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Full Circle Insights, Inc. |
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August 5, 2013 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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Full Circle Insights, Inc. is delivering a Marketing Performance Management Solution that helps Marketers using Salesforce Accurately Measure and Track the Results and Total Impact of their Marketing Campaigns |
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http://fullcircleinsights.com/ Full Circle Insights gives Salesforce marketing users a complete marketing performance management solution that helps drive more revenue from every campaign with best practice response lifecycle management. The cloud-based product is built 100% on the Salesforce Platform and is compatible with leading marketing automation solutions. With Full Circle Insights all your marketing data is in Salesforce and so are the answers.
Founded by former salesforce.com executives, product managers and marketing automation specialists – the Full Circle Insights team knows what it takes to run a successful marketing organization. We are passionate about giving all marketers the answers they need to plan with confidence and grow revenue. Learn more at www.fullcirclecrm.com. |
Marketing Cloud Service
Full
Circle Insights, Inc. 650-641-2766
Full
Circle Insights, Inc.
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Interview conducted by:
Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – August 5, 2013 CEOCFO: Ms. Crater, your website indicates that Full Circle Insights has “the answers every marketer needs to succeed.” Would you tell us how? What does your company do? Ms. Crater: We deliver a marketing performance management solution that helps marketers who are using Salesforce accurately measure and track the results and total impact of their marketing campaigns. They can see the impact on revenue. They can see the impact on pipelines. They can see the impact on sales velocity. They can see the impact across every stage of the sales cycle. They can see what is working to bring in new prospects vs. accelerating deals already in the pipeline.
CEOCFO: Would you give us an example? Ms. Crater: Sure. Say you are a CEO and you are trying to figure out how you can impact revenue this quarter and next quarter. Many B2B companies have a medium or long sales cycle so just throwing more money at marketing will not necessarily be able to impact revenue in the short term. But, if marketing can analyze and quantify which campaigns are best at accelerating deals already in the pipeline and which are best at driving new opportunities with shorter sales cycles – then the CEO can invest additional dollars in marketing that will make a powerful short term impact on revenue. Today most companies cannot do this because they lack the data and tools to understand marketing’s impact in this nuanced way. They have this level of insight into their sales performance, but not about their marketing impact.
CEOCFO: What is the process? Do you pick up where up Salesforce left off? How do you improve on the whole Salesforce structure to make it easier for people to get the information? Ms. Crater: We start with the core Salesforce marketing product and add a robust response management application on top of it. Our product is architected to work seamlessly with your existing Salesforce marketing data while capturing an extensive amount of additional data about every response marketing generates and exactly what happens to every inquiry. In addition, we provide a unified workflow for following up on marketing responses – regardless if the inquiry came from a new lead or an existing contact. Some customers have started calling us the secret sauce between their Salesforce account and their marketing automation systems because we track all of the data in Salesforce and allow them to start doing all of their detailed marketing reporting right inside Salesforce instead of doing some in Eloqua or Marketo and some in Salesforce.
CEOCFO: Do many companies realize what they are missing? Are they looking for a better solution or a solution like Full Circle Insights? Ms. Crater: Many companies realize that they need to measure their marketing and wish they had a more sophisticated understanding of their marketing impact. Companies will spend two percent to twenty five percent of their company’s revenue on marketing. They know that they need to do a better job in being able to track activities across the complete marketing and sales funnel. They want to know about deal velocity, which programs drive the fastest sales cycle and whether they are generating enough volume to create enough revenue. They need to know the conversion rates between different stages in the marketing and sales funnel. At the same time marketing is becoming more measurable. According to SiriusDecisions, nearly seventy percent of the customer journey is now visible. That means that companies who are selling and marketing products to other companies can track this activity over the internet. A prospect may download a white paper, attend a webinar, watch a video – or all three! All of this information is stored digitally on the internet and measurable.
CEOCFO: What was the most difficult part of the technology for you to put together. What were the challenges in creating a system that works and seems to work quite well? Ms. Crater: We have had an unfair advantage from the start because we are founded by a team of Salesforce experts, ex-salesforce.com executives and our CTO has literally written the go-to book for developing on the Salesforce Platform. We were already experts at the Salesforce products, have worked with numerous marketing organizations, and know the best practices for a software product like this. Our biggest challenge was simply time – the time it took for us to design every detail of the system and create the product. We were excited to become a Salesforce ISV partner and have our software listed on the Salesforce Appexchange. Salesforce has been a great partner for us.
CEOCFO: Full Circle been recognized by JMP Security’s Hot 100 and Red Herring, so clearly you have got it down pat. How do you reach potential customers? Ms. Crater: Our customers are marketing and sales executives who run the very popular CRM cloud service from salesforce.com. And so we go places where they are. We attend a fantastic show called Dreamforce which Salesforce puts on in San Francisco every year. Last year I think more than ninety thousand people attended the event. It was a very large opportunity for us to reach customers. We also reach customers through other popular events, such as the SiriusDecisions Summit. SiriusDecisions is a consulting firm that emerged about ten years ago and was started by two former Gartner analysts. Based on their research, Sirius has put together a set of “best practices” for B2B marketing. The top B2B marketers in the US and around the globe all follow SiriusDecisions best practices. Since marketing measurement is a best practice, we attend their annual event every year to engage with those individuals who also want to measure their marketing.
CEOCFO: How is business? Ms. Crater: Business is good! We are attracting new customers and deploying them. The customers are getting a lot out of the product. They are often surprised about what they find out about their marketing – that certain marketing programs that they thought did not do much at all for their business are actually very effective -- and also visa versa.
CEOCFO: How do you ensure ease of use? How do you ensure that your user really has that best experience and it is easy and understandable? Ms. Crater: We built the product right into the familiar Salesforce user interface our customers already know. Our customers are already very knowledgeable about Salesforce and they love that we’ve built our product right into the Salesforce application. Customers simply click on the Full Circle Insights tab inside their Salesforce org and use easy pull-down menus to view different types of data. Customers can also click on the dashboards tab and get all of our advanced marketing analytics using their familiar Salesforce reports.
CEOCFO: What did you learn in your previous experiences? What was the most important (experience?) in your background when you set about creating and working at Full Circle Insights? What did you bring to the table? Ms. Crater: Measuring marketing has been a journey of mine for quite some time. My first vice president of marketing job was in 1998 with Oracle’s Network Computer Inc. And in 2000, I was CEO of a company where we were one of salesforce.com’s first customers. Over the next several vp of marketing jobs I became more sophisticated about wanting to measure how well we were spending the budget. I could tell which marketing programs were generating the large numbers of leads, but I could not tell which programs were actively driving revenue. Therefore, over the years I would ask my teams if they could provide me complete information about marketing campaign impact on revenue and they would tell me that they couldn’t get all the information they needed to net this out for me. Of course, I was too busy with my marketing jobs at the time to dive in and figure out exactly why this was so hard. Two and a half years ago, a friend who was an expert at Salesforce called me up and said, “We are helping some Salesforce customers with their marketing operations and they are having a hard time measuring their marketing impact and we have an idea for how to build a product that would fix that.” I immediately understood the pain and the opportunity because I had lived it and would have paid anything for this information in my various marketing executive roles over the past ten years.
CEOCFO: What is the business model for you? Ms. Crater: Like many other software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, we sell our software as an annual subscription. We also sell services to help companies and marketers configure the software so that it models exactly how they manage their lead process. We will also help them take their existing data and migrate it into a new model, so that they can see comparison results from this year to the last year with the new model applied.
CEOCFO: Are there features that you would like to add to the offering or that you are working on now? Ms. Crater: Yes. Weighted Campaign Influence. Let me explain. One of the traditional measurements that marketing professionals use is ROMI. That stands for Return on Marketing Investments. ROMI describes how many dollars you get back for every dollar put in. This sounds good but it is not so simple in B2B marketing. With B2B marketing, multiple decision makers participate in many different marketing programs so ROMI inherently counts the same revenue over and over again when there are multiple responses to multiple campaigns. So that’s why we are introducing Weighted Campaign Influence. What Weighted Campaign Influence does is allow you to show the influence of a series of campaigns on your company’s revenue. In today’s world, a basic Campaign Influence model has the same problem as ROMI – it simply assigns the same revenue amount to a number of campaigns. For example, if a sales rep closes a ten thousand dollar deal and the customer responded to two campaigns, each of the campaigns would get ten thousand dollars credit. So the system would show a total of twenty thousand dollars that was influenced, even though the deal was worth ten thousand dollars. With Weighted Campaign Influence, each campaign gets a weight, because clearly, not all campaigns are as important as other campaigns and the dollar amount of the closed deal should be spread in a logical way across the campaigns instead of giving each of the campaigns the same dollar amount credit. With Weighted Campaign Influence, customers have a superior method of understanding which campaigns are influencing revenue for their company.
CEOCFO: Why should investors and people in the business community be looking at Full Circle Insights? Ms. Crater: Our Marketing Performance Management product gives companies the right foundation for their marketing investment decisions. There are lots of companies tackling revenue attribution for specific marketing channels – online ads, search marketing, customer advocacy. But we are the only solution that enables companies to properly account for every marketing campaign, response and outcome across all of their programs – and we do it all right inside Salesforce so they can evaluate all of their marketing and sales data in the same place. Salesforce.com is the leading CRM company and they are investing heavily heavily in their Marketing Cloud product. We help make every one of these Salesforce Marketing Cloud customer more successful.
CEOCFO: So many companies today talk about measurement and talk about big data and lots of conflicting methods of how to measure what is going on. What is the “aha moment” when you talk with a company and explain what you do? When do they “get it”?
Ms. Crater:
We are
finding that CEOs and CFOs are getting frustrated that they “can’t get the
chart.” Marketing and sales operations professionals are also getting
frustrated that they cannot provide the answers their executives want. When
we show prospects and customers the marketing charts and reports they can
get using Full Circle Insights with Salesforce, it is not uncommon for the CMO to
say, “My CFO is going to love this!” |
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“When we show prospects and customers the marketing charts and reports they can get using Full Circle Insights with Salesforce, it is not uncommon for the CMO to say, ‘My CFO is going to love this!’”- Bonnie Crater |
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