Neolane, the leading provider of cross-channel campaign management software and CRM Technologies, the UK’s premier marketing operations agency, invites you to a free-to-attend Breakfast Seminar on Wednesday 6^th May 2009 from 8:30am to 10:10am at One Aldwych, London WC2B 4RH.

For more information and to register Click here

Marketing is no longer just a ‘job’ – it has become an ‘operation’ involving a range of creative, administrative, scientific, analytic and technological skills with the potential to stretch the abilities of even the most experienced or highly-qualified marketing professionals.

Today, you need to be able to juggle campaign activity with gathering customer data and delivering high quality, qualified leads to your sales team, while reporting to an increasingly-savvy board of directors, who all want to be convinced that their money is being well spent.

What you need is an expert capable of bringing all of these technological, analytical and database skills together in a solution which recognises your need to practically integrate and synchronise all of your marketing systems and processes – someone like CRM Technologies. As a pioneer of the ‘marketing operations’ concept – with the hands-on experience to appreciate your marketing challenges and the in-depth knowledge to provide a solution - there is none better placed to help you.

Marketing Operations can deliver the entire automated customer lifecycle model to your overstretched marketing team, in a way which enables individuals to gain a clear oversight of the whole process, from data gathering and relationship acquisition, through the sales process and on to customer retention and development – in other words, the so-called ‘single customer view’ from first contact through to repeat buyer.

The notion of a ‘single customer view’ is not new in itself – but achieving it almost certainly is. The business world is littered with the remains of those marketing departments that have tried to achieve this ‘single view’ without being in possession of the necessary understanding and skills to make it work in practice. Anyone who has attempted to combine disciplines like database management, email marketing, event marketing and relationship management into a single, fully-synchronised ‘closed loop’ marketing system will fully appreciate the problems to be overcome!

Marketing operations can effectively offer the ‘glue’ which has been lacking until now. By focusing on providing the technical services, solutions and knowledge required by today’s marketing departments, operations specialists can allow the marketing department to focus on strategic and tactical innovation, without becoming bogged down by operational, technology and data challenges.

Marketing Operations can cover a wide range of specialist services for marketers, from data cleansing, enhancement and analysis, marketing database design, development and management through to fully-managed web based automated marketing systems. The skill is in the application of working practices, resources and technology to address the needs of the marketing department and other departments that rely on it. Without it, departments that truly wish to achieve the goal of a fully-synchronised, single view approach will either spend a fortune on ‘not quite achieving it’ or worse, will put the integrity of the entire department and its systems at risk.

Technology has taken over the marketing process in a way that few could have possibly imagined even just 10 years ago. CRM Technologies’ Marketing Operations expertise offers a real opportunity for marketing departments of any size, all over the UK, to achieve the kind of technology-based, fully integrated marketing process that business has always wanted.

It also means that marketing technology no longer needs to rely on the IT department for its upkeep, while marketers can go back to marketing again, safe in the knowledge that you now have the systems and data specialists available to keep both the sales team and the board happy!

About CRM Technologies
Founded in 1999, CRM is the first of a new breed of specialist marketing operations agencies to deliver a range of services and solutions to provide operational support for marketing departments. CRM provide access to operational best practices, technical expertise and administrative resource, enabling marketers to focus on strategic, creative and tactical innovation.

CRM provides a number of on-demand services for the busy marketing department from data cleaning and analysis through to emarketing and reporting. CRM also host and manage marketing databases, web applications, campaign landing pages and reporting portals - allowing sophisticated solutions to be deployed, with no IT overhead from the client.

CRM provides its solutions and services for micro-cap to large-cap size companies, operating primarily in the Hi-Technology and Services sectors. Clients include; Sun Microsystems, McAfee and Netstore Benendon Health, Gartner , Manhattan Associates and Micro Focus.

Sales and Marketing operations specialist integrates business databases following acquisition

Sales and Marketing operations specialist CRM Technologies has played a significant role in enabling UK-based global software business Micro Focus plc to seamlessly integrate the business data of its latest acquisition into its own business information system.

Micro Focus bought web business applications company Netmanage in June 2008, with an objective to fully integrate Netmanage’s sales, marketing and customer information systems by September 2008. Drawing on its extensive data expertise, CRM successfully matched, cleaned and de-duplicated over 300,000 data records and 600,000 individual contact files across Netmanage’s core sales and marketing systems, enabling Micro Focus to integrate the required records from the remaining data into their Pivotal database.

Netmanage had run separate, non-synchronised databases for its sales, licencing and customer support functions, with no effective integration between the three. Consequently, Micro Focus faced a significant challenge in achieving its deadline for systems ‘switchover’ following the acquisition.

“We had worked with CRM Technologies before and we were confident of their credentials in the data quality and analytics field,” commented Micro Focus Worldwide Business Systems Manager, Danial Clarke. “With that in mind, we felt they were the obvious choice in helping us to ensure that we could achieve our systems switchover with quality, robust data which fully integrated with our systems at Micro Focus,” he added.

CRM Technologies mapped all of Netmanage’s business data against a series of agreed ‘core’ criteria – ensuring a minimum of data duplication between the systems - before delivering a final mapping file which provided integrated and de-duped data from Netmanage’s three databases as an overlay onto Micro Focus’ Pivotal database.

“Exercises like this underline how critical it can be to incorporate operational data from an acquired business in a way which lets both businesses operate effectively and seamlessly from day one,” commented CRM Technologies director Andrew Freeman. “Data quality is a key consideration for any sales and marketing team, but when you are combining the data from a number of disparate systems into a single business application, it becomes absolutely crucial.”


About Micro Focus
Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization and Management software enables customers’ business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk. For additional information please visit www.microfocus.com

About CRM Technologies
Founded in 1999, CRM is the first of a new breed of specialist marketing operations agencies to deliver a range of services and solutions to provide operational support for marketing departments. CRM provide access to operational best practices, technical expertise and administrative resource, enabling marketers to focus on strategic, creative and tactical innovation.

CRM provides a number of on-demand services for the busy marketing department from data cleaning and analysis through to emarketing and reporting. CRM also host and manage marketing databases, web applications, campaign landing pages and reporting portals - allowing sophisticated solutions to be deployed, with no IT overhead from the client.

CRM provides its solutions and services for micro-cap to large-cap size companies, operating primarily in the Hi-Technology and Services sectors. Clients include; Sun Microsystems, McAfee and Netstore Benendon Health, Gartner , Manhattan Associates and Micro Focus.
www.crmtechnologies.com

Sales and Marketing operations specialist integrates salesforce.com with enterprise-wide business application

Sales and Marketing operations specialist CRM Technologies has implemented salesforce.com for UK-based global software business Micro Focus plc, in a way which enables the company to significantly increase the capability of its sales activities, while retaining and integrating all of its ‘legacy’ sales, marketing and lead data.

CRM Technologies developed a bespoke integration of salesforce.com, which will provide Micro Focus’ sales teams with company, contact and opportunity management facilities, while synchronising seamlessly with the company’s established enterprise back-end business applications.

Micro Focus’ sales & marketing business applications are based around a central database application and the need for the company’s sales function to develop a more comprehensive approach to lead management, tracking and development led Micro Focus to adopt the popular salesforce.com platform, but in a way which retained its legacy data.

“All of our sales and marketing operational data resides on our chosen relationship management platform and we wanted to incorporate significantly higher levels of flexibility and functionality for our sales teams, but in a way which did not mean losing our existing data or systems,” commented Micro Focus’ Worldwide Business Systems Manager, Danial Clarke. “CRM Technologies has provided us with an ideal solution by integrating a state-of-art sales management tool with our familiar and established back-end systems in a way which improves our business processes and enables us to develop, track and exploit a wider range of sales opportunities,” he added.

As a salesforce.com consultancy and application exchange partner, CRM Technologies can offer bespoke application development services for existing customers of salesforce.com, while offering new salesforce.com users the opportunity to deploy completely customised applications which perfectly match their business needs.

Saleforce.com is one of the pioneers of ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) and its templated, ‘on-demand’ marketing applications delivered over the internet have historically been highly popular with small to medium sized businesses who do not wish to make long term, expensive licensing commitments to major marketing software vendors.

“We are delighted to have been able to deliver to Micro Focus a solution which has provided them with exactly what they wanted from both their existing and new applications,” commented CRM Technologies Director Andrew Freeman. “Historically, applications like saleforce.com have proved popular with small to medium-sized businesses, but this underlines the fact that not only is the package well-suited to global businesses, it is also possible to integrate the solution with existing business systems, without the need for a wholesale overhaul of legacy business data,” he said.

Salesforce.com is accessed securely over the Internet, enabling businesses to work from any location — home, office, or the road. According to Salesforce.com, software as a service offers data security, upgrades and round-the-clock support, with nothing to install and no costly setup fees - leaving staff with more time to concentrate on core business activities.

“CRM already has a strong history of delivering hosted and custom-built marketing applications including hosted databases, campaign landing pages and management portals,” added Freeman. “We are confident that the further innovations we will be able to offer through the salesforce model will significantly add to our ability to provide genuine, real-world value to our customers’ marketing activities.”

About Micro Focus
Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization and Management software enables customers’ business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk. For additional information please visit www.microfocus.com

About CRM Technologies
Founded in 1999, CRM is the first of a new breed of specialist marketing operations agencies to deliver a range of services and solutions to provide operational support for marketing departments. CRM provide access to operational best practices, technical expertise and administrative resource, enabling marketers to focus on strategic, creative and tactical innovation.

CRM provides a number of on-demand services for the busy marketing department from data cleaning and analysis through to emarketing and reporting. CRM also host and manage marketing databases, web applications, campaign landing pages and reporting portals - allowing sophisticated solutions to be deployed, with no IT overhead from the client.

CRM provides its solutions and services for micro-cap to large-cap size companies, operating primarily in the Hi-Technology and Services sectors. Clients include; Sun Microsystems, McAfee and Netstore, Benenden Health, Gartner , Manhattan Associates, Micro Focus. www.crmtechnologies.com

In this economic downturn, marketers will need to focus their efforts on existing customers for maximum return, explains Andrew Freeman at CRM Technologies

The gloomy economy now means that businesses will have to achieve more sales, with less marketing budget. But with so many options within the marketing mix, where should you start to prioritise those activities? The key objective should be to focus on marketing activities geared to retaining and maintaining existing customers. This is because marketing to repeat customers is the most cost-effective route for business survival and continued success.
So how do you respond to this shift? Well, it’s all about understanding your relationship with your customers at each stage of the sales lifecycle. To target existing customers, you should only need to examine those at the later stages of the lifecycle, examples of this could be:

• Profiled prospects - contacts that have had one or more leads associated with them

• Customers - contacts that have purchased your product or service

• Repeat customers - contacts who have repeatedly purchased your product or service

Once you have a customer you obviously want to sell them more and develop them. This could be achieved by cross-selling or up-selling to them. After they have been developed to their fullest, you then want to retain them – so they come back! This may seem easy in practice, but how do you discover who they all are and what they want?

Fortunately, help is at hand, as a growing number of customers conduct both their purchasing research and sales on the Web. This means that you can easily gain a strong understanding of their digital behaviour. Armed with this customer knowledge, you can begin to see what is taking place in the buying process. This means that tools such as online tracking and analytics packages can provide low-cost competitive intelligence to really understand and serve customer buying habits.

The key to examining your customer’s digital behaviour is comprised of analysing their website visits, information downloads, keyword searches and email responses. In many ways an online buyer’s behaviour provides the most accurate picture of interest and intent. By analysing the frequency and click stream data of Web site visits, you can focus on the buyer’s concerns and motivation.

There is sales & marketing process that can support this - the idea is to develop a closed loop between your marketing and sales efforts. This allows you to keep track of the different stages of a customer and adapt your marketing messages appropriately. By aligning your marketing and sales teams around information and intelligence, you will possess the most important tools to drive successful sales.

Unfortunately, simply switching on a business intelligence tool is not enough. A holistic approach is needed with significant process changes required within both your marketing and sales teams. This could include:

• Developing marketing channels on a single marketing platform to build comprehensive customer profiles

• Sharing customer intelligence with sales and other business stakeholders by integrating the marketing system of record with Customer Relationship Management or Sales Force Automation systems

• Evaluating customer behaviour using advanced sales lead scoring systems

• Speeding up the sales process with real time sales alerts and notifications of prospect Web activity and marketing responses.

• Driving customers back to the website with personalised nurturing campaigns.

So once these processes are set up, how do you know if things are working? Apart from revenue going up, here are some other ideas for metrics and measures for the latter stages of the customer lifecycle, highlighted earlier:

Develop

• How many customers buy a single product/service from you versus multiple products/services

• Increase in actual and forecast revenue from existing customer base

• What is in each stage of sales pipeline for existing customers

• New business wins from existing customers

Retain
• Customer churn rate

• Customer satisfaction levels

• Share of Wallet

There is a big opportunity for forward-thinking companies to strategically use tools and processes to track the behaviour of their customer’s prospects and making that information available to their sales teams. By focusing on existing customers and their buying behaviour means that you can achieve more business for less budget – which is the perfect solution in a recession.

CRM Technologies partners with Eloqua to offer end-to-end marketing automation tools and best practices to business professionals

Marketing operations specialist CRM Technologies today announced that it has partnered with Eloqua, the category-defining marketing automation leader, to provide leading edge demand generation technology to its fast-expanding marketing applications and professional services portfolio. Founded in 1999, Eloqua is the global market leader for demand generation applications and best practice expertise for business marketers.

CRM Technologies’ partnership with Eloqua means that the company can now offer marketing departments and new business teams a highly specialist combination of market-leading demand-creation technology combined with an innovative portfolio of technology and integration services designed to offer complete demand generation and sales force automation systems which can be delivered via the SaaS (software as a service) model.

“We are delighted to have been approved as an Eloqua partner,” commented CRM Technologies Director Andrew Freeman. “Eloqua’s leading position in the demand generation space sits perfectly with our ability to seamlessly integrate its solutions into a fully-comprehensive, end-to-end marketing operations solution for businesses of any size and any geographic or sector focus,” he said.
Eloqua’s Vice President of EMEA Sales, Bijan Bedroud, “Eloqua is in the enviable position of leading a fast-growing and exciting market where companies can significantly elevate their marketing effectiveness. We look forward to working with the team at CRM Technologies, to growing our business together and to making our customers the best marketers in the world.”
According to the company, Eloqua’s products and services turn customer acquisition into a measurable and repeatable automated process, by putting the most powerful automated demand generation solutions into the hands of sophisticated business marketers.
Eloqua’s products are aimed at those businesses who are no longer satisfied with putting up a website, sending out emails and crossing their fingers. Eloqua allows you to increase response rates, let salespeople know when prospects are ready to buy and convert more of them into profitable customers. The company’s applications also allow better integration all of online and offline marketing programs, while using the web to inform prospects, qualify leads and accelerate the sales process.

“CRM already has a strong history of delivering hosted and custom-built marketing applications including hosted databases, campaign landing pages and management portals,” added Freeman. “We are confident that the further innovations we will be able to offer through our partnership with Eloqua will significantly complement our existing partnerships with other innovative vendors like salesforce.com, adding to our ability to provide genuine, real-world value to our customers’ marketing activities.”

About CRM
Founded in 1999, CRM is the first of a new breed of specialist marketing operations agencies to deliver a range of services and solutions to provide operational support for marketing departments. CRM provide access to operational best practices, technical expertise and administrative resource, enabling marketers to focus on strategic, creative and tactical innovation.

CRM provides a number of on demand services for the busy marketing department from data cleaning and analysis through to emarketing and reporting. CRM also host and manage marketing databases, web applications, campaign landing pages and reporting portals - allowing sophisticated solutions to be deployed, with no IT investment from the client.

CRM provides its solutions and services for micro-cap to large-cap size companies, operating primarily in the Hi-Technology and Services sectors. Clients include; Sun Microsystems, McAfee, Netstore, Gartner, Beneden Health and Manhattan Associates. www.crmtechnologies.com

About Eloqua
Eloqua is the category-defining marketing automation leader and provider of best practices expertise for marketers around the world. The company’s mission is to make its customers the best marketers on earth. Thousands of customers from leading companies such as American Express, AON, Apple, Cognos, Dow Jones, Fidelity, Seagate and Sybase rely on the power of Eloqua to execute, automate and measure programs that generate revenue. Eloqua helps companies read and decode their buyers’ Digital Body Language™, thereby improving the quality and quantity of sales leads, increasing marketing effectiveness, and accelerating the selling process. Eloqua is headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, with offices in Toronto, London, Singapore and throughout North America. For more information, please call 866-327-8764 or email demand@eloqua.com.

Andrew Freeman, Director of marketing operations specialists CRM Technologies argues that the challenge of migrating business data is too easily overlooked in the business acquisition process.

So, you’ve been on the acquisition trail, you’ve pinpointed a business which offers an ideal strategic fit with your own, their board has accepted your offer, the deal is done and you can now look forward to a seamless integration process which fully synchronises that business and its operational systems with your own – thereby creating a business superpower capable of conquering all in its path, right? Well no, not exactly...

No matter how apparently ‘perfect’ the fit is between seller and buyer, unless that ‘fit’ can be translated into practical and successful integration, then both businesses might just as well remain single. Data migration, in particular, is the often overlooked and usually underestimated hurdle which many acquisitive businesses ignore at their peril. But, if approached and handled correctly, a properly-handled migration can provide the catalyst for many years of mutually-beneficial and successful partnership.

Businesses are bought for many reasons, but most are bought because they offer the buyer something they don’t already have – whether it be market share, new technologies or access to new markets and new customers. Either way, the buyer is going to want access to the seller’s business information pretty quickly – not least so it can be migrated and integrated to give both businesses access to the economies of scale on offer.

Usually, the first target of any data migration or integration requirement is the bringing together of sales, marketing and customer information systems as quickly as possible. On the rare occasions that both businesses are using the same business applications, on the same platforms and with the same synchronisation techniques, then such migration is rarely a major issue. In the real world, however, not only may the businesses use different applications, they may actually use separate systems for sales, marketing and customer data – with no means of synchronisation between any of them! This is clearly where expertise and experience in data migration can mean the difference between success and failure.

As a case in point, in June 2008, global application modernisation business Micro Focus acquired web application business Netmanage, aiming to fully integrate the systems of the two companies within three months. Further analysis of Netmanage’s business data showed that it comprised in the order of 300,000 data records and 600,000 individual contact files across the company’s core sales and marketing systems – all of which had to be reconciled with Micro Focus’ own data before transfer, to avoid duplication and subsequent confusion.

In situations like these, where you have two businesses operating in a fundamentally similar marketplace, it is almost inevitable that the sales teams of both businesses are going to be targeting the same types of companies – and possibly the same individuals within those companies! In that sense, the need for thorough reconciliation between the business data of both buyer and seller should require no further explanation.

It is essential that sample data from all relevant data platforms is analysed in the first instance – and as early as possible within the acquisition process - in order to give some idea of the level of ‘overlap’ present in the two data sets. From this it will be possible to properly assess the level of task required to fully integrate the data from both businesses – as well as an estimate of the likely time required.

It is also essential at this stage to agree on what is regarded as ‘core’ or strategic data. In other words, it is probably not essential at this stage to begin mapping what percentage of contacts have a liking for rugby, hang gliding or real ale – just the name, position and contact information should be enough to enable business to continue. Once you have your data is fully migrated and integrated it will be significantly easier to overlay additional layers of detail at that time.

Eventually, all of Netmanage’s business data was compared and mapped against a series of previously agreed ‘core’ criteria – reducing what was initially a 90% data overlap with Micro Focus’ systems down to just 5% - before arriving at a final mapping file which provided integrated and de-duped data from Netmanage’s three databases as an overlay onto Micro Focus’ relationship management database.

Exercises like these underline how critical it can be to incorporate operational data from an acquired business in a way which lets both businesses operate effectively and seamlessly from day one. The number of badly targeted mailings, the number of inappropriate sales calls and the volume of irrelevant email serves to underline the fact that data quality is a key consideration for any sales and marketing team. But when you are combining the data from a number of disparate systems into a single business application, it is not just ‘important’ - it becomes absolutely crucial and getting it wrong can have a huge impact.

So, before you embark on that major data integration exercise with your new acquisition, it might just be worth taking some time out to assess the quality of the data you will be working with – and how much of it already resembles your own business information. The earlier you can do this within the acquisition process, the better – and the earlier you recognise that you may need some expert help in matching, cleaning and de-duplicating what may be a significant volume of data, the more likely you are to achieve a successful integration within the time you have been given.

The current business climate has seen many of the UK’s (and indeed many of the world’s) financial institutions merging – either through choice or necessity. The need for effective and reliable data migration should be high on the list of any business systems professional currently faced with such a task. That task may be critical for a number of reasons, but if you get it wrong now, you may not have another chance to put it right.

About CRM Technologies
Founded in 1999, CRM is the first of a new breed of specialist marketing operations agencies to deliver a range of services and solutions to provide operational support for marketing departments. CRM provide access to operational best practices, technical expertise and administrative resource, enabling marketers to focus on strategic, creative and tactical innovation.

CRM provides a number of on-demand services for the busy marketing department from data cleaning and analysis through to emarketing and reporting. CRM also host and manage marketing databases, web applications, campaign landing pages and reporting portals - allowing sophisticated solutions to be deployed, with no IT overhead from the client.

CRM provides its solutions and services for micro-cap to large-cap size companies, operating primarily in the Hi-Technology and Services sectors. Clients include; Sun Microsystems, McAfee and Netstore Benendon Health, Gartner , Manhattan Associates and Micro Focus.
www.crmtechnologies.com