I had the privilege of reviewing the Genius Enterprise™ product Genius.com is launching tomorrow. This new release expands from the capabilities of Genius Pro™ with lead nurturing, scoring and automation features that serve to closely align marketing and sales in pursuit of real-time, right-time information and service delivery.
The folks at Genius take a novel approach in the way they’ve developed marketing automation. Their roots stem from the sales side. Instead of looking at customer acquisition as a linear process from a marketing start that transitions to a sales finish, they’ve taken the initiative to create a holistic approach that allows either side to be involved instantly, depending on the prospect or customer’s need.
In a customer-driven environment, their approach has a lot going for it. But, what really impressed me is the increased visibility for sales into the marketing approach. I’ve written a lot about how marketing can empower salespeople, but Genius has actually provided intuitive tools that help accomplish this feat.
Genius refers to this as Dynamic Engagement—the ability to increase the understanding and collaboration needed between sales and marketing to more fully answer prospects’ needs in real time.
The interface of Genius Enterprise leverages drag and drop workflows to create automated nurturing programs based on lead behavior and characteristics. One thing I like a lot are the drop down choices mapped to match the fields in SalesForce.com.
To more closely align sales and marketing, they’ve harnessed one set of values to be used by both groups, eliminating confusion. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to mess up, given the directional point and click options.
Marketers can create a number of steps that match right-time information to a prospect’s online behavior. They can start a campaign by using explicit characteristics, like industry, and then target the prospect’s experience through refinements as they learn more from implicit interactions. For example, automatically shifting the content delivery to match specific interests or using other information collected progressively during online interactions.
Another compelling capability is the ability to specify "conversion events."
Many marketing automation systems allow the creation of drip marketing campaigns.
Consider this typical scenario:
- The prospect opts in by downloading a white paper and indicates they’re willing to hear more from your company.
- An auto-response welcome/thank you message is immediately sent with a link to the white paper.
- The automated schedule then says to wait one week before sending the next message…and so on.
But, consider if the prospect who opts in does a few other things while at the site that indicate a high degree of later-stage buying interest. Or even over the next few days, before that week is up.
In a scheduled drip campaign that dictates waiting a week for the next interaction the company may have a lag time in reacting to that interest. For example, if an online demo is known to indicate a high-propensity for customer conversion, but doesn’t trigger the total score requirements for sales readiness, you could be losing an opportunity.
With conversion events, this won’t happen. Conversion triggers are set independently from regular campaigns based on events that indicate the prospect is displaying avid interest that should be followed up with quickly. When one of those specified events is “triggered,” sales is notified immediately and can take the right action because they have instant access to the prospect’s activity history and other information.
The ability for a prospect to, if you will, override the nurturing campaign schedule and receive relevant engagement at the right time could be termed the “no prospect left behind” program.
Even better, interactions can be initiated on the prospect's timeline, not the company's.
The Genius capability to instantly overlay a web promo on the web page the prospect is on to offer exclusive, related content downloads, or initiate a live chat session can help the company make a strong impression and build engagement that moves the prospect forward in their buying process.
Based on that interaction the salesperson can choose to update the lead's score. Enabling a human assessment to impact the scoring process can add to the quality of the process as long as those adjusting the score employ parameters so everyone knows what those adjustments mean. I can't help thinking that actively involving sales in the scoring process could drive better adoption rates.
Best of all, marketers never need to touch a lick of code. The proxy-based technology enables them to track prospect behavior, launch web promos and sales alerts or transfer prospects directly to sales without any IT intervention. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.
Although landing pages and form creation will be fast follow-ons and there are some limitations to functionality in comparison to several other marketing automation solutions, Genius Enterprise has captured the essence of merging marketing initiatives with sales activities to enable companies to meet their prospects online, when the time is right.
To learn more about how the system actually works, go read David Raab’s review.
Take a look at the reviews from Salesforce AppExchange customers and see what your peers are saying about Genius software. (click on the Reviews tab)
"Dynamic engagement" is a great term for this ability to take action in the moment instead of merely waiting for a lead to follow a rigid and linear path from marketing to sales.
Conversion events or triggers definitely have to be factored into the mix -- and sales people should have the opportunity to reach out in real-time. I think this is also happening with chat features, as you note, that enable a prospect to engage the seller in real-time.
Our thinking about engagement must become more sophisticated if we are to maximize the seller's guidance in this era of customer-driven decision cycles.
Posted by: Britton Manasco | March 02, 2009 at 09:10 AM