B2B Marketing Features

Marketing, particularly in the B2B arena, has become a hotbed of technological development. As new tools become available, marketers embrace technology to help them reach their customers.

Since the Internet spawned the World Wide Web, IP (Internet Protocol) services have developed to the point where any marketing department can now harness their customer data to unprecedented levels. Hosted services have replaced installed applications making them more cost effective to use, easier to customise and from the vendors points of view, fast and efficient when upgrades are needed.

This is a far cry from the days when marketing applications were installed software that required existing infrastructure and maintenance over time that put them out of reach of many B2B marketers simply due to cost.

 

Software as a service

One clear illustration of how marketing technology vendors have rapidly evolved over the last few years is the massive success of Salesforce.com. The once dominant Siebel – now part of the Oracle Empire – saw its market dwindle as Salesforce.com became dominant. Even the massive SAP is looking closely at the foundations of its business model that sees its customers with massive investments with its applications environment, and finds it lacking in a business world that is increasingly moving online. In the past, enterprise computing meant SAP, but in the future smaller more dynamic vendors who can offer fast development of custom applications that their clients' demand will dominate the CRM market.

But Salesforce.com isn't simply a hosted CRM package. It offers a practical insight into what have become known as 'Software as a Service' (SAAS) applications. This platform is simply a software delivery system that is Internet-based. From a vendor's perspective the SAAS – or on-demand CRM market as it is often called – is buoyant. Gartner predicts that the market as a whole will increase by $1 billion per year over the next five years. CRM is clearly an ideal candidate for this kind of delivery mechanism, but as are other marketing applications, such as event management and brand asset management.

The often low cost of subscriptions that vendors place on access to their services make these kinds of CRM packages very attractive to the B2B marketers who may well be operating within a very narrow market sector. The pay-as-you-go approach to the new breed of CRM applications has opened technology to more marketers, but also enabled smaller vendors to enter the sector with their own specialised applications. Saleforce.com's own AppExchange offers anyone the chance to build custom applications that use the Salesforce.com hosted foundation. If you need specialised utilities you can build these yourself and bolt them into your existing Salesforce.com hosted package.

But Salesforce.com won't be alone in its market for long. SAP and Microsoft will soon have their alternatives and with Microsoft's dominance of the desktop and back office markets, a functional alternative to Salesforce.com's application platform could be very tempting. Who wouldn't like to seamlessly integrate their Microsoft Office applications with their CRM platform? Microsoft is already offering this kind of off-the-shelf service with its Dynamics CRM platform. “We believe in the power of software plus services and the introduction of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live is another example of our delivering that vision,” says Jeff Raikes, president of the business division at Microsoft. “Microsoft CRM Live will provide a SAAS option for deploying our leading CRM solution and will also afford partners new opportunities to deliver their value-added services.”

 

Newcomer to the market

Salesforce.com's dominance of the CRM market is built on the foundations of the web. But recent developments in IP application could mean that applications like this have to once again evolve. Why? Because the barrier between the Internet browser and the PC desktop is about to be breached with a new wave of software built via Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

This new breed of application is Internet based, but it can also interact within your computer's desktop environment. The web browser will no longer be a walled garden. For instance, in the world of RIAs you could run a hosted CRM system online, but the RIAs would enable these systems to integrate with any back office or legacy systems you may have just as if the whole system was sitting on a server at your premises. It's very early days yet for this development platform, but expect companies like Salesforce.com, Oracle and of course Microsoft to offer this kind of functionality within their hosted systems in the near future.

Salesforce.com may grab all the limelight but it is not your only choice of hosted CRM systems. The market is awash with other vendors including BScaler, Entellium, RightNow, SugarCRM, NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, Soffront, C2CRM and Aplicor. They all seem offer broadly similar features, but the key to buying this kind of hosted CRM service is to match your exact needs to the application. The devil is in the detail in this market.

 

Vendor advantage

What these vendors have learned is that they have to provide solutions that marketers can see real value in. Also as Ray Welsh, sales and marketing director at Mailtrack, says, support is of paramount importance. “What helps a new technology get trialled and ultimately become accepted is the support provided around it – if you throw raw technology at marketers, very little of it will stick. If you explain in business and marketing terms the problem that it will address, how to implement it and what the benefits are, the adoption rate of the technology will be far higher. This is the difference between providing technology and providing a solution.”

With a number of well-developed tools available to B2B marketers, it's easy to believe that this market is mature and that each vendor can offer similar systems, when in fact the market is diverse and often confusing to a B2B enterprise looking to install its first hosted CRM system or other marketing application.

Chris Sykes

Chris Sykes, MD at Volume, says, “There are two camps; the early adopters and the laggards. If you ask a vice president of marketing who has been using 'marketing technology', I'm pretty sure they will be able to demonstrate the value they have gained but with the admittance that it took time to tweak and refine before they got back anything tangible from their investment. In the case of the laggards, a lack of confidence is a key barrier to adoption. The problem for them is where do they start, who should they be talking to? And what do they really need? The marketing technology space is very fragmented, which compounds the issue further.”

 

Change on the horizon

The landscape that marketing technology vendors are operating in is changing rapidly. Where once a marketing system would have taken years and millions of pounds to develop, now micro vendors can use open source standards that have been adopted by SMEs and FTSEs alike, and build robust marketing systems that deliver just what their clients need in their narrow CRM market.

Sean Rollings

Advanced APIs (application programming interfaces) that enable one system to communicate with another are now available to any developer. Sean Rollings, VP of product marketing at Netsuite, says, “Faster, better and cheaper have long been the hallmarks of business management. It's true for marketing too, and you should add 'measurable' to that mix. The on-demand business suite of applications enables faster, better, and cheaper with the once elusive measurable as core.”

There is little doubt that hosted CRM systems have changed the face of marketing. With rapid development in the sector, customers of these systems can focus their attention away from the systems they use, and onto developing their businesses relationship with its clients.

“Creativity to build new, fresh and imaginative products and services by smaller companies, or even individuals means that we are buying into technology that is current and useful now and in the future,” says Tim Gibbon, director at PR agency Elemental Communications. “We have a clearer picture of where the landscape is going and how we may arrive at it. As long as the product or service does what it needs to, there is solid support and it's expandable, within reason, I'm not perturbed about where it's from and who built it. The competition is fierce and this is helpful for all parties.”

Tim Gibbon

Ken Kornbluh, vice president at MarketingPilot, adds, “The early adopters are already showing the value of using these new technologies. In marketing one is always rewarded for novelty and leadership; marketing is often what makes the difference between success and failure. The rapid adoption of these new technologies speaks for itself. For a marketer the availability of these new technologies is an incredible opportunity to engage customers and prospects like never before.”

With the open standards that IP-based applications delivers, vendors of marketing applications have been able to accelerate their development and offer the market an increasingly diverse range of products to suit even the most specialised requirements. Today, if a business has a PC and a broadband connection to the Internet, they can use cutting-edge CRM systems with ease.

 

INTERVIEW: Siim Vips on technology in marketing

Siim Vips, the founder  and CEO of software  company Modera, on  the evolution of  technology

Q: How do you think a new technology vendor within the marketing sector can instill confidence in the market for a new product?

A: The barriers of entry can be broken in two ways. It can be a unique function of the tool or service that will stand out. Or the enhancing or combining of existing tools with new technologies making the life of marketers easier, or increasing efficiency.

Q: What are the key advantages technology has brought to marketing over the last few years?

A: Technology has changed the marketing sector forever. The main advantage is that now we have more tools to track customer behaviour and measure the results of these marketing activities.

Q: The first generation of marketing technologies were cumbersome to set up and use. The current generation is more streamlined and able to integrate into existing systems. How important has this been to back office systems such as accounts and customer management?

A: It is crucial because the tools that compile back office systems are the ones that produce most value. Recently, it has been shown that companies are willing to invest in upgrading back office tools and software to support sales and marketing
efforts. In the near future we won't remember what the old desktop-based back office tools were about as we will be using OS independent, AJAX driven or similar user-friendly applications.

Q: No longer are we required to have a huge workforce to develop, manage and maintain an application - these days companies can be small and flexible. How do you think this will develop?

A: Service-based applications are the way forward, especially in the SME sector. Our focus is to offer the same tools in different ways including software as a service. Technologies will be more flexible taking account of each customer's need and allowing them to experience more choices. Taking into account geographical and cultural differences is also a major factor
in flexibility.

Q: Do you think the B2B sector has an affinity for the software as a service model of delivering hosted services to their marketing departments?

A: For sure, there are many ways to bring B2B together through several hosted services to marketing departments. These systems already exist and will develop quickly in the future. We will see many B2B sectors base new standards that will combine B2B and B2C releasing enormous synergies.

Q: What should companies should look for when evaluating a vendor?

A: Always track records and references are among the first criteria in the decision making, since the rate of success is usually directly linked to the past performances. With newcomers, you may get lucky or may lose valuable time. Specific know-how in the sector of the prospective clients is always important as well,shortening the learning curve and period of the
return on investment. Also, define your needs and map your existing systems for the full picture of your opportunities. Look for client testimonials,case studies and reference information. Check the credibility and potential of the vendor to secure your investment. Always make sure that the vendor has the needed know-how in your sector and get to know the user interface to see if it is good enough. That is what you will be working with daily.

 

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