Sunday, March 01, 2009

Act On Software for e-Marketing Programs

Act-On Software

Act-On Software is a spectacular e-marketing application that enables marketers to create and manage programs for demand generation and lead qualification while working in conjunction with WebEx Event Center, a webinar-based delivery platform solution.

With any demand generation and lead qualification system, the goal is to generate demand/leads, qualify prospects, and close deals. The challenge for marketers is that one needs to manage multiple data systems and manually transport information from one system to another system. There is zero integration across systems and there is no real-time dashboard to track and measure results easily.

Running insightful, real-time analytics is next to impossible. Seeing if the sales team has followed up on the leads never happens because there is no accountability measure in place. Spending too much time on the wrong leads is common place for sales since there is no prioritization or lead scoring in place.

Shawn Naggiar, Director of Sales and Business Development, echoed similar marketing challenges, "Prior to Act-On, advanced marketing capabilities like lead scoring and behavior tracking were only available to large corporations with huge marketing budgets. Furthermore, the systems themselves were very difficult to use and took months to implement. Act-On is demystifying these advanced marketing concepts by offering a complete solution for as little as a few hundred dollars a month, which can be up and running within minutes and requires no technical expertise. If you can surf the web, you can use Act-On."

In short, Act-On Software solves these common and tough business challenges for marketers with a turnkey and fully integrated e-marketing solution.

"When prospects see our online demo, they get very excited. The interface is so user friendly that people feel very comfortable and quickly realize how easy it is to be a better marketer using Act-On. Customers often tell us they don’t know how they ever managed their prospects and lead flow without it," stated Shawn.

Act-On Software Highlights:

  • Email campaigns and email marketing
  • Demand generation
  • Lead nurturing
  • Qualification and scoring
  • Web forms
  • Landing pages
  • Prospect tracking
  • Activity history tracking
  • Website analytics
  • Drill-down reporting
  • Salesforce.com and WebEx Event Center integration
  • Microsoft email connector

Shawn summed up the Act-On Software highlights by saying, "Internet marketing practices have created a new breed of prospect that will travel further along the sales process on their own before they are willing to engage with a salesperson. Prospects essentially self qualify themselves by responding to ad campaigns, attending webinars, visiting your website, downloading documents, opening emails and filling out forms. The key to successful lead management is being able to track and report on all of these marketing channels collectively to determine which leads are ready for sales and which require further nurturing. This is one of the key values behind the Act-On Marketing Service."

When I communicated with Act-On Software Founder and CEO, Raghu Raghavan, this is what he had to say about his company's value proposition and its position in the e-marketing space:

"We built the Act-On Marketing Service around the premise that every business with a web presence needs a lead management service. We have created an affordable service that is unusually easy to learn and to use. Our service is the only one to truly recognize that webinars are a staple of marketing departments everywhere. We have taken special care to build in tight integration with the best of breed webinar service – WebEx.

Our Cisco/WebEx Connect partnership holds huge potential for our company. With Connect, customers will get the convenience of a bundle of integrated communication and collaboration services for a single monthly fee from a trusted vendor, Cisco/WebEx. We know that every business needs marketing and sales. Connect gets our marketing and sales services in front of Cisco/WebEx’s prospects and customers with Cisco/WebEx’s implicit stamp of approval."

If your MBO's are tied to lead generation, cost per lead, market awareness or market share, the quickest way to achieve your marketing MBO's is to use Act-On Software. There is not another more powerful and complete e-marketing application that I can think of in the market today. All other solutions only offer pieces of what Act-On Software delivers.

Easy to use, tight integration, real-time analytics to measure your marketing program success.

* There is no financial compensation for this blog.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert