The client is Feedblitz.com – an RSS to email service provider.  A very neat tool that enables marketing newsletters and blog RSS feeds to be merged into a single site service.  The advanced functionality is very useful.

Take a read about what they wrote about the project.

Creative Agency Secrets has worked on

• User interface redesign
• New site features
• Logo redesign
• CRM customer analysis (value ranking and customer needs analysis)
• Marketing communications – to come later.

We congratulate Phil Hollows and the Feedblitz team on the work so far and look forward to an awesome relaunch… more anon.

I was reading Marketing magazine and one of the columnists was Will McInnes writing about Cadbury’s Wispa.

Itself a brand that’s been well used to great PR (thanks to inspiration from Mark Borkowski in the past.  What interested me in what Will wrote was his criticism of Wispa asking visitors to register in order to get into the deeper engagement features of the site.

The registration was described as

a direct marketer’s fantastical wishlist

And that started me thinking.

The Early CRM years

When I was working with PRG doing CRM strategy – we’d set out a database specification that had hundreds of data points for each individual customer.  We WANTED to know all about you.

The difficulty was getting that information from the customer in an appropriate way.

The way it is now

McInnes suggests that Cadbury use Facebook Connect to handle log-in and registration for its site.

Not a bad idea – the fan page relationship stays in FB and the marketing platform remains on the Wispa site.

As a marketer, I’d be nervous initially about allowing a third party to handle customer data particularly a closed one that didn’t allow data extraction.  But then I had second thoughts.

How to assess your brand’s data needs

Wispa is a B2C brand – it has no expectation of selling direct off its site to customers and the ‘engagement’ is just about getting people to live the brand values of playfulness.  And so why not outsource the ‘grunt’ registration to a third party.  Particularly one where security and data handling is a key expertise?

Who knows, FB might do a combined advertising plus deal with Wispa if they use its platform to drive new memberships into FB.  I see a nicely balanced relationship with each brand delivering part of the site and playing to their own strengths.

Let’s face it, what will Wispa do with your customer data anyway?

P.S.  Afterthought – when the brave new world of VRM starts and customers hold their own data and brands have to ‘subscribe’ to the customer’s data rules and regulations – the boot will be firmly on the other foot and all those multi-field-integrated-user-databases will be worthless.  And I’ve heard on the grapevine that Mydex has a launch date for its first version.  Grin.

Let’s get the tables turning.

Image via CrunchBase

Tom and I corresponded a while back and I have been keen to get an interview with the Engago team about their LeadsExplorer service.

Have a browse around their site and if anyone's tried the service, please write back and tell us what you think.

1) What gave you the idea / inspiration to build LEADSExplorer?

Actually we were developing another B2B solution and were writing the business plan, when it became clear that the website would play an important role in the lead generation for this business.

One member of our team had had experience in his job with a web service that revealed the companies visiting the website and the pages visited providing the basic data for a lead qualification. However he indicated the solution was not good enough as it was missing several functions, features thus requiring too much work to be effective: for instance the data was not grouped by company, thus different visitors from the same company appeared separately.

Thus we came to the conclusion we would need to build it ourselves instead of using a service we wouldn't like.

At the same time it became clear to us that outbound marketing (direct mail, email campaigns, cold calling) is waste of energy as one addresses too many companies.
As people in businesses have become more educated in the use of the Internet, they will more and more prefer to search on the Internet themselves, than to be pushed by emails and cold calls.

After investigating different sources it seemed that at least 7 out of 10 business deals in B2B start with an Internet search. Thus in order to reach out to potential customers early in the buying process, you need to discover them (the company) on your website and qualify them using the visit data: pages visited, duration of visits, repeat visits, number of unique visitors by company, search terms used, direct hit to the website with repeat visit, ?

Thus we defined the requirements for a system:
- Company identification
- Real-time visit data by company

As the companies are stored in a data base for aggregating the data, the step towards a CRM was not far. A CRM that integrates seamless with the website of the company for both:
- Lead generation
- Customer retention

As we found it obvious the user-friendly CRM should collect the emails by company too, we just added two alternative methods to obtain the emails in the CRM too.

The idea is that all available electronic information should be available without any effort in the CRM for the convenience for the user.

2) Who do you think will be the principal users of the service?

The solution is intended for any business in B2B as it reveals the company names of the website visitors.

These businesses can be all kinds of companies: large and small having a website with a few hundreds of visitors a month or a several thousands of visitors.

In smaller to medium sized companies the lead generation is in many cases done by the sales team or even the salesmen, whereas in large companies lead generation is for marketing.

The customer retention is typically for the salesmen ? account managers.
As customer retention is an often overlooked aspect of CRM and it will become even more important in the current economic climate, we believe this is a major feature: timely call or contact your customer thus wasting less time of your customer and yourself.

As we are a smaller company, we don't expect a large multi national to be using our solution (yet).

3) Why should business development professionals be aware of you?

Instead of cold calling or sending out emails /direct mailings to ten thousands of companies form listings, they can limit their efforts by just contacting those companies that have visited the website and have shown sufficient interest in the products or solutions.
This will be much more effective as these are "warm" companies.

In case of customer retention, the alert received when a customer visits again is the trigger to contact your contacts with this client as this is timely.

4) What are the main things you are doing right now to find new customers for LEADSExplorer?

Making sure the right, interested people are landing on our website… after that it's all down to LEADSExplorer (yes, we eat our own dog food). Using our own tool this way also helps us find ways to improve LEADSExplorer or imagine new functionalities we would need. It's an absolute luxury to be able to enhance your own tool this way.

We aim for driving more traffic to our website by:
a. Optimizing the website to:
- increase the SEO – mainly by increasing content.
- aim for a high ranking on search results (SERP) using page titles, titles and headers

b. Blogging:
Blog posts provide high rankings on the results pages of searches. Thus we post on the blog almost everyday.

c. Commenting:
Posting interesting or relevant comments on industry specific blogs.

d. Register the website on all kinds of sales, marketing, CRM and Start-up directories

e. Register the blog feed in as many places as possible to get exposure beyond our reach.

f. Twitter micro blog posts but that doesn't seem to be very effective

g. Press releases: At least one press release every month.

Achievement: Without advertising or advertorials we managed to get a decent amount of traffic: Alexa ranking: #450,000  Compete 4500 unique visitors / month
[update 343,69 Alexa]

5) Any advice for other bootstrapped companies who need customers?

The main advice: double the time estimated in your business plan as everything takes longer than you would ever expect, especially on the Internet.
You have to be ready to sacrifice the main part of your spare time. Still make sure to get out and get away at least once a week. It is good for the spirit and brings new and better ideas or solutions.

Make sure you have a steady income stream in order not to be too worried and have the time to deliver quality solutions and services.

Have a business model as your funding is limited you will need revenue once you have users or customers.

The principles of working remotely are commonplace and many of us have opportunity to take days away from our office desks and work at home or from another location. Nothing much new there.
But what if you could completely redesign your job so that half of your activities were taking place using internet tools?

What do I mean by “internet tools”? well anything from a meeting scheduler like Doodle to a shared database like SugarCRM or Salesforce and collaborative project management like BaseCamp .
I regularly use these tools so that I can now work almost anywhere with little loss of functionality compared with my own desk. The only things I carry around with me are papers [goodness, how last century!]

It feels good. I leave all the backing up and security tools to these online service providers. No need to buy new software each year because when it is released it’s usually already installed on the website and my fee to them includes all these updates, online support and training.

A new mode of working

This phenomenon is called SaaS or “software as a service”. But it’s come to mean far more than just software. It is a new mode of working that releases organisations from having huge in-office servers for hosting networks, software installs and updates and costly security firewalls. Many small and medium sized enterprises now don’t have their own servers. Is this progress? Does it save money and staffing?

Well it seems that Pharma is slowly catching up with the crowd with the first drug rep meeting scheduler tool – all run off the internet. RXVantage has been running a trial in Rhode Island and Massachusetts for the past two years. And it seems to work well.
Drugs reps and medical device salesfolk can schedule meetings online with doctors. It’s led to an increase in efficiency for time-starved doctors and the reps are able to make an appointment without first having to visit the doctor’s practice, sit in the waiting room for 2 hours in order to make the appointment (tell me that wasn’t a waste of time!).

Although I’ve positioned it as a scheduling service the company describes itself as

“The most efficient way for medical providers and pharmaceutical companies to exchange knowledge and ideas that improve patient care.”

How does that sound to you? It’s an ideas exchange…. we give you information in exchange for your time Mr Doctor. Obviously NOT selling.

It has a huge sign-up rate for doctors of over 90% of those invited joining enabling the reps free access to the majority of medics in two states. The doctors can reschedule and rearrange appointments easily online (quick to do between patients rather than having to pick up the phone) and the software advises all parties of the change. It fills a gap in the doctors’ surgery software armoury – they have no proprietary software to handle drug reps visits. It also enables doctors to show when they are available for rep visits… insight that must be worth gold dust to pharma companies.

Why is it an attractive proposition?

The openness of the exchange of value between a drug rep and a doctor is the underpinning principle for this service and is one of the main reasons both parties find it attractive.
There are times in our working lives when we are ready to be “sold” to and different times when we want information or education.

A salesman has to guess when these times are based on little or no information from his targets (even if he has a loyal customer base and data from years of interactions, it’s still guessing much of the time). By taking the cold-calling aspect away from these interactions, RXVantage has created a fabulous exchange of value between these two groups. I tell you when I want information, education, drug samples or just a general catchup and you turn up to my bidding.

One of the key insights that CRM has failed to deliver to many industries is the timing for a particular information exchange. This software service passes power to the doctor community to dictate when, where and how the drug companies can interact with them.

Now that’s a real example of B2B vendor relationship management (VRM) in practice. And the future is slowly developing before our eyes.

Exciting, isn’t it?