad economy. "The good thing is, entertainment does well in a recession," he said, laughing. "We've always been very, very cost-conscious as a company ... we try not to overhire, try not to reach too far, too fast." Eqal's chief operating officer, Greg Goodfried, notes that strategic partnerships are key to generating revenue in the short-term, but to maintain internal ideas and projects for long-term growth.

Companies that sell sales and marketing tools are in a very healthy place as well. Umberto Milletti is CEO of InsideView, a company that proclaims to "take advantage of the convergence of social media and enterprise applications - what [they] call 'socialprise' - and bring the insights gained from subscription-based and user-generated sources to the enterprise."

Milletti says, "Historically, sales and marketing applications like ours are helped by a tough economy," citing Salesforce.com's success in the early part of this decade. "Frankly, I think [a poor economy] is sometimes the best opportunity because the weak companies get weeded out, and the strong ones make it. For a healthy market, you do need these times where the good companies break away from the not-as-compelling companies."

Mary Kathleen Flynn, Senior Editor at The Deal, also speaks with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, Lane Becker of GetSatisfaction, and Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, and you can view the entire interview at BlipTV.

Read More: Web 2.0, Start-Ups, and Social Media in a Recession

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Ingrid Catlin is a marketing professional based on the East Coast who specializes in search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing (SMM), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, trade show coordination, and lead generation.