Is there a clear picture of all B2B technologies required to support successful marketing/CRM?

Christopher, part of this depends on what is the mission of the site and the role of marketing for the site. From the site volumes, I'm assuming the site is a core channel for the busines - i.e. e-commerce, media consumperation, tech support, etc. An important component could be some type of content or community management system (CMS) that integrates with the CRM or marketing automation system. For many marketing programs site content is integral to acquiring and re-engaging users. Another important component could be some type of automated customer satisfaction measurement system. This can integrate with a CRM system but may not come with an out-of-the box CRM offering.

Over the years my practice in helping company "become smarter" I have aside from the technology areas you mention a few more that they should have on their list to evaluate for suitability. While not true technology they are areas of focus: Technology that allows the company to reach consumers of their products in each of the contact or channels, be that a trade show or some digital catalog that exists for your industry; invest in learning about your customer's buying habits and how you might target messaging to reach them better through deep analysis and data mining. Finally I advise my clients to look at embracing the customer with information and other engagement techiques through a customer and/or partner portal.

Seems like you are missing a multi-channel content management system linking your web presence (internal site, mobile, marketing pages/email response tracking, search, social web), marketing campaigns, content in SFA/CRM, Call Center response management, etc.

These all need to be on the same page and integrated (easier said than done, I know). The rest of your list is standard, just make sure it can work together. :)

The ideal state is shaping your digital interactions to be in perfect alignment with all the other systems. And moreover, designing with customer intentions first and providing a services model for your B2B relationship building, so that value is added by customers coming to your site.

Governance always gets bandied about... but given the "decoupled" solution state of today's CRM architectural blueprints, its always needed. I agree with the decoupling trend, but one con is that its hard to get all the pieces moving and synchronized. It seems like we have moved the dial too far in the other direction away from Big ERP, toward best of breed/SOA approaches. Once you set all this up, you will see why governance then kicks high on the agenda...

You can google a million on governance frameworks, visuals, "business IT alignment", etc. - but the real part is tailoring it personally F2F within the org and building up the relationships needed to support the vision and roadmap for your CRM architecture and consensus amongst cross-business unit leads.

Sean

The most important factor in automating sales and marketing processes is knowing what those sales and marketing processes are. As Carlos mentioned, technology is not a sales/marketing strategy. Too frequently I'm called in to implement a CRM system and have to tell the client that they're not ready for it. There is no process to automate. They don't know what they want to get out of the system and how much they are willing to put into the system.

For example, is the web site setup for eCommerce? Sales people may need to see inventory levels and open sales orders. You may want to give customers access to the current status of an order so they can track it. So, is ERP integration required? Carlos also mentions BI--is this a factor?

Other considerations: how does marketing find leads? What happens when a lead responds? What series of steps are taken to qualify a new lead? When does the lead become a prospect? Do you track opportunities? Some systems are very complex and have low user acceptance; do you need a very simple systems without a lot of bells and whistles?

Best bet is to find someone who understands your business and asks a lot of questions to help you map your data flow and identify just what you need to automate. Forget about all the other possibilities out there. You'll go nuts trying to work in something that doesn't fit your business model.

@Jill Please feel free to provide your POV. I would be interested in your personal perpective given your extensive experience with market leaders. The forum would much appreciate.

Regards,

Sean

Christopher,

there is no easy answer to your question. Each company in the B2B market has it´s own strategy and equally important its´IT-history with existing infrastructure. Based upon where you set you focus in your CRM strategy and where you come from (how does you CRM infrastructure look like) there will be different modules/functionalities out of analytical, collaborative and operational CRM. E.g. If your company strategy is mainly focused on your sales force; direct marketing is less important you would put less emphasis on campaign management,.. The question "all B2B technolgies" should rather be which selected ones best serve my strategic purposes.

Great question Christopher!

We're currently introducing a series of webinars on this very subject. It depends a lot on your chosen marketing methods. One way or another, you need a single place to track all "leads", nurture them, sell to them and measure how things are flowing through your process. If you try to do it in separate systems, there is too much work to try and compare apples to apples.

Your CRM and your Email Marketing/Lead Generation should be one and the same thing and all incoming leads (call ins, web site conversions, cold calls, etc.) all go in there and get touched in multiple ways, sales calls, emails, direct mail.

Although I joined Eloqua (the leader in the B2B marketing automation space) eight years ago after spending two years at Salesforce.com (the leader in the CRM space), and could write my own response, I read an excellent blog posting from Adam Needles today I thought I would share with the group. It is a thorough post comparing CRM and Marketing Automation for #B2B demand generation. http://bit.ly/cKED8d

SiriusDecisions (www.siriusdecisions.com) also has some very good content on this topic.

Enjoy!

Jill Rowley
jill.rowley@eloqua.com
925-984-2731

"Is there a clear picture of all B2B technologies required to support successful marketing/CRM?"

No. There are sites like the Wikipedia that will show you a lot of CRM programs but nowhere near "All" B2B tech.

1MM-50MM is a wide spread and few are the companies that will achieve this level.
When they do they will have to look at custom solutions due to server loads and internal staffing configurations.

Once a company gets online with an ecommerce platform a method of handling page content and customer management is needed.
In a company just going online, one has to present the benefits of using a web based customer management system for the various departments.

Manufacturing has to know that they should be using this for managing orders if of the custom variety, and for inventory management if taken from stock.

Production can use this for indicators as to what products to schedule and marketing to see what products are selling.

Reception can monitor "Live Support" integrated into the website, with staff on call to answer the users questions or to help in the sale process.

There is a lot of B2B CRM software in the open source niche and CRELoaded is one of the better offers.
It handles different levels of customers, different pricing based on quantity, inventory, spread sheet product additions, customer management, newsletter, full ecommerce, ad management, cross and up sell, affiliate, and more wrapped in a very Google friendly PHP/MySQL driven program.

If I sound biased, I am. I have developed (or helped develop), some 90 sites in it.
My http://RegCharie.com is my CRE playground. It is not a production site but a default CRE site showing all the display options. (Info boxes).

best,
Reg
DotCom-Productions.com

It seems like a common theme here is there is no cookie cutter approach that one can take to deploying a successful CRM system. Much depends on the company, its existing infrastructure, how it is currently set up, and what it wants to accomplish with these tools. That is not too surprising.

As Art mentioned, one of the key elements that is lacking is the lack of an overall playbook. The issue is not just that the companies have not planned appropriately. In most cases, these tools have been arriving in a piecemeal fashion and being jerry rigged together in a haphazard manner. This market space has been emerging like ERP solutions that arose in the 1990s where vendors started out with a few core modules (accounts payable, accounts receivable) and added on in a scattershot manner. Consequently, it can become difficult for a business to find all of the tools it needs from one supplier. Integration different modules can be time consuming and difficult. My sense is this market space will eventually sort itself (like the ERP space did in the 1990s), but for now, companies will have to expend a lot of time and effort and still not feel that they have put a complete solution in place.