A View from the TopLine

Business intelligence, or BI, has been a hot buzz word for several years now. A lot of businesses are looking to take advantage of it but getting only limited traction. There are a number of tools out there to help – each one having its strengths and weaknesses.

Salesforce seems to be on a cadence of making a big (and I mean BIG) acquisition each year.

Last year it was MuleSoft, an integration platform for $6.5 billion. I wrote a blog about this at the time questioning the impact for the average customer. I’ll follow that pattern with this more recent acquisition.

What influences your decision-making process for marketing activities and spend?  Many times in marketing we must balance creativity, timing, audience and spend when selecting campaigns.  The success of a marketing campaign is often judged by a feeling.

Since April 1999, I have been involved with CRM implementations. As I reflect on what’s changed over the years, the reason for success or failure has shifted.

Back in the day, databases had to be synced back and forth. That was a fragile process, which has now been virtually eliminated with the advent of web-based CRMs, such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365. We now have real-time access to our accounts, contacts, opportunities, and activities.

I work with a lot of new entrepreneurs, because I love their passion and enthusiasm! I also want to see them succeed. They generally have a great idea about their products and/or services, but they don’t always know how to put the building blocks in place to get their business off to the best start.

Last week I was reminded of a simple and basic rule of selling: follow-up on your leads! It sounds simple, but all too often Marketing generates leads with email campaigns, events, tradeshows, advertising, etc., and Sales doesn’t follow-up. They often make excuses:

I don’t have time.

Here at TopLine, we are all advocates of a philosophy known as the “slight edge”. The philosophy is outlined in the book The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson, and it purports that success is the result of consistency in our simple daily choices. One of Olson’s key insights is it’s the small, easy-to-skip tasks that are our greatest barriers in realizing the full potential of our possible successes.

People who have used Dynamics CRM in the past know that historically the only way to get your CRM contacts into Outlook was to use the Dynamics CRM Outlook plugin.  This was an app that you would install on each user’s computer which provided for integration and synchronization between Outlook and Dynamics.

If you’ve ever received what looked like a personalized email from a huge corporation, there’s a good chance it was actually written using an email automation platform. This technology saves time and money while strengthening customer relationships, and contrary to popular belief, it is well within most SMB budgets.