At my company we have all kinds of good marketing info scattered around in different systems. I often wish it was all in one place where everyone could see it (including the sales team) and take action on it. Even though I share the info, let’s face it, the sales people don’t read it. But I have great info over at my marketing desk like what web pages a prospect visited, what emails they received, what links the prospect clicked on, what webcasts they attended and what is being said about them on social media.
The tools I use to gather all this info from are: LiveMeeting (webinars), Leadlander (web visitor tracking), Google Analytics (website stats), Constant Contact (email), Survey Monkey (surveys), Butterfly Publisher (social media tracking). For all these services I probably pay about $350 per month plus all the time it takes to analyze the info. PLUS the time it takes to enter the information into our Microsoft Dynamics CRM system (which, to be honest, rarely happens).
Then I saw a demo of SalesFusion – a marketing automation tool that integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It does it all, and reports on it all and puts it all in CRM. Amazing. I could actually cancel several of my subscriptions to other tools and put the money toward the cost of SalesFusion. And I could stop wasting time compiling reports that nobody reads and stop driving myself nuts retyping information into Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Here are a few of the things I really liked from the SalesFusion demo. (Since I am currently re-evaluating my Constant Contact subscription, most of the points that jumped out at me are email provider related).
- Email Drip campaigns – multi step, send then resend to people who opened but did not click or did not open. No more manual review of lists and re-uploading new lists. SalesFusion will even schedule the follow up.
- Email Trigger campaigns – “when you take this action you get this email”. So no more manual emails for fulfillment.
- Email Subject Line A/B testing – I could automatically test alternate subject lines on email blast to see which is best.
- Email sent from SalesFusion comes from my own domain (which makes it look less like spam).
- With the SalesFusion Outlook Plug In I can send email from Microsoft Outlook, but have it tracked by SalesFusion so I know if it was opened and which links were viewed.
- I can add Merge fields from CRM into the text of my email blast to customize it and make it look more personal. (For example, “Are you Outgrowing your current system?”)
- Integration with GoToMeeting and LiveMeeting – shows who registered for my webinars and who attended, without logging in to separate systems and manually entering the info into CRM.
- I already have a tool that tells me what companies are visiting my website and what pages they view. I call it my “spy tool”. But with SalesFusion this info would automatically be in my Microsoft CRM system so my sales people could see it.
- Karen, my SalesFusion rep, gave me this example: I recently published a press release “”
Karen told me that if I was using SalesFusion I could place the press release URL through their URL shortener, called IttyBItty, and have it redirected to LinkedIn, then capture the number of clicks it gets. And if I have the email of the person who clicked on it in my CRM system, I can then call them and see if they have any questions, etc. This is a nice door opener, which salespeople love. If I don’t have their email and then they decide to visit my site and download a white paper by entering contact info in a form, including their email, I will then be able to see that they originally came to us via LinkedIn. Oh, this technology is just amazing! Then I can use that email and put contact info in a drip email campaign based upon specific topics. It just gets better and better.
And did I mention my favorite part of all – SalesFusion integrates with my Microsoft Dynamics CRM system!
Those were 9 points that I got out of my demo with Karen from SalesFusion. But I feel that we literally just scratched the surface. Looking at the list below, I realize there is so much more.
Functional Areas of SalesFUSION
- Web Visitor Tracking
- Email Marketing - Drip, Trigger, Nurture, Bulk, Salesperson
- Lead Scoring & Routing
- Landing Pages
- Social Media
- CRM Accelerator
- Mutli-Channel Marketing
- Pay Per Click Tracker
- Microsoft Outlook Plug-In
- Sales Chat/Web to Chat
- Marketing Reporting & Dashboards
So am I using SalesFusion? Not yet. I still have paid time left on several contracts for my marketing tools. But once the funds free up, I think SalesFusion will be a serious contender. If you are ready now and want to learn more about them visit the SalesFusion profile page on the CRM Software Blog site.
By CAL Business Solutions, Microsoft Dynamics CRM User and
