I’ve invested huge amounts of my time in the last few months in automating our sales and marketing processes. Basically, at my startup, we let you download an evaluation version of our product and try it out for 30 days. We use SalesForce for CRM, LoopFuse for marketing automation, Wufoo for our forms, Woopra for online site analytics and Google Analytics for history site analytics (when we launched Google Analytics couldn’t be used to real time analytics. It changed now – but I really like Woopra).
I’ll talk about the processes in future posts, but for now, the most important criteria for us was integration between the product. For example, we love ZenDesk as a support portal, but ended up using SalesForce for support, although it’s a much more limited. ZenDesk SalesForce integration didn’t let us create users when new SalesForce contacts were created – a major limitation in our automated process.
So, the process goes as follows:
Someone visits site and is tracked by LoopFuse, Woopra and Google Analytics. Each is used for a different task.
When the visitor fills out a form, he fills it on our site using a Wufoo integrated form. Integrating Wufoo and WordPress is very easy. Integration with LoopFuse is OK, I encountered a major bug in capturing details from Wufoo to LoopFuse, but that was fixed since.
Since I don’t really trust integration, our entire sales team gets an email from both Wufoo and LoopFuse when a new registration occurs. This way we can make sure that the registration run through the entire process.
Once the form is submitted details are sent to LoopFuse, which automatically sends this data to SalesForce as a lead. I found no problems in this integration.
Custom code in SalesForce converts the lead to an opportunity, and, for quality control, sends an email to the entire sales team, with a special email sent to the sales rep who is responsible for the opportunity.
At this point the user receives a confirmation mail, and an additional email, sent automatically from SalesForce, containing the support portal credentials.
It was an incredibly difficult to implement this integration, and I’ll dive into each tool we use and how we use it in the following posts.
Feel free to ask questions about this topic in the remarks section, or just sent me a LinkedIn invite and I’ll be happy to chat.
what you just described sounds like a startup opportunity all by itself, dude.
ReplyDeleteHey Liran,
ReplyDeleteHow many leads/day are you getting that it justified the automation? other than the "cool" factor, is it worth the effort? did you notice that opportunities were slipping past your sales guys because you didnt have the automation?
Hi Ofer - thanks for the question. No cool factor at all. Leads were slipping, and it was very hard to measure any marketing effort without the integration.
ReplyDeleteWe have a few dozens leads a day, so at this level, we are not even ranking the leads - although that's the next step.