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 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.

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.

Recently I gave a webinar to about 30 companies who are getting into e-commerce.  They have a large, established customer base but more and more are seeing value from offering many of their products online, as opposed from buying from a Sales Rep.

The real goal is to get the reps more efficient by putting lower margin items online, and have reps spend their time on the larger, more consultative, opportunities.

Here’s a few of the tips I gave them during my presentation on how to properly market their webstores.

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What’s not to love about automation?  Having things done for you is always better than doing them yourself.

Pardot’s email marketing automation solution is a tremendous application for anyone who wants to do a better job sending emails and generating leads. With rules based email, intelligent lead scoring, and integration with NetSuite, Salesforce and SugarCRM it’s sure to improve almost any marketing department that sells B2B.

The first thing to know is that Prospect Insight, Pardot’s application, works just great as a stand alone application.  When you are using it in combination with a CRM tool it’s designed to operate “in front” of your CRM, feeding it with leads when it’s appropriate to contact them.

The image to the right really sums it up.  Pardot will capture web visitors information and activities, score the lead, automate email followups, and then, when you deem it useful, assign the lead to a sales rep.

Do you have problems with large quantities of “junk” leads?

Do you wish you could sort leads by how interested they are in your website?

Do you wish you could nurture cold leads with a call to action that makes sense for that individual contact?

I could ask a hundred more questions.  But if you say yes, then read no more and contact us to see a demo.

Read more if you must…

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Audaxium is always on the look out for great applications.  Especially those that are easy to implement, intelligent, and can add a lot of value to an organization. We also like hosted applications.

With this in mind, when we saw Prospect Insight, Pardot’s email marketing and automation application, we were very impressed.  The application is great, and the team at Pardot is very friendly and helpful, a great combination.

If you’re a NetSuite user, and you’d like to automate your email campaigns, improve reporting in the marketing department, and capture better lead information from your website, then we encourage you to contact us and check out a demo. We know you’ll be impressed.

Every year, probably since the dawn of time, people have been using the relatively arbitrary start date of a new year to think about the future.

Now I don’t typically make resolutions, as I think the’re best done through out the year, but now’s as good a time as any to think about things. Here are some questions that I think you should ask yourself, and the answers just might cause you to take action and contact us.

How much do you spend on employee productivity?

This question is a bit tricky, but a white board, or a paper and pen, along with 10 minutes of your valuable time should give you a ballpark.  You might know exactly how much you spend on marketing, or even exactly how much you spent on employee training, but how much did you spend on all productivity related items. This includes IT related purchases that are supposed to make people better at their jobs.  Now, how much of that was on the periphery? How much was spent on the tools they use most often?  I won’t beat you over the head with the logical conclusion.

How predictable is your business?

Can you know in advance if you are going to hit your targets?  What data points can you use for planning?  Do you have an accurate forecast from your reps?  Do you have a system in place to track that data and make it not a complete PITA for those that work for you?

Do you have unused power at your fingertips?

During the past year I’ve heard “We’re not using the system to it’s fullest.  We just don’t have time to improve.”  C’mon.  2010 is the year to make the list of things that you know you should be doing and tick them off the list.  Need help?  Ask.

How clean is your database?

Do you have someone who is officially, not “should be”, in charge of how clean your customer data is? When was the last time you looked at data that calculates how clean?  When are you going to implement a clean up/refresh plan?  Pro Tip – If you can get your customers to clean it up for you it’s a lot easier.  This is very easy to do in NetSuite… Ask me how.

How intelligent is your marketing?

Do you use rules to segment your leads?  What about customers?  Do you employ drip marketing to nurture contacts and valued clients.  Do you add value to your recipients lives while blasting them with email?  We can fix that…

So… with 2010 upon us, lets do all those things we thought we’d been doing in this space age year.