Tag: CRM

Three Predictions For Marketing Automation From Act-On’s Chief Marketing Officer Atri Chatterjee

Cloud Computing Today recently had the privilege of speaking with Act-On’s Chief Marketing Officer Atri Chatterjee about his predictions for marketing automation in 2015. Chatterjee predicts that 2015 is likely to witness the expansion of marketing automation over and beyond a platform that enables an expansion of revenue. Specifically, Chatterjee envisions marketing automation as becoming a key part of customer relationship management and management of the customer lifecycle more generally. From a technology standpoint, Atri asserts that the industry will increasingly demand “marketing automation platforms to be open systems” that interoperate with other cloud platforms and products as noted in his three predictions below:

3 predictions for the ‘Future of Marketing Automation’ by Atri Chatterjee:

1. Marketing automation will not just be categorized as a lead to revenue platform and instead leveraged throughout the customer life-cycle; for communication programs beyond acquisition and through retention and expansion.

2. Marketing automation will be the front end technology for customer relationship management. Marketing is currently the first touch point for customers and it will also continue throughout the relationship. A marketers role in the customer experience will continue to be more pervasive as the use of marketing automation expands to other initiatives.

3. Marketers will require their marketing automation platforms to be open systems that empower them to customize their solution with other third-party cloud services to enhance its overall use. Doing so will allow marketers to differentiate their digital marketing experiences and be able to augment campaigns using data from other systems such as ERP, HR, CRM and others. Think of marketing automation as a trains locomotive and the cab cars as the eco-system of apps.

About Atri Chatterjee

Atri is responsible for all things marketing at Act-On. Although he didn’t join until 2012, his association with the company as an adviser and an early customer goes back to when the company was founded. He wasn’t satisfied with helping the Act-On revolution from the outside; he had to jump in!

His over 20 years of experience span marketing, product management, business development and engineering at high-growth innovative companies ranging from start-up ventures to large public companies. Most recently, he was Vice President and GM of the User Authentication business at Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC). Prior to that, he was Senior Vice President of Marketing at McAfee, Inc. (now part of Intel) and prior to that was the CMO of Secure Computing Corporation until its purchase by McAfee.

Atri was also the first VP of Marketing at Responsys, where he helped create the first business plan, raise several rounds of funding and establish that company as a pioneer SaaS application for email marketing. He has also held senior marketing roles at other category-leading companies including CipherTrust, McAfee, Netscape, and Clarify.

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Base Enhances Sales Productivity Platform With Real-Time Analytics And Rich Data Visualization

Base, the CRM that leverages real-time data and analytics, recently announced the release of a bevy of new features and functionality that brings real-time, Big Data analytics to cloud-based sales productivity management. Base’s proprietary technology aggregates data from sources such as phone calls, in person meetings, social network-based prospects and news feeds and subsequently produces real-time notifications to sales professionals. As a result, sales teams can minimize their manual input of sales-related data and instead take advantage of the analytic and data visualization capabilities of the Base platform. The Base platform testifies to a qualitative shift within the CRM space marked by the delivery of enhanced automation to sales operations workflows resulting from the conjunction of real-time data, predictive analytics and data visualization. Uzi Shmilovici, CEO of Base, remarked on the positioning of Base within the larger CRM landscape as follows:

Base picks up where other CRMs have left off. Until now, legacy cloud Sales and CRM products like Salesforce have been accepted as ‘the norm’ by the enterprise market. However, recent advancements in big data, mobility and real-time computing reveal a need for a new generation of intelligent sales software that offers flexibility, visibility, and real-time functionality. If you’re using outdated technology that cannot adapt to the advanced needs of modern day sales teams, your competition will crush you.

Here, Shmilovici comments on the way in which big data, real-time analytics and the proliferation of mobile devices have precipitated the creation of a new class of sales applications that outstrip the functionality of “legacy cloud Sales and CRM products like Salesforce.” In a phone interview with Cloud Computing Today, Shmilovici elaborated on the ability of the Base platform to aggregate disparate data sources to produce rich, multivalent profiles of sales prospects that augment the ability of sales teams to convert leads into qualified sales. Base’s ability to enhance sales operations by means of data-driven analytics are illustrated by the screenshot below:

The graphic above illustrates the platform’s ability to track sales conversions at the level of individual sales professionals as well as sales managers or owners within a team. VPs of Sales can customize analytics regarding the progress of their teams to enable enhanced talent and performance management in addition to gaining greater visibility as to where the market poses its stiffest challenges. More importantly, however, Base delivers a veritable library of customized analytics that illustrates a prominent use case for the convergence of cloud computing, real-time analytics and Big Data technologies. As such, the success of the platform will depend on its ability to continue enhancing its algorithms and analytics while concurrently enriching the user experience that remains integral to the daily experience of sales teams.