Audaxium Blog

Here at Audaxium, we have been spending a great deal of time talking to customers about how to get off on the right foot when implementing marketing automation software, in this case, Pardot.

These discussions are as unique as our customers, but there are a few constants in the equation that add up to a successful implementation. It’s important to give these careful consideration.

As point of reference, all of our clients sell to other businesses, and they typically have a lot of customers and contacts at those customers. But they also have a keen desire to both generate new leads, and manage leads sent to them by their partners. Our advice below makes the most sense in that context.

So what’s first? Where do we begin?

What first happens is a discussion of the value of marketing automation tools. Times have changed. It’s no longer appropriate to download lists of email addresses and spam them. It’s not valuable to email your entire customer base each week with every message you want to broadcast.

In a nutshell, you’ll be using an application like Pardot to achieve the following:

• Capture Lead Information
• Track Lead and customer behavior on your website and content
• Measure the “sales readiness” of contacts
• Manage the hand off of sales ready leads to the sales team
• Give customers content and offers they are interested in

But you already knew all that. You’re here to learn about your first steps.

Data Scrubbing

The first step is an analysis of your existing data. Just how good is it? This breaks down into two essential questions. How much data that you need to use to segment your database, is missing? Address, email, company size, industry etc. are typical but there may be others. The second question is, how much duplicate information is there?

While improving data quality should be an ongoing task in your organization, and not a one time program, you’ll need to make sure it’s happening as you move ahead with marketing automation. Clean your data.

Make sure you’re removing or merging duplicate email addresses. Put in place metrics in your CRM system to warn users when they are working with incomplete records.

Your database will never become perfect, but place a high degree of importance on the effort to make it so.

Click the green button to read more…

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Here at Audaxium, we’re happy to announce that we are adding to our product portfolio. After extensive research we will be supporting Microsoft Dynamics products, as well as NetSuite and Pardot.

Over the past two years in listening to customers, we’ve identified a segment of companies where Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Dynamics AX ERP system are a very good fit. Equipment and other manufacturers who have a deep investment into other Microsoft applications have been asking for functionality that we just couldn’t provide. Now we’ll have it.

Also, some of these companies were looking to deploy their systems on premise, as opposed to “in the cloud”, and now they have that option from Audaxium. Having the choice to migrate from on premise to hosted, or vice versa, is something many customers want.

The team members at Audaxium have a long history of working with manufacturers and helping them deploy information systems to ensure their business run smoothly. We’re happy to be able to, once more, work closely with them. We know that many of you have disconnected systems where engineering is still not integrated with operations and sales, and we aim to bridge that gap.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and AX, are both very capable systems, watch this space to learn more about them. If you’re interested in learning more about these applications via email, please subscribe here.

With the state of the economy, it’s likely that the LAST THING you want to do right now is spend money and resources on a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.  It would mean a significant investment of not only dollars but also staff resources who are already too busy.

Right now you are likely focusing all your resources on your most important goals.  Some of those may be:

• Hitting your sales and profit targets
• Exceeding your customers expectations and building their loyalty
• Delivering high quality products and services
• Keeping your best employees happy and productive
• Improving your company’s financial position (accounts receivable, cashflow, expenses, etc.)

Although implementing a CRM system can be a big job and big expense, it can help reduce the stress of a tough economy and help you achieve your most important corporate objectives.

The most obvious benefit of a CRM system in a tough economy is that it can help you sell more to your existing customers.  In tough times, many companies go into hibernation mode and tend to conserve cash “for a rainy day”.  They also become hesitant to purchase products or services from a company they have never done business with before.  However, if a company already trusts you to deliver high quality and timely products and services, they are more likely to buy from you, even during a down economy.

It is much easier, faster, and less expensive to sell up-sell or cross-sell additional products and services to an existing customer than it is to win a new customer.  A well implemented CRM system can help you mine your existing customer base more effectively and proactively find sales opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed.

If you don’t already use a CRM system, you may want to read more about how it can help you achieve your goals.  If you’re warming up to the idea, maybe you should consider adding this to your budget for next year?

With the recent (re) launch of SAP’s Business ByDesign in direct competition with NetSuite, I thought that it would be useful to present some pertinent questions that should be asked if you’re investigating a new CRM/ERP application, hosted or not.

In recent years, applications have come a long way but it’s not fair to assume that some of the big names, like SAP, always have the perfect solution for your business.  And by solution I mean both the application, and the ecosystem that surrounds the app.

So lets get to some of the questions I feel are important.

What’s been the track record over the past 5 years?

Software, and especially software as a service has developed tremendously over the past few years and it’s important to understand the trajectory of the company and the application.  A series of false starts is sure to be a warning sign.  Progress need not be tremendously rapid, but always forward, and always with the needs of customers at heart.

Perhaps things were a little rough?  What steps have been taken to improve things for the now many customers the vendor has up and running.

What does an implementation look like?  How flexible is it?

Every company is different and yet, the same in many respects.   Do you have choice in how to deploy the system and who is involved in the implementation?  Can the implementation be modified to fit your needs, timing, and budget?  Are there resources readily available who can make sophisticated changes during the initial implementation, while at the same time ensuring that your company is self sufficient at running the app?

How deep is the functionality?

It’s easy these days to develop software that fulfills the check boxes required by the marketing team.  The trouble with any application is the level of sophistication the functional areas have, and how easy it is to actually use them day to day.  Perhaps the system can send email, but can it do so automatically and intelligently?  Perhaps it can track opportunities, but can it track projects, quotes, sales and tasks related to those opportunities?

If the answer to “What’s next on the product road map” contains many very simple requirements, perhaps it’s time to be cautious.

How Scalable is it?

As a customer, getting caught in a bait and switch has got to be one of the worst experiences.  It pays to avoid starting out with apps that are designed to upgrade you, at significant cost soon after you sign up.

Sometimes limits on the use or scalability of an application make sense.  If your company has 10 employees, a cap of 1000 would seem reasonable.  But a cap of 10 or 20 likely indicates that it’s an arbitrary number, defined in the marketing department and not actually a software limitation. And if the new app you’ll need to move to requires a new implementation?  You know you’re in for it.

What is the Vendor’s commitment to Accessibility?

Any SaaS vendor worth their salt can give you reasonably detailed uptime metrics on their systems.  Compare these to your own uptime metrics that, hopefully, you’re keeping in your own IT departments.  While all systems go down from time to time, including big name apps like Gmail and WordPress, having a track record, and a stated commitment to protecting your data is important.

In Closing

Hopefully these questions give you a start on asking some very reasonable questions of a potential vendor.  They’re not questions with a pre-defined acceptable answer, such as, Are you a public company? or with no good answer at all, such as What if you go out of business?

With luck these questions will get you into a dialog with your potential vendor and you can both work together to determine if their application meets your needs.

If you’d like to have that conversation with us, particularly as it pertains to NetSuite, please contact us.

If your website is an integral part of your lead generation activities, and I hope that it is, you probably use Google Analytics to look at what’s happening on your site on a daily basis.

But what about the details?  Just who exactly is visiting your site?

If you’re selling to other businesses wouldn’t it be great to know what potential customers were reading your content?

Pardot is now offering a very small subset of their functionality, for free, that enables you to see what companies are visiting your site, and what they are doing while they are there.  As long as a company can be identified from a reverse lookup, you’ll get their name in a report.

Not only can you see who’s visiting, and potentially spot opportunities before they contact you, but you can also examine specific visitor behavior, to see if your site is working as intended.  Sometimes overall stats are nice, but sometimes you need to look at the anecdotal behavior of one user.

From the Pardot Site:

Real-Time Reports Online

Log in to your VisitorID account at any time to view up-to-date reports on your identified website traffic.

Tracking which companies are visiting your website can help you both gauge interest for deals that are in progress and identify new target customers.

Detailed Activity View

Dig deeper in to a lead’s activities and see which pages were viewed, how long they spent on each page and what search terms they may have used. The detailed activity view gives the sales team greater insight in to a prospect’s area of interest.

Daily Activity Emails

For a simple way to keep up with your visitor reports, you can choose to activate daily activity emails. Each morning open your inbox to find a report of all visitor activity for the past 24 hours. Easily forward the reports to your sales reps or share with others in your organization.

If you’re interested in signing up, contact us, or sign up at Pardot’s site.

It was only a few years ago that your home page would be where most visitors would begin their experience with your website, but now Google and the other search engines rank your internal pages much more effectively and visitors often ‘land’ on an internal page before reaching the desired start point of your site. So you need to convert these internal web pages into more effective landing pages and get the most leads/sales that you can from them. Here are four simple steps to help you achieve that goal:

Read More »

Understanding what visitors are doing on your website is a very important component of your marketing machine, and you are probably familiar with most of the web analytics platforms that are out there today, such as Google Analytics, Webtrends, or Omniture. In fact you probably have an analytics tracking code setup on each page of your web site right now!

What is Web Visitor Analytics?

However the major thing that is missing from the popular web analytics tools is you don’t know what each individual visitor is doing on your website. For instance you have a product page on your website, from your web analytics you can determine that 850 visitors landed on the page last month, and 245 of those visitors picked on a link to watch a video. But can you identify an individual visitor from the 1,000s that visited your site? Where did each visitor go after watching the video? Did they download a white paper? Did they visit your blog or read a customer success story?

This is where Pardot Web Marketing Automation can help you. Pardot is able to track what an individual visitor is doing and how they are using your website.

How does Web Visitor Analytics work?

Pardot seamlessly attaches a cookie to your web visitor’s browser and then tracks their interactions with your site. The visitor reporting will tell you where the visitor came from, and what pages/content they are interacting with. This provides you with immediate insight into what an individual visitor is interested in. In the example Pardot visitor analytics report shown below  you can see a list of the pages that a visitor looked at, the type of action carried out , time spent on each page, and the date and time of the visit.

Visitor Website Interactions Report

When a visitor fills out a lead form on your site to gain access to content, like a white paper, or to contact you for a quote; your visitor then becomes a Prospect. Pardot will store each prospect in a hosted web database (Pardot will sync the prospect data with your CRM system, and works with NetSuite, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Sugar CRM).

How can Web Visitor Analytics help me?

Every time your prospect returns to your site and interacts with your web content their activity is tracked, as shown in the figure below.

Prospect Activities Report

Pardot can then help you to nurture your prospect with web marketing automation based on the activity with your website. For instance, if a prospect read a specific customer success story, Pardot could then send them a related white paper or product data sheet automatically without them having to fill out another form or make a request. Or your prospect registered for a webinar and downloaded a guide after the event a salesperson in your company could be alerted automatically by Pardot to contact the prospect.

Conclusion

As you can see having web visitor analytics in addition to your existing website analytics means that you can better utilize your web site, understand how visitors use your site, automate your lead generation activities and nuturing campaigns based on how a visitor interacts with your site.

Want to learn more about Pardot? Contact us to schedule a live demonstration or click here to watch a video and download our Web Automation Guide.

The B2B world of buying and selling has changed. With the power of Google and other web tools, buyers have access to far more information and they are doing more research on their own long before even contacting the vendors. In many cases, by the time the buyer contacts the vendor, they already know everything they need to know to make a buying decision.

The problem is… will they be contacting you? Or will they be contacting your competition? Making your website into a lead generating machine rather than an electronic brochure is now more important than ever!

View our presentation below to learn how the Pardot Web Marketing Suite can help you to obtain more qualified online leads for your sales pipeline. Our presentation includes…

• How to nurture your leads until they are sales-ready.
• How to enhance your website with search tracking, landing pages, and lead capture forms.
• Being perceived as a thought leader, rather than a spammer.
• Automating the process of nurturing a potential buyer through their investigation process.
• How to track what your prospects are doing on your website

Pardot’s a great Application.  Check out the demonstration below.

Here’s a funny video from NetSuite spoofing the Apple vs Mac ads, except this time it’s SAP vs NetSuite.

There are a couple other amusing videos on the NetSuite Youtube channel.