How customer voice
drives business

During Dreamforce we spoke to Lumesse CMO Stephan Schmitt about how Lumesse is partnering with Salesforce to re-think the talent management user experience. Their new TalentObjects portfolio, available on the app cloud, anticipates the growing importance of talent to business strategy, and the need to develop better relationships with a skilled workforce. Schmitt explained that Lumesse is shifting the “workforce management” paradigm toward “workforce engagement,” with an emphasis on convenience and consumer-grad usability. The new platform is totally mobile, intuitively modulized, and designed to foster continuous engagement with talent communities. Give us some background on Lumesse—who are you as a company, and what is your grand vision? Lumesse is a talent management company. Our solution includes talent acquisition and talent management—performance, succession planning and development, learning, and onboarding. Our four-product suite covers the entire talent management space. We’ve been on the market for about 15 years, primarily in Europe. We have customers in the U.S. and in Asia Pacific, but about 80% of our customer base is made up of European companies. We believe that the talent management space will radically change in the next 5-10 years, and we want to lead the market in preparing customers for those changing business […]

We talked with Hannon Hill’s CEO, Kat Liendgens, and VP of Engineering, Bradley Wagner, about their approach to content management and content marketing. They explained the inner workings of Cascade Server and Spectate, including the advantage of storing content in small, flexible chunks, and shared their vision for smarter personalization based on customer journey data. Though originally designed for higher education, the company has been gaining traction in new verticals. According to Liendgens and Wagner, the CMS is a good fit for any organization that values self-sufficiency and needs to manage multiple, decentralized sites. Based on reviews and ratings contributed by end-users to TrustRadius, Cascade Server is a Top Rated CMS product for mid-size companies and enterprises. Cascade Server was also featured in our recent CMS Feature Report, which compares user feedback and company and customer demographics across eight leading CMS products. Could you give me an introduction into Hannon Hill’s overall vision and positioning? Kat: Hannon Hill was founded in 2001 by David Cummings, CEO of Atlanta Ventures. Our core product offerings are Cascade Server, a content management system, and Spectate, a content marketing tool. David started developing Cascade Server while he was student at Duke University. He designed the CMS with higher education […]

We heard from Igor Polevoy, President of ExpressPigeon, about ExpressPigeon’s custom integrations, deep personalization, and unique combination of email marketing and transactional email features–differentiators from competitors like ExactTarget, SendGrid, and MailChimp. Polevoy explains how ExpressPigeon, as a recent entrant in the space, has learned from the limitations and successes of older email service providers (ESPs). The company’s focus is now on providing boutique email services that meet the complex demands of B2B corporations. Who are you as a company, what’s your mission, and what is your value proposition? On the surface, we are a typical email service provider. We have tools for users to log in, create messages, send, and run reports. If you dig deeper, though, we are more of a boutique ESP; our tools allow users to produce high quality work very fast. We also take care and pride in our responsive, compatible messages. This is something that an ESP should do, but very few other providers are actually capable of producing a message that is compatible with different browsers and responsive across different devices. We also combine marketing email and transactional email capabilities, which very few ESPs do. Think about MailChimp and SendGrid—we’re two mass email communication services under the same roof. The other differentiator is that we are a […]

At Dreamforce we talked with Paul Rudwall, Director of Product Marketing at Invoca, about marketers’ blind spot in the customer journey. According to Rudwall, the rise of mobile has created a surge in phone calls, which are not properly linked to the mobile internet research preceding the calls. Tracking this journey is crucial, if marketers want to understand which touch points are driving conversion.  Rudwall describes how customers are using Invoca to tie online activity to phone calls—intelligence they use to drive high-converting leads for sales.   Give us a little introduction—who are you as a company, and how did you personally come to work with Invoca? Before Invoca, I worked with Responsys, so digital marketing is my forte. But finding Invoca was a light bulb moment. At Responsys, I had worked with huge companies who invest millions of dollars every day to drive demand for their product, and you might be surprised by how many conversions still happens over the phone. Before buyers make a big purchase of a complex product, like a cable or satellite subscription, life insurance or software, they want to talk to a real person. Tools like Responsys, ExactTarget, Kenshoo, and Marin are not focused on how phone calls fit into the […]

The sales software category is red hot right now as companies try to apply best practices and technology to improve prospecting effectiveness and efficiency. The category has attracted a lot of investment capital and competition is intensifying.  I caught up with Nick Hedges, President and CEO of Velocify® at the Dreamforce conference to learn more about their offerings and approach to the market. Velocify is a provider of cloud-based sales software, designed for high-velocity sales environments. It has two core products – Velocify Pulse for companies using Salesforce.com and LeadManager for those that do not use Salesforce.  Its primary focus is on accelerating lead response, optimizing sales practice to boost conversion, and prioritizing sales activities. Velocify is reviewed on TrustRadius by users here What’s the founding story of Velocify and how did you get to this point? The business has changed quite a lot over time. We got our start in the financial services industry. About 11 years ago, many financial services companies, particularly in the mortgage industry, were buying a lot of leads. It was an exploding vertical, growing really fast. Companies were growing really quickly but not building marketing capabilities. They had been buying leads from Lending Tree, for […]

  FinancialForce.com is a cloud applications company built on the Salesforce.com platform. Their apps include accounting and billing, PSA, ERP, HCM, inventory management, and SRP. At the Dreamforce conference, TrustRadius talked with Tom Brennan, SVP of Marketing, about the relationship between accounting and customer success management, the company’s recent funding, and the R&D advantage of working with the Salesforce platform, which Brennan sees as “winning the platform race.” How did FinancialForce.com get started, and where is the company now? The company started in 2009, with an investment from Salesforce and Unit4. Initially, the idea was to break down barriers between what Salesforce does, in the front office, with everything that goes on in the back office like accounting. FinancialForce.com’s main value is that front and back office apps are now on the same platform. For users that means one login, one set of workflow tools, and one set of reporting tools. From a data point of view, there’s only one customer record, so the information they put in Salesforce is the same they bill, invoice, and collect cash against as well. Companies have only one set of data to use for reporting; it greatly simplifies the business as a result. We started in the accounting space and then added professional […]

According to Ian Walsh, CMO, TrackMaven’s approach to marketing analytics is helping content marketers drastically increase engagement. Walsh explained how TrackMaven’s metrics aim to help content marketers focus in on what’s working–both in terms of their own content and their competitors’ content. TrackMaven is a competitive marketing analysis platform, aggregating and presenting competitor marketing activity and content marketing via a feed and offering it for comparison to one’s own campaign.  Tell me about TrackMaven—what do you do and what is your vision? Basically, TrackMaven is a marketing analytics software platform. We call ourselves competitive intelligence for digital marketers. At the highest level, we help companies create better content for their content marketing. We do that by analyzing the impact that our customer’s content is having in the marketplace. Not social listening or the voice of customer but actually looking at the content and messages that our customers are putting in the market across various different digital channels, and looking at what’s working, what’s not? What’s driving the most engagement with channel metrics? We do that for their competitors as well as for the customers themselves. This really helps them benchmark their performance relative to their competition. This means understanding how well they’re performing on different channels and different topics […]

Lattice Engines’ CEO describes how predictive analytics can transform marketing and sales processes and unclog the B2B funnel. Over the past few years, Lattice Engines worked to achieve a surprisingly fast deployment rate, which continues to be a win-win for customers and company growth.   Can you give us some background on Lattice Engines? What’s your vision? We are pioneers in the predictive marketing and sales space. We were the first company that ever started talking about predictive marketing and sales for B2B. We start with the premise that if you can predict who is going to buy, what they’re going to buy, when they’re going to buy, and how much they’re going to buy better than the average person, then you can use that to improve everything about the sales and marketing function.  So for example, if you have perfect information about what a particular person is going to buy on a particular day, you don’t have to spend your marketing dollars and sales dollars on anybody else, you would just go to them and talk them.  Obviously, you can’t have perfect information but what you can have is very high-quality probabilistic information—this person is 80% likely to buy, versus […]

Michael Walton of Simply Measured explains how marketers can use social data to understand the why and the what next for their social marketing campaigns. Rather than passively “listening” to social, Simply Measured believes marketers need goal-driven insights around social impact, marketing impact, and business impact.  What is Simply Measured’s value proposition, and how was it developed? The history of Simply Measured set the tone for how we think about things and how we deliver solutions to the market. In 2010, the three founders had a vision about making marketers’ lives easier. But they honestly had no product idea at all. At the time they named the company UntitledStartup.com. Their premise was to get talented people together, deeply understand customer needs, then build a remarkable product and turn it into a remarkable business model. It wasn’t long before they understood that giving marketers access to social data in tools they can use was really key to marketers’ goals. That was the seed. Since then Simply Measured has turned from a tool focused just on Twitter measurement, into what we believe is the market leader in in-depth social analytics across a range of social networks. We deliver value up and down the marketing stack. It’s a cool […]

Demandbase is an Account-based Marketing (ABM) solution with capabilities for targeted web advertising, website personalization and ties to CRM.  Per Wikipedia, account-based marketing (ABM), also known as key account marketing, is a strategic approach to business marketing in which an organization considers and communicates with individual prospect or customer accounts as markets of one. They recently acquired a company called WhoToo, which will help Demandbase add “types of people” persona profile data to the mix, making campaigns more targeted.   What’s new at Demandbase? We’ve built out our B2B marketing cloud solution with a platform for advertising, personalization, and now CRM. Our comprehensive approach connects results from advertising, website and selling programs at the account level, fueling ABM (Account-Based Marketing), which B2B companies are rapidly adopting. We started to experience a lot of traction a few years ago in high tech, but now we are seeing adoption by financial institutions, healthcare companies, and manufacturers. Our underlying data assets are driving the success of our ABM solutions and we continue to invest in growing these. Last week we announced the acquisition of WhoToo, a Seattle-based company focused on building persona profiles of people (hundreds of millions) and interests in functional areas. Our core data asset has always been a […]

Social media management vendor Spredfast acquired another SMMS product, Shoutlet, last month. Both products offer a similar set of capabilities, and serve a mix of SMBs and enterprise customers in industries such as retail, CPG, and financial services. Shoutlet has 100 employees and is based in Madison, WI. Spredfast is based in Austin, TX, and prior to the acquisition, had about 400 employees. Acquisitions are prevalent in the SMMS space: Spredfast merged with Mass Relevance in 2014, and Sprinklr has made 7 acquisitions in 18 months, including NewBrand, Get Satisfaction and Pluck this year. According to Spredfast, though they are both social media management platforms, Spredfast and Shoutlet have complementary feature sets. TrustRadius summarized the strengths and areas for improvement of each product in our Buyer’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Management Software, published January 2015. End-users who have written reviews of Shoutlet on TrustRadius like the product’s publishing features, its contests and landing pages features, and customer support. Users would like to see better channel coverage, better workflow and collaboration features, and better social CRM features.  Spredfast users like the product’s workflows, analytics, innovation and customer support, but also mentioned performance issues, usability issues and a learning curve. Spredfast is most compared to Sprinklr by those […]

InsightSquared is a sales performance analytics solution that includes sales forecasts, KPI tracking, and multi-data source reports. The solution helps businesses immediately identify weaknesses in their sales process, diagnose the root cause of the issue, and take action to correct course. It’s a top rated BI solution in the small business segment on TrustRadius. What’s new at InsightSquared? We’ve grown a lot this year and had a great year last year. We feel like we’ve really found product market fit, so we’re leaning into growth. We moved to a new 45k square foot office in Boston – that’s triple our old space. Our team has doubled in the last year to over 150 people. Our sales team, in particular, has grown pretty aggressively. There’s been a lot of change. What’s new on the product front? We’ve doubled down on sales performance analytics. If you look at our reviews on TrustRadius, we are the top rated sales performance analytics product on the market. We offer over 400 reports – we think it’s the deepest library out there. Our product is very configurable, but customers can still be up and running within a week with limited to no professional services. That’s really unique in the industry. To date, […]

  The brand-new TrustMaps for Survey Tools are here, which means buyers can now use dynamic filters to find the best products for their company size. Dynamic TrustMaps rank products based on real-time user satisfaction ratings and evaluation frequency among SMBs and enterprises. Users of survey tools have shared 107 ratings and 187 in-depth reviews, spanning a broad range of products, use cases, and opinions. Buyers can now quickly locate the survey tools most highly rated and widely adopted by companies of similar size, and therefore most closely aligned to their needs. To understand what users are saying about specific product features and other use case parameters, check out our review base here. “Companies are increasingly looking to both customer and employee satisfaction as a key part of remaining competitive. Online survey platforms enable their research, but different feature sets are important depending on the use case,” said Vinay Bhagat, CEO of TrustRadius. “Users running customer satisfaction surveys might need CRM integration and in-depth customer profiling, whereas those gathering ‘360-degree’ employee feedback might need advanced branching logic with anonymity. Our Survey Tools TrustMaps™ and store of in-depth reviews help prospective buyers identify the best-fit solutions based on their specific needs.” Each TrustMap™ depicts […]

  We sat down with the CEO of Totango, Guy Nirpaz, to learn more about their platform and the importance and future of Customer Success. What’s the Founding story of Totango? GN: Our name, Totango, is derived from the saying, “it takes two to tango,” referring to you and your customers.  Our story began when we started thinking about the amazing phenomenon of Cloud and SaaS, and how digital distribution has led to a model where your relationship with customers is often more remote and it is easy for them to leave. We became very intrigued with helping companies retain and grow their customer base. What’s your approach to customer success? GN: In the digital subscription model, you don’t have the same customer relationship as in the on-premise days, so the question becomes how do you know if they are finding success with your product? It starts with usage stats to know if your customers are using the product in the right way. You need to know what motivates them and if they are seeing value. We built our product to understand the value a customer is getting and built a feedback loop so that the company can understand what is […]

NewsCred is a content marketing platform and content marketplace. TrustRadius talked to Alicianne Rand, VP of Marketing at NewsCred, to learn about their approach to content marketing and their innovations around measuring the “content journey” across the full customer experience. NewsCred has gone through some interesting changes over the past few years. Can you give us some background on NewsCred and your current value proposition? NewsCred has about 220 people in three offices globally. We’ve been around for about seven years, but for the first three years, we had a different business model. As a B2B marketing company we’ve been around for four and a half years. There are two core pieces to our product. The first is our software: we provide a platform that enables global brands to source content and manage the entire content marketing process. It can help them simplify and scale the process from start to finish: from building a content strategy, to sourcing quality content, to editorial calendars, workflows, and planning, to publishing and distribution, to measuring and analyzing the success of their content. That entire process happens within a single platform. The second part of our product value is our content marketplace. NewsCred is the […]

  TrustRadius talked with Workfront’s Chief Marketing Officer Joe Staples about project management adoption among marketers, the benefits of integrating collaboration with workflow—especially at larger organizations—and the importance of optimizing work processes before automating them.   Give us an introduction to Workfront—who are you as a company, and what is your value proposition? The value proposition is: Workfront puts organization and structure to chaotic work processes. Where people are struggling to be efficient, Workfront provides a single software tool that allows them to get their arms around all of the requests and projects, manage them, track how quickly they get done, and provide visibility to stakeholders. Workfront was founded in 2001, so we’ll be 14 this year. The company is growing nicely. Last year we grew the top line by 49% year- over- year. In our most recent round of funding we raised $33 million, and a few weeks ago we acquired ProofHQ, adding 100 employees to our staff. We now have 670 employees and approximately 4,000 customers. We’re headquartered in Lehi, Utah. The company started developing and selling project management software, primarily to IT teams, and we’ve grown and branched out from there. Our fastest growing segment is selling […]

TrustRadius talked with Clarizen’s VP of Marketing about collaborative work management, a new software category that combines traditional project management with tools for collaboration and execution. What is your take on the current state of project management? As Gartner stated at a recent conference, gone are the days of a very linear planning process, where businesses could spend most of their time building a plan and 10% on execution. It should be 40% on the plan, 20% on the execution, and 40% on learning from what happened and adjusting all throughout your process. It’s less about the plan, and more about how your team can adapt and deliver amidst constant change. Teams change, projects change, corporate initiatives change, priorities change—and with collaboration around the world, it’s changing 24/7. This is a foundational issue that businesses need to be equipped to handle. We think the way most companies work today is broken. You have discussions in hallways, in thousands of emails, and in interminable meetings. And then you have discussions in social collaboration tools going on, which may or may not be connected to the work content, the things that need to get done, like tasks, tickets, documents and the like. […]

Uberflip is a content marketing platform that allows its users to aggregate marketing content into a well-designed, easy-to-update content hub. We interviewed Uberflip’s VP of Marketing to talk about the company’s positioning, differentiation, and perspective on content marketing trends. What are the core capabilities of content marketing software? When we take a look at the space in general, there’s the broader content marketing cycle. First, there’s content creation, ideation, authoring. Then there’s the creation of the content experience – how is it presented to audiences? Is it responsive and optimized for lead generation, or whatever your goals might be? There’s also content distribution, and then there’s the ROI metrics component, which runs through the entire cycle. With bigger organizations, there’s also the issue of content marketing operations, especially if they are creating a lot of content. They need to coordinate content with many different stakeholders. Most content marketing software falls into one or more of those buckets. Are there all-in-one products, or do most products focus in on a part of the content marketing cycle? That’s a very loaded question. A lot of content marketing software overlaps. While you do have solutions that claim to be all-in-one, I have yet to […]

TrustRadius talked with Campaign Monitor’s vice president of demand generation and marketing ops about the importance of balancing beauty and basics for do-it-yourself email marketers.   Campaign Monitor has undergone a lot of growth recently. What does your customer base look like? We now have more than 1.2 million customers at 120,000 companies globally. Our customers break down into three main categories: 1) We have a great set of SMB customers who are really trying to grow their businesses with Campaign Monitor. We work with businesses like Rip Curl, who uses Campaign Monitor’s email marketing to launch their products, and the San Diego Chargers, who use us to manage ticket sales and promotions. 2) We also have a lot of digital agency customers. Businesses work with agencies to make their email marketing decisions, and those agencies then utilize Campaign Monitor to send emails for their clients, like the Foo Fighters and Disney on Ice for example. 3) Lastly, divisions or departments in big companies use Campaign Monitor to get on-brand email out. These are people who are trying to get something done and can’t afford to wait in the queue of a corporate marketing dept. Coca-Cola and British Airways are two […]

Gainsight is a Customer Success Management solution. We interviewed Gainsight’s CEO to discuss trends in the space and areas of focus for Gainsight.       How have you seen the CSM industry change in the last couple of years? The way we think about this industry of customer success is really to think first about the profession of customer success, and then think about the technology. Over the last 10 years, more and more business models have shifted to where the lifetime value of the customer comes not from the initial sale, but from ongoing value. You don’t get paid up front as much anymore, and the customer’s not stuck with you. You’re making a lot of your money over time, and because of that, companies at the forefront created customer success teams. Some people still call them account management teams, but the new way to think about this role is all about driving success for the customer, driving lifetime value in terms of renewal and upsells. Salesforce came up with this terminology and idea; they created “customer success” a while ago. Almost every SaaS company has a customer success team of some kind. But it’s not just SaaS companies anymore; […]