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Webinar Series on Marketing Automation starting May 18th

April 21st, 2010 by Jame

Are you a little puzzled about marketing automation?

  • how it works
  • how to use it
  • using it effectively

Marketing automation has been a hot topic for companies in all industries.  As more an more marketing efforts move online through your company’s website, natural search, paid search and social media, your prospects and customers are more knowledgeable about your products than ever.  As a result, most prospects interact with your company before actively “raising their hands” for information — without assistance of involvement from your sales and marketing teams.  You need to deliver timely content across multiple channels: online, in-person, at industry events and everywhere else.  Marketing automation steps in to help you to track the effectiveness of all of your interactions with your prospects and customers, online and off.

We’re hosting a 3-part webinar series with our partner, Eloqua, marketing automation pioneer, and Barbara Anguis Saxby, Founder and Managing Director at Accelent Consulting – a strategic marketing firm that has worked with companies like Peoplesoft and Salesforce.com.

This 3-part series covers the basics of marketing automation, practical applications for marketing automation and how marketing teams can measure success.

The first session answers the most critical question:

What is Marketing Automation?

We’ll talk about:

  • Measuring results across the entire customer lifecycle
  • Building a better marketing funnel
  • Improving trust between sales and marketing

If you are interested in registering for the first session on May 18, register here.

  • Webinar Session: What’s Marketing Automation
  • Date: May 18, 2010
  • Time: 10A PST

Are you interested in more content like this?  Join our marketing automation email list.

Barbara Anguis Saxby, Founder and Managing Director at Accelent Consulting.

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Now Serving the Globe (in the Cloud)

April 15th, 2010 by Jame

We have some exciting news, we’ve been acquired!  We’ll now be a part of hiSoft Technology International, Inc.  hiSoft is the second largest technology outsourcing company in China.  hiSoft provides end-to-end solutions and support; its core competencies include CRM, application development, BI and legacy system migration and management.

We’re looking forward to joining forces with hiSoft’s global team and we’re happy to note hiSoft’s clients are excited as we are.

“Over the past eight years of working together, hiSoft has become AIG Edison Life’s essential business partner in the areas of application system development and business process outsourcing.  We welcome hiSoft’s acquisition of Echo Lane, as we expect that it will bring great value and benefits to both hiSoft and AIG Edison Life.  The combined companies will contribute greatly to our strategic cloud computing initiatives.”

-  Tohru Futami
Managing Director and CIO
AIG Edison Life Insurance Company

As a part of hiSoft’s new Cloud Services group, we’re scaling up our capabilities and resources to better serve you. The entire Echo Lane team combines hiSoft’s existing consulting practice to form seasoned global team of CRM consulting professionals to focus solely on the Cloud.  Our new 100-strong team has 10+ years of CRM and Cloud solution expertise a larger pool of technical resources and a global reach.

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News Release: Echo Lane Acquired by hiSoft

April 15th, 2010 by Jame

Top U.S. Salesforce.com Partner Echo Lane

Acquired by hiSoft, China’s Leading IT Outsourcing Company

hiSoft leads China’s further expansion into global ITO services market; creates ‘best-of-all-worlds’ cloud services consulting practice through Echo Lane purchase

San Francisco, CA – April 15, 2010 — Echo Lane, one of the top U.S. solution providers for Salesforce.com and other cloud applications, announced it has been acquired by hiSoft, the leading global information technology outsourcing company headquartered in China. This is the most aggressive push yet into the U.S. cloud computing market for a major China-based IT Outsourcing company.

Under the terms of the agreement, Echo Lane will remain a wholly owned subsidiary of hiSoft, and the firms will join forces to expand their dominance in the cloud computing market, serving Global 2000 customers in the United States, Asia and Europe.

“Over the past eight years of working together, hiSoft has become AIG Edison Life’s essential business partner in the areas of application system development and business process outsourcing,” said Tohru Futami, Managing Director and CIO, AIG Edison Life Insurance Company.  “We welcome hiSoft’s acquisition of Echo Lane, as we expect that it will bring great value and benefits to both hiSoft and AIG Edison Life.  The combined companies will contribute greatly to our strategic cloud computing initiatives.”

Echo Lane was founded by Salesforce.com alumni in 2004 with an exclusive focus on cloud computing solutions.  The firm has since earned a solid reputation executing strategic cloud-based initiatives for customers in the manufacturing, high-tech and financial services industries.  In addition, Echo Lane provides a full set of business process and information technology consulting services around the software-as-a-service model.  Two deep specialties are: the migration of custom, legacy, and traditional on-premise applications to cloud computing solutions, and the implementation of fully integrated, end-to-end CRM solutions using leading cloud computing applications including Salesforce.com, BigMachines, and Eloqua.

“The acquisition of Echo Lane is an important step in hiSoft’s strategy to strengthen our global cloud service capabilities, as well as our CRM consulting practice,” said Tiak Koon Loh, CEO of hiSoft. “As one of Salesforce.com’s elite partners, with more than 1,000 completed projects in the past six years, Echo Lane brings an impressive portfolio of cloud computing knowledge and experience.  This, combined with hiSoft’s deep engineering expertise, extensive delivery capabilities in China, and broad CRM expertise within enterprise customers in the financial services, technology, and manufacturing sectors, we will allow us to provide our global customer base a whole new level of innovative and cost-effective cloud deployment services.”

With more than 4,500 employees across 16 global business offices and eight Asia delivery centers, hiSoft is a trusted outsourcing partner to its clients, leveraging a ‘flexshoring’ service delivery model via mostly China-based development centers. With an even mix of research and development services for those clients that build and sell technology products, and information technology services for those clients that leverage technology to run their companies, hiSoft is well known for both its engineering depth and industry breadth.  hiSoft is a private company backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, ePlanet Ventures, GE Capital, Granite Global Ventures, Intel Capital, Mitsubishi UFJ Securities (HK) Capital Limited and Sumitomo Corporation.

“We are very excited to join forces with hiSoft, because together, we now have the flexibility to offer clients an extensive array of end-to-end cloud and other technology solutions delivered by either onshore or offshore teams, depending on the client needs and requirements.” said Alana Kaselitz, Principal of Echo Lane.  “The power of our cultures working together will allow Echo Lane to leverage hiSoft’s reach, technology prowess and resources, and offer our hands-on-expertise to a wider global market.”

For more information, please visit Echo Lane at www.Echo-Lane.com and hiSoft at www.hisoft.com.

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Eloqua’s new Social Media Toolkit, Best Practices community

December 17th, 2009 by Jame

B2B marketers are just starting to adopt social media as a core part of their marketing strategy, but right now doing it requires a mish mash of tools, limited reporting, and few examples to emulate.  Eloqua’s marketing team has been an active social participant for a few years now, and the busy product developers are adding new features to help their customers get started with using social media with their current processes at the same time making it easier for customers to share knowledge and best practices with each other.

Last week Eloqua announced a new social media toolkit and the SmartXchange community.

Here’s the scoop on these new marketing tools.

SmartXchange
This is the new best practices community from Eloqua (currently in beta).  It holds templates, and gives marketers a space to exchange ideas.  It is also a sneak peak of the new UI concepts.  SmartXchange preview:

Screenshot of the Coverflow in the SmartXchange

Screenshot of the "Coverflow" in the SmartXchange

Social Media Toolkit
You can create “share this” style links in your Eloqua emails, giving your readers a shortcut way to share your content:

Social Sharing Screenshot

Social Sharing Screenshot

Social Media Reports
By building a Social Media campaign, it is much easier to attribute any traffic spikes, or new visitors to your social media outlets.  Here’s a sample:

Social Media Reporting

Social Media Reporting

Learn more in the press release:

Eloqua Clears Path to Social Web

New Social Sharing and Reporting Tools Help Marketers Integrate Social Media into Marketing Mix

December 09, 2009
Vienna, VA, — Eloqua, the category-defining leader in marketing automation, today announced the worldwide availability of its new Social Sharing and Reporting toolset. The easy-to-use product allows marketers to harness the power of the social Web by pulling online conversations into their promotions, empowering fans to share marketing content with social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and track inbound traffic from blogs and social networks.

“We want to make social media marketing simple for our customers,” said Brian Kardon, CMO of Eloqua. “Our Social Sharing and Reporting tools are integrated into the same system marketers use every day, and they don’t require any special training. The social Web has become a huge influence on buying decisions. With just a few clicks, our marketing clients can trigger and leverage dialogues for their company, products and services.”

Eloqua’s Social Sharing and Reporting tools integrate with existing outbound marketing campaigns to enhance lead generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring and overall marketing effectiveness. Simply, the product allows marketers to go from zero to social in three steps:

Make campaigns shareable. Prospects can share marketing content and promotions with members of their social networks while marketers can embed third-party content, such as blog posts, directly into their email pushes and landing pages.

Track inbound traffic from social media sites/blogs. Capturing prospects’ relevant social media activities gives sales personnel immediate and unequaled insight into the interests and preferences of their potential customers.

Measure social media impact. Marketers can track which blogs and social networks are driving the most traffic to their Web site to better inform future media-buying decisions.

“Our new social media tools put our clients – the best marketers in the world – in the center of the conversation,” concluded Kardon.

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