Centralization - Thunder - Tech's 2013 marketing trends event

PRESENTER: And the next, I'm going to come up here and hopefully not bore you for another second, but centralization. So sizing up your data, centralization. So I come into the office, and maybe some of you do, too, and you may see this on your desk. This is the antithesis or exact opposite of centralization. So if I come in, if you come in, and you look up, you want to find your leads, your contacts. Who do you got to follow up with during that week, during the next week? Who's purchased what? And you're rifling through papers, that's not centralization. What we like to perceive centralization as is more of a mindset, the idea that you want to start aggregating all this information into a single resource. So quick question-- are you currently using a CRM in your organization? I believe these polls are up on trends.thundertech.com. OK. Yes, 12. No, nine. OK. Well, that's good. There's always room for improvement, but the idea is we want to avoid this. And obviously-- does anyone know who this is? Duke Nukem. Yes, OK. We got some gamers in the audience. Yes, this is Duke Nukem. So, if you're familiar with the term of shotgun marketing or email marketing blasts where I've heard horror stories. I've seen it in person, where a client or marketing professional will take and compile a list of all my spreadsheets on my desk. I even got a business card from someone I was waiting in line behind in the grocery store. I'll put them on my list, and I compile this and then send them an email. OK? I do it again the next week, send them an email. I don't care if they unsubscribe. I'm just going to send and go, go, go, go. That's what we call shotgunning. We want to avoid that. And centralization is-- yes, it's a huge marketing mindset, but it's also a big customer service mindset as well. So you want to avoid this. And I know Duke Nukem is probably not the best salesman out there. So there's plenty of ways to get in the game. You can get a lot of these. Hopefully, these aren't too abstract or too unfamiliar to you but Infusionsoft, Salesforce, ExactTarget, SugarCRM, and there's many more out there. All these enable you to start creating that data in an organized structure, plenty of different pricing levels and pricing structures. Among these, a lot of them have flexible APIs that you can get pretty creative with. And I'll touch on that creativity that you achieve with centralization in a minute. So if you think of centralization as that bicycle hub. OK So you're storing all your data, all your history, all your product purchases, your contacts, even offline. We have a [INAUDIBLE] system, internally, that if I talk to someone on the phone, a client, and they're either wanting to learn a bit about more service or complain about a service, what have you, is I'm going to record that information and track it as a history. So when someone else calls, we're not doubling up that conversation again and again and again. So that hub is going to achieve that end result where we track history, their contact information, what their interests are. And then we can get creative. Then we could start doing campaigns where, OK, let's do a campaign of some landing pages off our website. That'll be gathering some leads. But we want that information to be pulled back into our centralized center, our CRM, so we could even actually act on it, so our sales team can see those leads and act on it. OK? And if they act on it, great. What are they acting on? Let's see that history, too. And then we could send emails. And then we could go to different social channels. And then we could actually have our sales team remotely go out and start making cold calls, sales calls, meet ups, networking events. A couple quick examples of this creativity. So I talked about CRM, centralization. That sounds so robotic. That sounds so boring. It sounds so uncreative. Well, it's almost a paradox where the more structured you get, the better results you'll see, but also the more creative you can be with this data. Is everyone familiar with the term API? A lot of these CRM systems and these centralized databases have these APIs that you can-- if you ask a developer, say, hey, what can we do with these APIs right now? Can I push and pull context? Can I send in leads? We've done this with Transport Services, Incorporated. So they sell flatbed trailers, roll-off trailers, various other equipment, and they're doing it now with their sales team armed with an iPad app. So this is an enterprise app. You're not going to be able to download it from the Apple store or anything like that. But what this is is when they come in here, their salesman will meet with a potential person on site, at that person's office even, or even as they walk the yard, and pull up all the inventory, record the customer, create a new customer. And it's all these customers. They could lock a piece of equipment. It's locked in real time. The overall context and leads are fed from their sales force CRM and then also pushed back to their sales force CRM. Another example of centralization is the connection of a couple of extensions with this is we have a website, Ohio Means College. And it's going to launch this week-- actually, Ohio Means Success, in collaboration with a couple other partners in the area, higher education and government-- and created the website. The whole effort was to get people to apply to college-- children, teenagers, adults, high school kids, and they would do this by way of a road map. So behind a account login and registration, they'd be fed into a Salesforce account. And then from that Salesforce account, for email marketing and follow up to push and pull, push them back to the site, and, inevitably, hopefully, get them to apply, they use this roadmap coupled with Salesforce, coupled with Eloqua. And if anyone's heard of Eloqua, it's another email marketing system that synchronizes their sales force information. So, to recap. Centralization. It's out there today. There's plenty of providers out there. It's a mindset. You can start today, just start-- take a trial somewhere. There's plenty of vendors. See how it might fit in your organization. And understand that when you get centralized, you can really start to see results. And Justin's going to come back up.