CRM Watchlist 2013: Marketing Puts Itself Out There

On Wednesday February 20, 2013 at 7:00am ET, the CRM Watchlist 2014 registration process begins. Yep, right in the middle of the 2013 reviews. Progress (and time) wait for no man (or woman). What that means is that if you are a technology company or consulting/systems integrator business that does "customer facing" things which means software or services products/solutions, you become a candidate for the CRM Watchlist 2014. That means that:

You can request a 2014 registration form from me at paul-greenberg3@the56group.com.When you receive it, fill it out exactly according to instructions and in return you will get the questionnaire for 2014 - either the vendor questionnaire or the consulting/SI questionnaire which are slightly differentYou have until November 30, 2013 to fill out the questionnaire.If you send in the registration form to me, I will presume that you are going to fill out the questionnaire by the due date and will start tracking you as soon send the registration back to me.  Please don't waste my time and request the questionnaire and then not fill it out. I'm tracking you for the better part of a year if you do send it.

Now back to our scheduled show:

Previously on the CRM Watchlist:

CRM Watchlist 2013 Lifetime Achievement: IBM Institute for Business ValueThe Sweetest Suites: Part 1 of 3 – salesforce.com; MicrosoftThe Sweetest Suites: Part 2 of 3 – SAP, OracleThe Sweetest Suites: Part 3 of 3 – Infor, NetSuite, SugarCRM

Marketing departments are at the forefront of strategic technology investment – at least you would think that if you agree with Gartner’s now famous (apparently defensible) declaration that CMOs will have more budgetary authority then CIOs when it comes to technology buys in the near future (see Watchlist winner Aprimo’s CMO Lisa Arthur’s Forbes post on this here). The corollary is that marketing is also the hottest area when it comes to customer facing (e.g. social CRM and social media) technology purchasing and strategies. Thus, software and services clearly labeled social marketing are incorporated at least in concept with the more traditional tools like campaign management, email marketing, and for the larger ventures, marketing resource management among many other options.

This trend has led to something of a new phenomenon too, with what were essentially public relations and advertising agencies transforming their business models to add practices that specialize in social CRM and social media strategies and the technology components that enable those strategies – something brand new. Take a good look – Industry giant Edelman has a social business practice that involves thinkers like David Armano and Michael Brito; LBi hired Anthony Lye, who ran the CRM and customer facing cloud applications practices for Oracle to be President of their global digital technology division; three years ago, G2 split from Grey Global to be a digital strategy agency rather than a traditional public relations firm. Vendors such as Company to Watch winner Next Principles has redefined itself as a “digital agency” – and, for them, it makes sense, given the services they provide with their applications enabling those.  In other words, the evidence of this change is everywhere.

This is a great partnership opportunity for the smart vendors – and all the vendors here are smart.  In one case, as you will see, I think that they are exceptionally positioned to develop those relationships. (Don’t cheat and look ahead!  Bad! Bad kitty!)

Every vendor here with the exception of perhaps Infusionsoft has substantially advanced social marketing tools incorporated into their portfolios.  They’ve adjusted to the market realities of the Fortune 3500 so to speak and to the new demands of customers in how they “relate” to companies – mean care to be involved with the companies that they want to buy things from.

So, let’s see why these 6 companies in the hottest of the customer facing technologies market will impact that market in 2013 – and what they have to do about all that.

Aprimo, which is owned by Teradata,  has been “different” than the standard marketing automation vendor for many years. They specialize In what’s called Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) which not only has the normal marketing automation capabilities such as the demand generation components (lead generation, lead scoring, lead nurturing etc.) and campaign management, but the operational aspects of marketing such as marketing resource management and a deep business rules/workflow engine. They have been the standout in this world. 

But the world is changing. Marketing Pilot a small competitor of theirs who somewhat mirrors what they do is now part of Microsoft and thus has the resources that Microsoft can bring to bear; Infor is with their acquisition of Orbis has now added substantial Marketing Resource Management capabilities to an already very good marketing suite. Competition is showing up now and they are big competitors.

That said, there is still no one doing IMM at the level of Aprimo and the sophistication of their enterprise ready product shows in the product suite they provide. It is extensive to the point of being nearly overwhelming for all but the most sophisticated enterprises when it comes to marketing

Start thinking about the agencies –There is a market opportunity for Aprimo as the agencies become increasingly involved in the enablement technologies for digital strategies. Like it or not, the agency model is here to stay and more and more major players are getting involved. Aprimo needs to try to become the marketing suite of record for these agencies – who represent nearly perfect partners for them.  The management aspects that Aprimo provides are precisely what the agencies don’t have and won’t build themselves.Explode their Analyst Relations/Influencer Relations – As I mentioned they have a terrific CMO in Lisa Arthur who certainly knows how to handle the job. But one place they fall short is a big ticket program around AR/IR. Their historic tendency has been the classic one. Deal with the Gartner and Forrester institutional analysts and don’t do much else beyond that.  While there’s no problem with that, for a company that lags in top of mindRevamp their vision – They are seen as a classic operationally-focused marketing automation provider. Which they are. But to do what I’m outlining above, they have to be more visionary in their approach, which in turn, makes them a more interesting and exciting company to deal with. Good example of what they need to think about – the blandness of their vision – “Teradata Aprimo promises customers a commitment to continue to provide a high level of service and to invest in solid product advances. Teradata Aprimo will continue to find new ways to use technology to advance the function of marketing within your organization.”  While that is certainly a good thing to do – that isn’t a vision. Just adding the word “continue” doesn’t make it visionary. They need to see a future that companies are excited to buy into. What they are promising here is something that companies simply need to expect.  A vision statement is not where you make a promise about the quality of your work – it’s about the future you see and how you can support that future. Not support the “function of marketing.”Flip from operations to outcomes – Aprimo is very much a company that focuses on technology. But they need to go beyond that to technology enablement of outcomes that businesses are looking for. Just bifurcating the solutions into B2C and B2B doesn’t quite cut it. They need to show how they support the outcomes that the individuals who will be using them are looking for.  What is the business problem being solved or the outcome needed that they can enable?

Aprimo is not only a player that was very good before they acquired and now even better.  Now, it’s time for them to not only be good but to show it to the world – which they are doing more and more. It seems to me that 2013 is their year – and I’m sure I’m right.

Eloqua’s review is going to be short.  In a way, they don’t even belong here having been acquired by Oracle for a bargain $871 million in the last month of 2012.  But, they are a standout company; the acquisition, while announced, is still pending officially and it’s really hard to not include them in a list of companies having an impact when they’ve had a strong impact on the marketing technology world in particular and on CRM and customer-facing technologies in general for years. But their acquisition limits what they have to do in the next several months – and we’ll get to that in a minute.

There was no doubt about the impact Eloqua had in 2012 – with their successful August 2012 IPO – the first company of their genre to go public and their December 2012 acquisition by Oracle. But this isn’t all that makes Eloqua an impact player.

Even though they arguably battle for mindshare with Marketo in the Revenue Marketing space (they call it Revenue Performance Management (RPM) as does Marketo. The Pedowitz Group (TPG), another CRM Watchlist winner calls it Revenue Marketing. I prefer the TPG designation by a long shot. RPM makes it sound like accounting), they have a serious piece of it with their thought leadership in the space. Arguably the first to build their applications with the alignment of sales and marketing objectives in mind, Eloqua has bolstered their case for mindshare with their Grande Guides (disclosure: I did one for them on Social CRM in 2012) which cover such topics as: Lead Scoring; Social CMOs; B2B Content Marketing; and, of course, Social CRM among many others. They also were among the early adopters to incorporate communities into their engagement strategies. They have their Topliners community, which they call “an open forum peer-to-peer community for marketers and Eloqua customers” which serves as a location to get questions answered, interact with experts and other customers and get marketing expertise. They have over 6000 members – which while not say, SAP’s numbers, is still impressive for a company focused on marketing.

The acquisition changed things a great deal and not completely for the better. In 2011 and 2012, Eloqua invested a lot of time into their salesforce relationship, partially in response to Marketo’s sashay with salesforce and partially because their deep integration with the basic salesforce applications had been so successful.  But the acquisition kills that and all other integrations that they had invested in, no matter what you might hear.

But that is a smaller problem far exceeded by the likely benefit of the acquisition should the cultural integration work as well as I hope it does.  There is some speculation that Eloqua was acquired to replace an aging Siebel Marketing application with something more attuned to contemporary marketing – i.e. Eloqua. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that Oracle bought Eloqua and it was a smart acquisition for whatever reason.

So, Eloqua, here’s what you need to do….limited by the acquisition of course….

Just finish the deal – Once the deal with Oracle is done, then comes the tough part – integrating the cultures which are VERY different.   Oracle’s culture is not easy to assimilate to – both due to its size and its formality.  Plus there are a significant number of acquisitions that are still being assimilated for the past 18 months or more. So this is clearly going to be the big concentration point for Eloqua.  Their culture is self-described as “very customer centric.” Oracle is more sales centric but has a strong bias to their customers (e.g. their continuous assessment of their relationship to customers by the Chief Customer Officer’s group) but that’s still different than the much smaller Eloqua’s culture.Figure out what to do with the deep ties to salesforce.com and other integrations– This is no small effort. If you look at Eloqua, when it comes to integration, they almost bet the farm on salesforce.com with a very deep integration with salesforce.com; a beta of Chatter inside of Eloqua; a prioritized sales optimization (in the context of marketing) and product called Discover for salesforce.com in addition to some salesforce marquee integrations (e.g. the Center for American Progress).  They also have integrations with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, NetSuite and Saleslogix among others. They have the requisite integrations with Oracle CRM on Demand and Siebel, but these other ones are no small matter and there are customers to be dealt with as well as the partnerships with these companies – which are pretty much endangered barring unusual circumstances.

Hubspot is one of the last several years’ success stories. They evolved from an inbound marketing knowledge “site” to a mature technology platform without losing a beat over the last 3 years or so. Now they have a complete set of tools to support inbound marketing efforts that, while originally focused on the small business market, are now squarely in the mid-market.  

They are a company that has attuned themselves to the 21st century with a model based on attracting customers rather than pushing messages to customers (thus, “inbound” marketing) Their focus is around quality content and their systems reflect that with applications that provide (among other things):

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)A blogging platform and editorSocial media tracking and publishingA content management system (CMS)Analytics that are accessible to the ordinary humanLanding page publicationContent targetingStandard marketing tools – e.g. lead management; email marketing; campaign management

And I could go on. The key is that they have a strong toolset that is geared to their midmarket customer base and at the same time allows their small customer to cherry pick what they need to do what they do at the lesser levels that they operate on.

I’ve seen their platform and their methodologies in action and they work. Stop me if I’ve told you this story, but about 3-4 years ago, Brent Leary did a social CRM webinar for them. They had 6500 registrants and 2600 attendees!! Far exceeding anything I’ve ever heard of from anywhere else. But, what makes this really amazing, is that this was only the 4th largest webinar they did that year!!

But as far as impact goes, great success stories when it comes to webinars etc. are awesome as part of a mythos, but not enough when it comes to market presence.  So in late 2011, Hubspot hired a product marketing person and at the same time began thinking about their brand in a significantly self-aware way. That means that Hubspot began to attack the market to increase visibility leading to over 70 articles in 2012 that mentioned them. They proactively built out their existing strong thought leadership in a market that they say they coined “inbound marketing” with a book by co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah on Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blog and other books by other Hubspot staffers.  Even their blog has over 100,000 subscribers.

Meaning they know how to be in the market. 

Their success led to a Mezzanine round of funding in November 2012 of $35 million from institutional investors.

Jeez, they seem so successful, but they are also in a place – marketing where the competition is hot and heavy and the challenges huge – so they need to step up in some areas.  While there are tweaks beyond the two mentioned here, these are the imperatives.

Step up their analyst/influencer relations by magnitudes – While they made some progress in 2012, they are still light years away from where they should be given the size and scope of their company. Thus, while they are regarded well, they are not in the top-of-mind conversations they should be when it comes to customer recommendations.  They fall into the “oh yeah, you can also look at…..” category – which isn’t a horrible place to be but not good enough. This means that 2013 requires a formalized AR/IR program with all the requisite things that need to be done – which are investments of time and money and personnel.  They have to get past the old school view of it which is the talk to the institutional analysts and no one else. There is a far more complex world out there when it comes to how influence works now. They are a brilliant company who should be able to master it.Step up their strategic partnerships – right now their most significant integration has been with salesforce.com. Its been good on multiple levels for them – resulting in salesforce as one of their investors – and giving Hubspot a leading position on the AppExchange. Hubspot also integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, NetSuite, Sage, Zoho and SugarCRM. While these exist, none of the relationships they have with these companies are at the level of salesforce. They should step it up with at least Microsoft Dynamics CRM seeing that Microsoft, even with the acquisition of Marketing Pilot, doesn't supply the capabilities that Hubspot does.  Additionally, they should reach out to other smaller CRM vendors who can use the Hubspot API for integration and placement into the Hubspot Marketplace, similar to what they have with Nimble, High Rise and Pipedrive among others.

This is a company that doesn’t do much but win. Except when it comes to their love of Boston sports teams.  But despite that, Hubspot will be an impact player in 2013. They just need to figure out how much they want to be and then do what they have to do to get to that level. They are entirely capable of that. Mark my words.

Infusionsoft is adamant about one thing – they are going to be laser focused on small businesses under 25 employees – a market that has been historically underserved and yet is HUGE – 27 million small businesses according to the most recent figures from the Small Business Administration. That laser focus has been absolutely unmovable no matter what the temptations of going up market into the larger side of small business or the medium sized business – where companies like Sage with Saleslogix and others lurk.  

Thing is that this focus has given them the best possible results too – a company that has fanboys as customers – witness the 1500 attendees at their 2012 InfusionCon and $39 million in revenue in 2012 –a 50% increase from 2011. They have 40,000 customers too. To add a very big cherry on top of the cake, in January they announced a Goldman Sachs led funding round of $54 million – indicating the confidence their customer base and their investors have in their future.

And why shouldn’t they? They actually have a product that is very, very good and is absolutely tailored to the market they serve. Its focus is around marketing but they’ve added sales (which they rather weirdly call CRM) and paid attention to the trends that we see that are sweeping the marketing world – which is how sales revenue and marketing objectives need to be aligned – and it shows in their application.  Their applications don’t skimp when it comes to the standards of sales force automation – opportunity management, contact management, pipeline management et al. but they really shine in marketing where they cover everything aspect from demand generation (e.g. lead generation and scoring) to campaign management.  What they don’t do much of is the integrated marketing management functions like marketing resource management – because they don’t really need to do that for small businesses under 25 people now do they?

But they go considerably further than that with their involvement with their customer base. They have a strong services offering that provides “success coaches” which has a slightly narrower definition than the “success managers” that are becoming such a popular job category in the technology industry. A success coach’s job is to make sure their customers optimize their use of Infusionsoft. They have an Elite Forum program for selected customers limited to 20 who get a deep workshop in how to grow your business to the next level. They have an Ultimate Marketers Program which is an award for the most significant users of Infusionsoft each year with a decent basket of prizes including $5000 cash for the winning 3 companies. 

They also have remarkably close relationships with customers who are very vocal about their requirements as customers, so they have a vibrant informal co-creation process that is ongoing with their customers. They are not abstract or formal about it. The customers have deep input. They listen to it and make changes accordingly.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t make mistakes, though, thankfully not a lot of them in recent years. Perhaps their most egregious mistake was their “CRM is Dead” campaign of a few years ago which they smartly and thankfully dropped when they realized that CRM not only wasn’t dead, but was one of the things that made them money. One thing I like about this company is their willingness to correct mistakes and call them that – rather than defend the indefensible. Makes for a much more transparent i.e. honest relationship with the market and their customers.

Their partner program is focused around resellers more than anything who account for a significant portion of the revenues of the company – much like the Saleslogix model of the early part of the millennium.  Their strategic alliances are a bit different than I expected. They really seem to be something that are based on customer editions of Infusionsoft for a vertical. Which is really not the standard definition of “strategic” but if it works, who am I to question? (J)

With all that and their remarkable success, the competition is getting more intense for the market they dominate, which means the bar is being raised as of right away. That means in 2013, Infusionsoft, to continue to have the impact they have or increase it, are going to have to effect some evolutionary changes, four of which I’ll mention here.

A significant increase in their outreach and analyst relations program – while Laura Collins has done a magnificent job in her outreach to influencers, there comes a time in a company’s life where they need to establish an actual analyst program – which means an investment in time, money, and personnel. They are big enough to take that on.  There is only so much one person can do by themselves. Luckily, I know that they are taking this seriously and doing just this, so this is checked off.Extend their services offerings into an ecosystem - which means engaging business partners to provide the support services that Infusionsoft can’t internally or natively provide. That means a partner network that extends beyond resellers and into both technology integration partners (for example web self-service for those on the upper end of their small business spectrum who need some simplified customer service capabilities) or loyalty programs or whatever.  They have a small marketplace now that at least is a start to that.This also means on the opposite side, resellers with some public cache - I’m not saying Accenture necessarily because I’m not sure how Accenture makes money reselling to small businesses or providing small business services but a reseller with a marquee name never hurts, though this is a lower priority than the building out the ecosystem.Add social capabilities to their products – they are pretty weak in this regard and yet, we are all seeing an increasing interest in using social channels by small businesses. Vocus, last September came out with a survey that said “77% of SMBs say that social media accounts for 25% or more of their total marketing effort.”  While this represents the extreme I think (most similar are in the realm of 25%-40%), all in all we are seeing a significant uptick in social channel and social media usage so it would be wise for Infusionsoft to get on top of this.

They are an impact player in the small business world – period.  But they can even be more and if they proceed apace, 2013 might be a bigger year than even they anticipate. But watch out for competition on the horizon.

Marketo just seems to keep moving.  It’s kind of a funny thing with them. They are truly market leaders when it comes to marketing automation or what they (as does Eloqua) calls Revenue Performance Management. They are the ones that are mentioned more frequently top of mind than any other company in their in genre.  They have the technological chops and the vision to stay a leader in the industry if they choose to.

Their management is not only a highly experienced one but to their credit a highly visible one – unlike most companies in the tech world. For example, Phil Fernandez, Marketo’s CEO is an author, was an active mentor in CRM Idol (one of the contestant’s favorites) and was highlighted in the Wall Street Journal.

The company itself piles up the accolades as an industry leader – too many to count. If you want to see what they have won, check here.  

They don’t rest on their laurels however. They understand that the market is demanding two things – high quality products and content that is meaningful. They’ve decided to provide them both.

Marketo provides what are arguably the highest quality integrations with other CRM software – salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM in particular. But, the highlight of 2012 was their acquisition of Crowd Factory, which at the time, was the leading social marketing suite, now fully integrated into Marketo.  In the course of that acquisition, they also acquired their new CMO Sanjay Dholakia, a gifted professional who is as valuable to them as the acquisition of the Crowd Factory applications.  Crowd Factory had been the second place finisher in 2011 CRM Idol competition. 

But their applications refresh is only part of it. They provide extensive, quality content to the world that wants it – focused around their Definitive Guides series which provides detailed expert knowledge on things marketing – often up to 100 pages.

Of course their success has led to a series of rumors about the company ranging from acquisition of Marketo by salesforce.com to an IPO down the pike. Rumors are what they are – rumors. But they reflect a “feeling” that Marketo is a valuable and important property.

That said, they are far from perfect and in fact they have to move faster than ever before.  Which means they have some things to take care of – more picking them up than creating them though. You’ll see what I mean.

Make Marketo Spark important – Marketo released their small business product Spark in 2011 and while it’s a good product, it hasn’t been as visible or as prominent as you would expect in a market that starving for good technology to help their businesses.  Infusionsoft is the dominant force in that market right now. Perhaps Marketo Spark is doing better than my investigations show, but this fundamentally sound product doesn’t have the mindshare it should at this point in a market that is underserved. Marketo needs to spend some time building the presence of Spark in 2013 before they just become a small competitor in that space.Stronger AR/IR outreach – They have good analyst and influencer relationships but they are a company that needs to take the next step in AR/IR. That means for example, making sure that they have a program that is defined solely for the AR/IR crowd.  In their case, they are at the point that an Analyst Summit might not be a bad idea at all.  Also, either as an alternative or in addition, they need to make sure that more analysts, influencers, journalists attend their User Conference – and that there is an organized program for them at the event.

This is one strong company. They have done so much right in the last few years that their primary sin might be that they coast on what they’ve done sometimes rather than drive forward.  But they are without a doubt an impact player and will continue to be until one of those rumors comes true. Big stuff is possible in 2013 if they just do what they are doing already. Even greater things if they take up my suggestions. Either way, they are winners of the Watchlist for a really good reason.

Neolane is a first time winner of the CRM Watchlist this year.  I’ve been aware of them for several years however and followed their travels (and occasional travails for quite a long time).  Not that they are that old. I’m WAY older than they are. They were founded in France in 2001 and I was founded in Long Island NY in 1949. They’ve had a strong European footprint since their founding.  I’ve had two footprints since mine – at least since I learned to walk. 

They have a strong European presence. They are well funded, announcing a $27 million C series round of funding led by Tier One VC Battery Ventures in January 2012. Their 2012 revenue numbers hit a decent $44 million. They have a really solid well thought out product (more in a minute). Not only that, they were one of the few companies that (refreshingly) directly answered most of my questions.

Thing is, Neolane is a genuinely smart company.  For example, their view of "social" is that it is a practical requirement for the businesses that need marketing support. They launched Social Marketing in 2011 - slightly ahead of the general game -  but its not based just on Twitter responsiveness which so many social marketing apps are. The underpinnings are the monetization of social media audiences.  That means of course, deep social profiles tied to the customer records and the records of the interactions of specific and named customers (easier said than done); it also means that personalization is at the core of the interactions. It's, in effect, marketing to one.  That means at all levels. Learn what you can about the individual and then deliver what you can based on what you know about that individual.  Simple in concept; tough - very tough - to execute at scale.

Their marketing suite has all the broad capabilitie that a solid marketing suite needs including:

Campaign managementInteraction management (recommendation engine)Social marketing (see above)Message Center (high volume personalized messages)Leads (kind of obvious)Marketing Resource Management (planning, spending, resource allocation)

Now, I don't know that they do any one of these better than anyone else on this list, but its breadth is important for customers getting into the marketing automation world.   The one thing that I am a bit wary of is their commitment to their umbrella term for this, "conversational marketing." Its a term that they seem deeply attached to, but I'm a lot more diffident about. I'm not sure what purpose it serves beyond seeming somewhat "hip." See what I say below for my thinking on this because it is important to how they position themselves as they expand.

Neolane also is a company with a sense of humor.  For example they did a song parody they released at Dreamforce 2012 using the Red Hot Chili Peppers "Otherside" (RHCP was the concert at DF12) called "Touch the Social Enterprise." It was something only a geek could love but the guy who sang it was pretty damned good. At least they (and Hubspot too) try to inject humor, something missing from the enterprise software world. 

So what does this rookie Watchlist winner have to do?

Boost U.S presence big time - They are a presence in Europe. They have a presence in the U.S. but they are nowhere near a top of mind choice. That said, they are used by some marquee firms in the U.S. including Barnes and Noble and Disneyland Resorts. But it isn't enough. The U.S. market - or more broadly the U.S and Canada, are starving for great marketing technology - even to the point that marketing departments are creating positions for marketing technologists.Their product isn't at issue, it has universal appeal. But they have to step up their efforts at "getting known" in the U.S. This is a prime revenue opportunity for a quality company with an excellent set of products who's suite compares with anyones in all aspects. I think they can make what are okay numbers a lot better if the effort is there. Be more visible in the U.S. than you are, Neolane. Trust me, you have a lot to show.Don't overrely on institutional analysts - Just to be clear. I'm not saying don't deal with Gartner, Forrester, et. al. I'm just saying spend some time on understanding the overall analyst and influencers matrix that exists now. There have been dramatic changes that require different kinds of thinking than in the past. I imagine they are starting to think this way, come to think of it, or why would they have entered the Watchlist? But I really have no indication that they talk to more than the institutional analysts in here or even to some extent in Europe. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think so and even if they do, they don't make much of an impression or someone would remember talking to them. Time to understand the 21st century version of AR.Make conversational marketing a real category - or not - They "own" this category because they are the only ones that really call what they or anyone else in the space does, this.  While they proudly claim to coin the phrase and perhaps as a marketing and positioning "thing" it translates better in EMEA, I think they don't have any body of work to really support the category that they claim. At least not by that name. Their resources on their site are fairly sparse on this subject (not on the technology). This is pretty much the marketing side of customer engagement, or customer interaction, or even to a limited degree, customer experience (if you are willing to stretch it) - meaning what I've called marketing over the years - ironically - "the first line of conversation" with the customer. But my typing it that way and Neolane speaking to it as theirs doesn't make it so.  They need to either make it so or reposition it, not them, by renaming it. That means, in a long winded way, support it with a body of knowledge, don't just explain it and claim it.

If Neolane focuses on the U.S. the impact I already think they are going to have will be miniscule by comparison to what I think they can achieve.  But, that's an opinion. I just like what I see and I think they can realize all kinds of unrealized potential. This is why they won this year.  Because they should have.

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Next up: Customer Service companies – KANA, Moxie, Parature

View the original article here

Customer Experience Challenge Met: Oracle

PG Note: Oracle is providing their take and this will close the series for now. Oracle is the one company that has aligned more than a product--in fact a complete product portfolio around their customer experience messaging. Today we have David Vap, group VP for Oracle Applications responding. I haven't dealt with David Vap before so this is the first time I'm "meeting" him too.

David, you have the floor. Let's see what you can bring.

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Thank you for the opportunity to vet what CX means to Oracle, our customers, and it's relation to CRM. As an industry we are experiencing a "bandwagon" phenomenon. The danger of this is that the entire point of CX could be lost, transmuted, and confused. But on the flipside, if CX reaches buzzword status and gets overused, yet this leads to more organizations taking action and really thinking about what they should do to improve the overall customer experience, then I say let it happen.

It's glaringly apparent that the rate of recent technological change (social, mobile, cloud) has forever altered the ways that we consumers use technology. This reality greatly impacts how businesses must serve their customers. The new transparency this technology gives consumers is forcing businesses to truly consider the customer experience.  I agree that the concept of CX has been around for quite awhile, but I don't think that companies were truly forced to deal with it in the same way as they must deal with it due to today's empowered consumer.  (For an interesting read on the new consumer, check out Greg Gianforte's new book Attack of the Customer)  As vendors, it's our job to innovate, anticipating market shifts and to develop solutions that help our customers address these rapid changes.

It's also important to understand that a good customer experience is dependent upon far more than technology. Any business can implement new software, but without a cultural shift and leadership commitment inside a company, it won't create better experiences. But why? Because CX requires a holistic look at how a customer interacts with a company through the entire lifecycle, examining the people, processes, and technology that support and interact with the customer. Oracle is committed to partnering with our customers to tackle this challenge. This change requires a sense of organizational urgency and focus to understand the varied unique customer interaction journeys with the company. Only after the customer journeys are defined and a strategy is set, can technology be designed to create the desired experience.

While CX isn't just about technology, enabling great customer experiences at scale does require a wide range of software solutions. At Oracle we have been busy building a comprehensive portfolio of applications to meet this challenge. In fact, RightNow, which is one of Oracle's more recent acquisitions, has been a leading proponent of software driving excellent customer experience. Oracle is well known for leadership in the CRM category, which we view as a subset of the CX portfolio. We continue to broaden our portfolio of CX applications to meet market needs across marketing, sales, commerce, and service.

Let's set the stage to explain why CX is in such demand right now and is taking precedent. Technology and the proliferation of devices, data growth, and high-speed networks are reaching a zenith. Social has matured into the mainstream. In 2012, Pinterest had the largest year-over-year increase in audience and time spent of any social network.[i] In the U.S, people spent 27B minutes on Facebook and 3.6B minutes on Twitter.[ii] The last five years has changed long standing behaviors forever – the way we chat, share, shop, and influence. We are always on, always sharing, and always aware.

Additionally customers' rising expectations and competition have spawned greater commodization of products and experiences from rapid copycat development, as well as new markets opening up global competition with low-cost manufacturing and distribution. On top of it all, media saturation on both traditional and social channels has everyone fighting for attention in more places.

The way businesses often respond to these changes is to apply the old approaches that worked in the past, but are now seeing marginal returns. Core go-to tactics? Get into a price war. Increase marketing spend on traditional channels. Reduce operational and support costs. These approaches lack the agility, insight and differentiation needed. At Oracle, we're working with our customers to create a different approach. We're highlighting just how critical it is to build a great customer experience. Research we conducted and shared with our customers has borne this out. We found that 26% of consumers post negative comments to social sites after a bad experience. In addition, 86% of customers stop doing business with an organization after just one bad experience.[iii] These numbers cause people to sit up and take notice.

So where do we begin? We believe that understanding the complete customer lifecycle is crucial to developing an effective customer experience strategy. It's important for companies to appreciate their customers' unique journey. Organizations need to start by putting themselves into their customers' shoes. Companies must uncover the truth about what customers want, expect, and what matters most to them. At Oracle, we work closely with key leaders at many companies to rethink the customer experience from the outside in. We run full day customer journey mapping workshops where we focus on their customers, and how to create winning experiences for them. We spend an entire day bringing together both business and technology people focused solely on the experiences they want their customer to achieve. That's how it has to start.

We encourage companies to think about the customer lifecycle as a connected loop that moves through the stages outlined above. We know the model isn't perfect, but it allows people across business function silos to engage.  It's important to discover how to adapt their business to enable that journey, and then later to select and implement the best technology tools to provide the ultimate customer experience.

But we've found that one of the biggest hurdles for CX is not just the technology and the potentially complex implementations across channels and customer touchpoints. As discussed, the largest roadblock is the organization itself and the need to start embedding the customer experience at a cultural level. The "house divided against itself cannot stand" (Abraham Lincoln, June 17, 1858) rings true. For example, the VP of eCommerce cannot be in competition with the VP of Retail. There must be a new organizational harmony and a strategy in place for any CX initiative to succeed.

(Credit: Oracle)

Oracle's approach to CX has three core tenets: Understand, Empower, and Adapt.

First companies must UNDERSTAND their customer. But how? For some businesses it's difficult to harness the knowledge needed to understand how to better serve customers. Obviously technology can help fill the void.

At Oracle, we believe that in order to understand the customer, companies must take advantage of the data available about the customer and the business, both inside and outside of the company. This absolutely includes leveraging social data. To handle the expanding number of touchpoints, the volume and variety of customer information, organizations have to begin investigating business intelligence tools and analytics to offer more-targeted experiences.

Companies need to harvest the insight available about their businesses from this collective knowledge, which exists across all interaction channels, to better understand the business and customer needs, to improve overall operational efficiencies, and to deliver better experiences. One Oracle customer, a US-based consumer goods manufacturer, uses Oracle solutions to track conversations about its products on social channels and to listen and collect valuable feedback across the web. This helps the company maximize every opportunity to provide an exceptional customer experience. In addition, the technology enables the manufacturer to prioritize incidents and adjust accordingly, to provide customer service where it is needed most.

Secondly, organizations must EMPOWER customers and employees with consistent, accurate information that ultimately cultivates loyal relationships. We recommend managing this challenge by making self-service experiences easy and rewarding. Another Oracle customer, a large global travel company, is a great example of a company doing just this. We all know how unpredictable, and sometimes frustrating, travel can be. To ensure a seamless customer experience, this company provides customers with up-to-the-minute information, and Oracle's contact center solution provides the means, enabling superior multi-channel support regardless of how customers communicate with the company--via phone, email, or web. The solution dynamically changes based on the actions taken by the agent and on information known about the customer and product. The workspace delivers instant access to relevant content, at the right time and place. Agents are confident that they are always providing the most accurate information to the customer, which increases agent productivity and helps drive customer satisfaction.

And of course, empowering frontline employees with real-time, valuable insight anytime, anywhere enables them to more effectively engage, recognize, and reward customers in the context of interactions.

Thirdly, companies must continuously ADAPT to this ever changing market. We believe that the cloud can help, but how? By helping organizations adapt to fluctuations in demand with built in capabilities such as elastic scalability, robust redundancy, and extensible integrations. These provide more time to innovate for the needs of the business.

For one company, a US based tax preparation firm, the flexibility that a cloud-based customer experience solution provides, enables them to scale up operations during the critical and extremely busy tax season. As one might expect, getting workers up to speed quickly can be tricky, but is essential. This is especially true when a large portion of the support team is seasonal. Regardless, this information flow must happen seamlessly, so that the customer experience doesn't suffer. With the ability to scale its operations appropriately, this firm was able to increase productivity while simultaneously providing a best-in-class experience for its customers.

Certainly with increasing demand and more channel choices, businesses are now required to streamline cross-channel interactions and easily transition between transactions, conversations, knowledge, and people. A tall order indeed. Not to mention that increasing choices means increased competition and customer expectations. This requires that companies deliver highly personalized experiences based on deep customer insight, including the customer's own preferences and style. And to also continuously optimize and adapt these experiences in real-time based on insight gained from their intent, context, and behaviors.

As discussed, customer experience is more than just CRM, but does encompass CRM. A good customer experience strategy creates the consistent, connected, personalized experiences that customers want, by transforming existing operational systems and infrastructure into a differentiated experience across the customer lifecycle.

It's important to recognize that a comprehensive CX strategy needs to support a broad set of technology:

Marketing. To manage the entire marketing cycle from planning and budgeting to execution and analysis; create personalized and contextually relevant experiences across Web, mobile, and social channels; and manage and integrate multichannel loyalty programs

Commerce. To providepersonalized customer engagement across touchpoints, connecting buyers with relevant products and services, providing consistent buying experiences

Sales. Tocreate and optimize sales plans, territories, incentives, and quotas; centralize customer information; notify sales users of any activity impacting their customers and deals; allow sales users to collaborate online; integrate key competitor and reference information; and manage lead scoring and distribution

Service and support. To unify service interactions across touch points and channels; get an accurate, current record of customers; reduce the time it takes to resolve customer issues; personalize responses to customer inquiries; and enable service both in the call center and in the field

Social. To listen and engage with customers across social media platforms; monitor, understand, and respond to consumers' social conversations; create, publish, moderate, and measure social marketing campaigns and engagement; integrate social interactions with customer service; and collaborate and build engaging applications and enriched social experiences across Facebook, social sites, and mobile phones and tablets

Data Management. To leverage customer data to deliver great customer experiences; create a single source of customer information; scale relevant content, search results, and merchandising across customer paths; and use rules and predictive analytics to make better decisions faster.

(Credit: Oracle)

Truth be told, Oracle is the only customer experience vendor that can claim it has every capability mentioned above available within a comprehensive customer experience portfolio offering. We believe that these tools address the customer experience challenge that companies live every day, by actually providing solutions to meet the imperative. More than just lip service, but actual working solutions. More than just branding or messaging, but real technology capabilities in use today.

Oracle is meeting the customer experience challenge every day, by giving our customers the knowledge, resources, and tools to identify their unique customer experience challenges and by helping to develop strategies to address those pain points. The real challenge for us is, and will remain, in helping our customers to achieve success with theirs.

[i] According to STATE OF THE MEDIA: THE SOCIAL MEDIA REPORT 2012 by Nielsen

[ii] According to STATE OF THE MEDIA: THE SOCIAL MEDIA REPORT 2012 by Nielsen

[iii] According to The 2011 U.S. Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report by RightNow (acquired by Oracle in March 2012)

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CRM Watchlist 2013 Winners: Social is as Social Does the Mainstream, Part 1

Summary: Six winners cluster around this quickly maturing — but not mature — "social platform" category. Today, in no particular order: Attensity, Gigya and Jive. On Monday: Get Satisfaction, Lithium and Nimble. Let's start now.

I was sitting here preparing to write what you see below and thinking “this has got to be the only award that vendors can win that they dread winning.”  Why, you might ask, the paradigm of innocence? Because if you think about it, it seems to be that I’m saying “Hey, congratulations, you won!! Now, here’s what’s wrong with you.” But I need to explain myself here, so give me a second to put this into context.

To win the Watchlist is actually an achievement (if I do say so myself). You had to meet a very difficult standard and be seen as a company who could sustain that standard over the next few years. Meaning, even if you did well, you didn’t win if I thought you were a one-hit wonder. That says a lot for the winners’ impact and their sustainability of that level over multiple years.

That said, I also don’t give a crap who wins the competitive wars and that bears on results too. Honestly, if company A and company B (not the boogie woogie bugle boys, though — who out there knows where that reference comes from?) are attacking each other — shame on them. If company A wants to get a competitive analysis that points out the weaknesses of company B relative to company A, that won't be from me, amigo. 

What I do want is for all the companies I deal with, either as clients or not, to succeed. There is lots of money sitting out there and there are lots of opportunities waiting to be closed.  This is a prosperous world — technology and business technology in particular — and plenty of room for many, many companies, with the likelihood of world domination about zero when it comes down to it. Any company that wins the Watchlist is a company that is doing those things that give them a significant chance for success, now and in the future. A great thing (at least in my eyes).  They are terrific companies.

But they aren’t perfect companies either and what I try to do with the Watchlist is point out what they need to either fix or enhance to be even better than they are. Sometimes it can seem rough — but tough love is part of the winners “prize.” Hell, I put hundreds of hours into this and months writing these analyses. But I’m glad to do it because I hope that companies will at least consider the advice. If they don’t, I understand. I’m just giving an opinion. But, I hope, a well-considered one.

Okay, now I feel better. Lets get on with it. The companies I review in this maturing category require so much that I've had to split this into two posts it's so good, with Part 1 going up today and Part 2 on Monday.

But, first, a commercial.

On Wednesday February 20, 2013 at 7:00am ET, the CRM Watchlist 2014 registration process began. Yep, right in the middle of the 2013 reviews. Progress (and time) wait for no man (or woman). What that means is that if you are a technology company or consulting/systems integrator business that does "customer facing" things which means software or services products/solutions, you become a candidate for the CRM Watchlist 2014. That means that:

You can request a 2014 registration form from me at paul-greenberg3@the56group.com.When you receive it, fill it out exactly according to instructions and in return you will get the questionnaire for 2014 — either the vendor questionnaire or the consulting/SI questionnaire which are slightly different.You have until November 30, 2013 to fill out the questionnaire.If you send in the registration form to me, I will presume that you are going to fill out the questionnaire by the due date and will start tracking you as soon send the registration back to me. Please don't waste my time and request the questionnaire and then not fill it out. I'm tracking you for the better part of a year if you do send it.

Previously on CRM Watchlist 2013:

CRM Watchlist 2013 Lifetime Achievement: IBM Institute for Business ValueThe Sweetest Suites: Part 1 of 3 – salesforce.com; MicrosoftThe Sweetest Suites: Part 2 of 3 – SAP, OracleThe Sweetest Suites: Part 3 of 3 – Infor, NetSuite, SugarCRMMarketing Puts Itself Out There - Aprimo, Eloqua, Hubspot, Infusionsoft, Marketo, NeolaneCustomer Service Served Hot – KANA, Moxie, ParatureThree Kings: Sales, Process, Analytics - Xactly, Lattice Engines, BPMonline, Pegasystems, Clarabridge.

Social WAS hot. Now it’s just business and the issue is no longer “doing social.” It’s getting results from it. It is mainstream. It’s not ubercool anymore. It’s not the greatest thing since…fire. It's now channels, it's now the place where unstructured data rests — well, doesn’t rest. Roils, really. It’s the place where conversations about brands and service issues and life in general and things in specific go on among lots of people. It’s a consideration of business that is necessary, not experimental; mainstream not edgy. In Gartneresque terms, the hype cycle is over. Now business value is the name of the social game. And it's not a social game. It’s a multichannel game where companies and customers decide on how they want to communicate with each other and then proceed to do so in ways that ultimately (and hopefully) provide value to each of the parties involved.

Also, to be entirely crystalline, Social CRM is now CRM – meaning there are virtually NO CRM applications that don’t take social channels into account in the technology and no customer facing strategy that doesn’t at least consider how to handle social channels. Even small business-related CRM apps from small companies are integrating social communications or social profiles or social…something, e.g. Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn integration via some API or another.

I’m not sure I can say this any other way really or any more clearly or bluntly.  So-called social-the-noun is now a required component when strategic business decisions are being considered and named. Social is mainstream, necessary and not that cool anymore though it’s still kind of fun on the consumer side.

That said, we have the Watchlist winners who I’m categorizing as social (“you hypocrite,” you’re probably thinking, “what’s wrong with you. Say one thing, do another.”) because they are each part of the matrix that enables social communications when it comes to the nuclear technology needed to accomplish the purposes of a business.

The variance in the winners is wide though half of them are community platforms (Get Satisfaction, Jive, and Lithium). But the other three are unique to their own space: Nimble for small business, Gigya as a provider of a well-articulated social layer to web infrastructure, and Attensity as the listening and analytics platform that wraps results around social channel use.  

But what they have in common is that they all have an impact on the marketplace and that they are likely to in 2013 though each has a set of things that they can do to escalate that impact to a long-term, multi-year proposition.

So, let’s start the dive. Remember, PR departments, this is in alphabetical order. So please don’t talk about how you “top” the Watchlist or how you are the “top” Watchlist winner. Other than the top ten percent, there is no possible way to make a distinction (beyond the #1). Again, this is alphabetical order.

When I do the Watchlist review for a repeat winner, I deliberately don’t go back to the one I wrote the year before. That way, my view of their strengths and what they need to do isn’t tainted in any way by what I already did. But I will go back and look at what I said the previous year after that. 

When it comes to Attensity, damn if it isn’t the same things that impress me, plus more — and damn if it isn’t the same things they need to address…plus more.

The power of Attensity and its impact is in its products. They have a suite that provides exceptionally strong listening but combines it with analytics in a way that can provide actionable insight — but note the term I use. Can. I didn’t say does — though it does. All will be clear about that very soon.

They are one of the maybe five or so receivers of the full Twitter firehose, which, before Gnip and/or DataSift made the full firehose rentable, was a real differentiator. Now, not so much, but still important because they are able to integrate it across all products that require it.

Their products have expanded in the last year but in essence they have four:

Attensity Pipeline – This is the data collection and organization engine. They do what you would expect here: slam about 150 million sources, grab the appropriate data, run analytics in real time, organize the data accordingly, and then route it to the right person — all in seconds. The key here is not the “social” part but the workflow and rules engine that gets the information into the right hands right away — hot off the unstructured presses.Attensity Respond – This is the engagement console for Attensity. See a tweet or a Facebook wall post or a blog comment and respond proactively. This, once again, allows you to do all or any of this from a single interface, organized in queues and routable to the best responder if need be.Attensity Voice of the Customer Command Center – As cool as this sounds, its actually a highly effective dashboard that combines the power of the Attensity Pipeline and Respond products. The idea is that on a war game-like set of big screens you will be able to see in real time the social media activity roiling on the social web about your brand and respond to it as soon as you see it. You can also get the immediate satisfaction of algorithm-run results for the actions you are seeing in as close to real time as it takes to capture the data, run the analytics and present them to you — seconds after the activities were IDed.  So it has a Command Center vibe and thus the name. But it's in practical terms an aggregate dashboard that is showing you the big picture and the streams and other actions specifically associated with the results you are seeing and gives you the ability to respond. Coolness aside, this is a powerful capability that meets the velocity requirements of contemporary customers. And they can do it in 32 languages!Attensity Analyze – The analytics platform that they claim is “the industry’s most powerful and accurate sentiment analytics solution” — a claim that I have no idea how they make or sustain. I’d be publishing the numbers if I were them. That said, it is definitely one of the most powerful and has distinguished them from other social monitoring applications for a long time.

Much of Attensity’s impact is based on the power of their suite of applications. They retain the focus on an application suite where a lot of their competitors are making more of a platform play (see Radian6 Insights Platform). What really gives them the bang is the pervasive business rules and workflow engine that they have provided and the strong analytics at the back end. This helps distinguish them in the market.

They also have a well-considered small but strong partner network. Their strategy seems to be to deal with a limited number of valuable partners of three kinds. Technology partners focused around integration. That includes such smart associations as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Lithium, Teradata and of course Twitter (for the full firehose). Salesforce is notably but understandably absent post-Radian6 acquisition. They have Consulting/SI partners such as Capgemini, IBM, Cognizant, and very interestingly and wisely, Northrup Grumman and SAIC — wise as to at least the type of partner — government contractors heavily tied to the defense industry. Their VAR channel is a bit deficient and a bit strange — it lists a few small value added resellers and EFM/customer experience vendor Allegiance and their also technology partner Teradata.  I have to presume that the latter two are an Attensity user and a partner who also resell — with the key word being “also.” This VAR channel could use a lot of work.  In fact more on the partner/channel strategy below. The quality of what they do have, especially on the technology side, is very high and wisely considered.

Attensity is no stranger when it comes to big market reach kinds of programs. You see them blasting everywhere and showing up everywhere and this does add to their impact — especially since they make a conscious effort to intersect popular culture — albeit at a cost to them — both financially and “business spiritually.” But there is no doubt about their well-organized marketing effort and what is a very smart strategic decision to intersect popular cultural icons and high visibility events with their monitoring and analysis. The tactics…well, more later.

This is a company which, while it might have slowed a tiny bit from 2011, relative to the market still has a power that belies its size. They have 500 installations and have nothing but big things in their future and an even bigger impact on the market than they’ve made now.

If…

Need to do AR/IR by more than rote – There is a certain amount of irony in a company that does such good social monitoring and analytics work and has such a strong impact that they win an award like this, yet they clearly have little insight when it comes to analyst relations. While they are absolutely consistent in providing press releases that say “if you care to speak to an executive re: whatever-the-press-release-is-about ” they don’t really do more than this kind of rote work, and thus don’t have a consistent outreach program that shows an understanding of who the individual influencer they are sending their missives to, only what they are. A perfect example, and literally the most ironic one possible, given what you’re reading: If you look at their awards page (as of today, since I assume they are going to fix this), you’ll see that their 2012 CRM Watchlist victory is listed as two separate awards — an Enterprise Irregular CRM Watchlist 2012 winner and a ZDNet CRM Watchlist 2012 winner. This is wrong in so many ways, since, first, its only one award, not two separate ones, and it’s my award, not the vehicles that published my writings. The Enterprise Irregulars syndicate the ZDNet posts I write because I’m a member of the Enterprise Irregulars. ZDNet is my blog publisher. A little bit of research would have told them this. The importance is just a reflection of doing AR programs rote or doing them well — not any personal insult to me. I just found it ironically funny. Attensity, a company I think the world of, only does their AR program rote. They need to step up their game big time here.Stop the too many stupid “pop” campaigns – As I mentioned, Attensity made what is actually a smart strategic marketing decision to use their products to get results, typically out-on-a-limb predictive results from pop events or things that are noticed because they are icons in popular culture. So they might forecast something around the Super Bowl or around national elections or the propensity to purchase iPads.  But, while it does get media attention, there is a cost to this. First, there is always a huge risk if you’re not Nate Silver, in forecasting anything around a national election — or, more broadly, around anything that has national attention. Second, there is a limit to how much of this should be done. The press releases I do get from Attensity more often than not will be about some pop event and their forecast around it. At a certain point, regardless of publicity it might generate, who cares. And they are wrong frequently enough to be noticeable. Look, ultimately, the value of Attensity is in the business results they generate — and they have a great deal of success in that. While there is some value in doing the pop culture campaigns and making the forecasts and getting picked up by USA Today, the reality is that the value has its limits — and the limits shrink, the higher the volume of these campaigns. Start intermingling them with business results and announce them as best you can. Your case studies are sparse. Build those up. Do some pop campaigns, but dial down the volume and cut back the volume. Open up the channel a bit more – In 2011 and even into early 2012, everyone wanted to partner with Attensity. Now, not so much anymore. Not because the desire isn’t there. But the Attensity partner strategy has been selective and up to now, it has worked wonderfully well. They have a solid partner network of marquee partners. But this is their time with the power of their products, to extend their power — and market reach and devote some resources to open up their partner networks. Time to partner with new large Sis like Accenture but perhaps, since they have an interest in the public sector, several other large government contractors like CSC, who given their scope seem to be ideal. A bigger number of technology integrations would be valuable too — SugarCRM and NetSuite come to mind — and perhaps Infor. I’m not 100% sold on a VAR channel expansion for reasons too numerous to mention here, among them, the value of Attensity as a standalone sale.They still lack vision – I’m going to repeat what I said last year verbatim, not because I’m lazy, clearly I’m not, but because it still holds true. “As I said, they have a clear mission and their releases indicate continuously smart incremental improvement in their core applications. But I find no evidence of visionary thinking. Perhaps they think “well, hey, we’re social. That’s visionary isn’t it?” Well, no, not anymore it isn’t. It’s mainstream and they rightfully have a product line that reflects multi-channel including the most traditional in what they do, putting them uniquely on top. Well, then, they counter, “we were in the Visionaries Quadrant (lower right) in the 2011 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social CRM”. That’s nice but this isn’t what I mean by vision. Gartner puts companies in the visionaries quadrant because their product is more advanced than others of its kind. THAT criterion they meet with some ease. What I mean is, companies should provide a way of seeing how they view their world-changing future benefit to business. Apple’s original vision, even though it never entirely succeeded, was poetically brilliant — “an Apple on every desktop” which of course, not only reflects Apple’s attitude of world domination, but the school, learning, teacher, education metaphor is great poetry and reflects the other side of Apple’s then long-term strategy. That’s a vision statement. That’s something to build from. That’s also what Attensity doesn’t have. Mission AND vision, not just mission. Vision isn’t just the agreement on mission among disparate groups. It’s a true framing statement for how you see your company in its world-class future doing something that you will change the world and benefit business doing.” Amen to that…still. No change there, so this year, they need to change.

This might sound like I’m being tough on Attensity and, truthfully, I am.  But it's tough love. They have limitless potential and the only reason they haven’t gotten there yet is self-imposed limits. Even with those, they have made an impact on the industry that is lasting and will continue to be. Do some other things and they will go much further. I’d say its up to them entirely. But I think they will, which is why they won the Watchlist for 2013. That would be my Watchlist, not ZDNet’s or the Enterprise Irregulars ones. 

This is the only first time winner on this year’s social provider list. Their presence reflects how well Gigya does what they do.  But it also reflects a larger (relative) truth — the mainstreaming of social as part of the customer facing technologies — and the importance it now plays in the contemporary business. We’ve reached the era where social is simply part of business and any business it isn’t a part of is a business that is in trouble — now or in the future.

Plain and simple, Gigya provides a social infrastructure. I debated (with myself – which is kind of scary actually) their participation for a brief and somewhat insanely dumb moment when I was accepting (or rejecting) entrants into the Watchlist this year. But I quickly realized that their ability to deliver a lattice-like social infrastructure to their clients is deeply related to the enablement of customer engagement and bilateral communication between companies, customers and networks. Voila! Welcome to CRM Watchlist 2013.

The more I delved into Gigya, the more fascinated I became. Their delivery vehicle is a website. You might say, if that’s all you saw, “Meh. A website. That’s so retro.” What they are really delivering is a framework for social customer management and engagement that is geared toward the business users requirements. To differentiate them in easy-to-understand terms (if you’ve been in this market for the last hundred years) they are more like the equivalent of integrated marketing management than they are akin to marketing automation. Analogously, of course.

They provide not only the tools for engagement, but for the resource management, and the compliance and regulatory aspects of “social”; and strong administrative capabilities. Their social infrastructure framework breaks down into four pieces:

User Management 360 – This is what they claim is a “solution for managing a new generation of user data” but I actually think they undersell what it is. This is the core management console for everything ranging from identity storage, to password validation to social login.  In other words, it’s the admin dream for dealing with the immensely difficult world of real time unstructured conversations on the social web that apply to your interests as a company. Much more than data management, new generation or not.  The Gigya NEXUS partner program is designed to facilitate the integration of User Management 360 into marketing programs like Exact Target, Silverpop, Responsys and Adobe for example. They also integrate with WordPress and Drupal – which for a company that delivers websites is a smart moveSocial Plug Ins – This is the engagement piece. This is where you get reviews, rankings, live chat, newsfeeds and and sharing among other interaction enablement tools.Gamification – This is what it sounds like. It provides all the basics that gamification uses to drive customer behaviors.  Points, badges and special offers to reinforce the customer’s specific behaviors. Notification systems like leaderboards are provided.Analytics – They provide the analytics algorithms and the dashboards to see the results. Influence measures at the site level; referral traffic (i.e. advocacy); most popular gamification efforts; share rates are among what they offer.

What makes this product suite so powerful is that it integrates well into the systems that the customers already have and is a seamless part of the business’s multichannel programs.  It is a pre-fabricated (with lots of customization capabilities) social framework that simply works.

Gigya has had significant success selling their value. They have over 600 customers including well-known brands like NBC, CBS, ABC, NHL, Kohler, Mobil, Sprint, Verizon and about 500 other marquee names. Seriously. Perhaps the Most. Impressive. Clients. Ever.  Their strength lies in the B2C (business-to-consumer) world with vertical power in media and entertainment, news and publishing, ecommerce, consumer goods, and travel and hospitality – all verticals in which social has a HUGE impact, making Gigya a smart company for focusing on what I call the “emotional verticals” -- those verticals where how a person “feels” has more impact on the company than what that customer gets.

What’s funny is that Gigya’s footprint is actually far bigger than the company is. I won’t go into the incredible press recognition they’ve gotten – both contemporary and traditional – but suffice to say, they are a company with an aura. They have caché and good for them. They actually only have 150 employees and yet you’d think by their level of visibility in the market, they have 1500 employees. That’s impact -- and one of the reasons they arrived on the winners list of CRM Watchlist 2013. They are a market leader in social infrastructure, which, while not that big a category,  is -- given contemporary business needs -- a big deal.

But they do need (and want) to get bigger, so there are things they need to do.

Start playing in the CRM world  - Because they are such an agnostic part of a business, they can become an important -- even critical --  toolset in a CRM platform that offers more social channel integration than infrastructure.  It’s a big industry - $15-$18 billion – and Gigya represents a value to a lot of companies that aren’t where they are.Improve their overall outreach – They would do well to expand their outreach into the world of enterprise applications since they are enterprise-class themselves. Aside from the above-mentioned CRM technology partnerships, they would do well to reach the market influencers in that world.  Also, engage the specific business media.  Gigya is the company that you’ve heard of but don’t realize it until someone tells you their name.  Not exactly top of mind – which is a shame, given that they are the clear leaders in their category – social infrastructure.Build a library of enterprise use cases – They have some use cases and a few case studies on their site. So there is a limited amount of content that they provide that's of decent quality. But I’m looking at this in a different sense. Their use cases are built around the idea of technology.  What about the ones that can be built around outcomes for a Line of Business professional?  Gigya represents an infrastructure. Infrastructure is both an obvious need for an IT department and a not-very-obvious need for a line of business. Use cases go a long way for lines of business in understanding how social infrastructure can provide them with outcomes that they can kvell over.

Gigya may be new to the winners’ circle here, but they are the market leaders in their field.  They were and are the little engines that could. For a company to win the Watchlist they have to be thinking “big engine” and it has to be achievable.  I’m betting that 2013 is the year they go all “big engine” on me.

Jive is a company that verges on doing great things; but to do those great things, there are some good things they have to commit to, one or two of them substantial.

Successes haven’t been handed to Jive. They earned them for many reasons. I’ll get into the reasons shortly but the results are excellent and well deserved – which of course, is why they won the Watchlist this year.

They had a successful IPO and have remained relatively strong since.They broke over $100 million in revenue in 2012.They have achieved wide industry recognition from multiple places – aside from me of course. Forrester named them a leader in the Forrester WAVE for Enterprise Social Software; Gartner named them a leader in both Social CRM (not really that) and Social Software for the Workplace (definitely that). They have a top of mind recognition when it comes to one of the best choices available to Fortune 2000 C-level execs. 

That’s priceless for a company that sees itself, even now, as small with “massive ambition” as they put it.  It;s also well deserved.

There are multiple reasons that they have been successful – a few they might not even suspect – and they are all so eminently rational – and coherently thought through. Here are the two most important – and ones they might not suspect.

They have a solid product ecosystem coupled with a fantastic partner strategy – What makes this mission critical to their success is that they are entirely realistic when it comes to understanding what they can do well and what they need partners to do well.  Their strength is the Jive Platform – a social business platform that they’ve built around collaboration, scalability, and engagement in customer service, marketing and sales. Their ability to scale is leading to a enhancements around Big Data and predictive analytics – capabilities that they see as providing context in a work environment that is “overwhelmed by information and data deluge.” 

They’ve developed multiple avenues for integration ranging from what they call “noise gateways” which are designed to organize the streams from other systems; to their Apps Market which is designed to let partners use the Jive API for additions to Jive’s capabilities (e.g. social graph); to finally Jive Anywhere which is the Jive social listening product. But they understand that just providing this isn’t enough in today’s market – especially if you want to go big.  So they have one of the best thought out and executed partner strategies I’ve seen in the market to date.  

They have strategic technology partners like Twitter, SAP, and LinkedIn that are based on both customer and Jive business needs – enhancements to the core of Jive’s Platform. They have  more tactical technology partners who add a capability like Bunchball who add gamification to the Jive platform. They have strategic services partners like CSC and Accenture who use Jive as the tools for executing on strategies that the service partners deliver; they have implementation partners like Cognizant. 

Some of these partners are go to market and some not. They also have the Apps Market where third parties add to Jive’s feature set.  Take all of this and you get a core ecosystem that powers an offering that is a lot greater than just products.

They have a profoundly right view of where the market is, what customers want, and how they have to proceed with those customers and prospects –  Look at this statement made by CEO Tony Zingale on ZDNet February 5 – “The hype of social is dead. Social for social's sake is dead and Facebook for the enterprise is dead and buried. We're moving to an era of 'what does it do for me?'" he said. "Social as a term is loaded. Jive is going for systems and products that drive revenue. That's what mainstream buyers spend money on."

This is entirely right. I can’t be any more blunt than that. But they go a level deeper. I don’t often quote directly from a submission but I thought this expressed exactly what I wish all the entrants had said one way or the other.  “As such, we are shifting to be laser-focused on driving a business-level conversation. We will encourage a conversation in the market about business outcomes while offering an implementation methodology that tracks those desired outcomes to allow customers to measure their progress against the goal.”

Business outcomes.  Balm for the soul. Mission for Jive. And focus for an industry.  They get it and they articulate it well, better than anyone else in the entire industry -- at least as far as I can see.  

However, as well as they articulate under varying circumstances, this is not the market’s view of Jive, so they have some things to do to make it so.

Dial it back – This arguably is the most important thing that they can do in 2013. They come across as arrogant a bit too much (and too frequently) for anyone’s liking.  I’ve heard this from analysts, other vendors and practitioners so it’s not something that is isolated to one or two disgruntled ex-employees. In fact, none of the ex-employees I spoke to told me that and not that long ago it was a discussion among a significant and large group of influencers.

The form it often takes is ridiculously exaggerated competitive vendor smack talk. An example: "Jive is the only company that can answer the business value question. Period. ... The approach to social business taken by IT-centric legacy vendors such as Microsoft and IBM have consistently failed to deliver tangible business value and has wasted millions of customer dollars in the process." 

Without going into detail, I suspect the failure numbers are rhetorical and based on a rather biased look at what constitutes lack of business value – at the best. Additionally, Jive isn’t the only company that can answer the business value question. Period.  These kinds of statements, heard too often from Jive, need to stop.  Win on your strengths. 

Minimally, Jive needs to lose the nasty rhetorical flourishes. Plus be able to defend the statements they make like IBM’s and Microsoft’s “consistent failure” and “waste of millions of customer dollars.” And avoid similar accusations from other competitors.  Jive isn’t actually an arrogant company, but there are too many public statements that seemingly prove otherwise.

Ironically, they have one of the most highly regarded people in the industry – their Chief Strategy Officer, Chris Morace – who is respected because he is as smart as he is and because he is as nice as he is. Jive might want to model themselves more after one of their own.  Whatever. But dial it back a lot.  Its just bad marketing.

 Get marketing in sync with mission, vision, outlook – Jive has had the devil of a time for the last several years, since former CMO Ben Kiker left them, in doing good marketing, which is ironic in so many ways since their outlook is actually spectacularly on point.  Their marketing doesn’t reflect that outlook at all.

While individuals like the above-mentioned Chris Morace articulate the outlook well, the product collateral and marketing materials are more product centric than the company actually is. They have a good body of use cases and even case studies, but the feature/function listings actually diminish their worth. Generic documentation in vertically specific markets doesn’t help much either; nor does giving a market the impression of a nasty company do them any good.

Get AR/PR/IR fixed – This has been a weakness of theirs for years. During the period they were heads down on the IPO, they virtually ignored the analyst world, which had toxic results for them.  The (generous) thinking among the analysts at the time was “well, when the IPO happens, they will start the outreach they need to do.”  Due to a series of bad decisions, it didn’t happen. They are in process now of fixing all that, but it has been very, very slow and still is far too slow.

Just to be clear, especially because I’m seen in part as an analyst, this isn’t some self-indulgence on my part – though outside of Chris, my relationship to the company has been non-existent for 3 years – this is a “necessary evil.” Meaning, it would be wonderful if I was out of a job in a manner of speaking and it wasn’t necessary for a vendor to do anything but stand on the merits of its own products to succeed. But that’s not reality. Success in the software world – and especially high ambition realized – is driven by a complex series of activities, one of which involves among other things – AR/IR/PR. Jive needs to step it up now – 2013 – March.

Get more involved in the CRM world – This is more of a tweak than anything else. They have an extraordinary partner strategy that they have done an excellent job of executing on.  One place that they could spend more time – both in cultivating partnerships, being visible when it comes to the industry and showing a strong value proposition for customers who have systems in place, is the $15-$18 billion CRM industry. There is a lot of opportunity here. If I were Jive, I’d make the effort. But I’m not.

In any case, Jive is a winner with some just fundamentally right things they are doing – some of the most important ones – one or two which can alter a market.   If they proceed on the other things – wow.  That’s about all I can even say about this.

 To be continued Monday: Get Satisfaction, Lithium, Nimble

Topics: Tech Industry, Emerging Tech, Social Enterprise

In addition to being the author of the best-selling "CRM at the Speed of Light: Social CRM Strategies, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers," Paul Greenberg is President of The 56 Group, LLC.

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CRM Watchlist 2013 Winners: Three Kings - Sales, Process, Analytics

Summary: This is probably the most eclectic category - because it's so disparate - but it's the foundation for many a company's core business operations: sales, business processes and analytics. Three hot areas. Our winners this year are all accomplished. Let's see what they got. Winners: Xactly, Lattice Engines, BPMonline, Pegasystems, Clarabridge.

Woody Allen has this great thing he says about immortality:

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work…I want to achieve it through not dying.” 

I’ve come to the conclusion that my work on these Watchlist reviews are going to take me so long, I’m going to have to achieve immortality by not dying – just to be able to finish this year’s Watchlist.

 Now, a commercial.

On Wednesday February 20, 2013 at 7:00am ET, the CRM Watchlist 2014 registration process began. Yep, right in the middle of the 2013 reviews. Progress (and time) wait for no man (or woman). What that means is that if you are a technology company or consulting/systems integrator business that does "customer facing" things, which means software or services products/solutions, you become a candidate for the CRM Watchlist 2014. That means that:

You can request a 2014 registration form from me at paul-greenberg3@the56group.com.When you receive it, fill it out exactly according to instructions and in return you will get the questionnaire for 2014 - either the vendor questionnaire or the consulting/SI questionnaire which are slightly different.You have until November 30, 2013 to fill out the questionnaire.If you send in the registration form to me, I will presume that you are going to fill out the questionnaire by the due date and will start tracking you as soon you send the registration back to me.  Please don't waste my time and request the questionnaire and then not fill it out. I'm tracking you for the better part of a year if you do send it.

Previously on CRM Watchlist 2013:

CRM Watchlist 2013 Lifetime Achievement: IBM Institute for Business ValueThe Sweetest Suites: Part 1 of 3 – salesforce.com; MicrosoftThe Sweetest Suites: Part 2 of 3 – SAP, OracleThe Sweetest Suites: Part 3 of 3 – Infor, NetSuite, SugarCRMMarketing Puts Itself Out There - Aprimo, Eloqua, Hubspot, Infusionsoft, Marketo, NeolaneCustomer Service Served Hot – KANA, Moxie, Parature

This isn’t an “easy” category because, truthfully, it’s three categories at once. But they have a relationship that is unimpeachable. All three of the categories and the companies that they represent are pillars of what needs to be done at multiple levels in the 21st century business world. Core stuff.

Yeah, okay, pretty lame, but that's the best I can bring for an overview.  

As anyone who has been around the CRM world at any length whatsoever knows, sales was the original driver of CRM the technology and CRM the strategy. While the battle around “CRM the strategy” was lost a long time ago (though it is still a strategy – just not perceived that way), CRM technology in the traditional sense is typically identified with sales force automation.

Yet, Social CRM, the new evolution of CRM (which can go back to being called CRM) was driven by customer service, partially because the massive escalation of customer demands on companies has put more than just the traditional customer service representative in the position of providing service to the customer. This forces changes in the company’s operations and culture, because of the required empowerment of employees to allow them to respond with some ability to act when dealing with this new more demonstrative customer. Customer service, rather than a pillar, becomes an envelope around sales, marketing and customer service’s traditional pillar-like departmental functionality.

What this led to is an uncomfortable relationship between the use of “social” channels and sales. For a long time (in Silicon Valley terms, that’s more than 6 months), there have been attempts to fit Twitter and Facebook external outreach to sales.  The broad discomfort of putting “social sales” into the pillars of Social CRM and even just the integration with social communications channels and traditional sales functions have always been a bit dodgy. But there is an area that actually works and that’s an area that is defined either as sales intelligence or a broader set called sales optimization.

Sales intelligence at its simplest is the use of the structured data of an internal database or Hoovers and Reuters corporate information in combination with the capture and organization of unstructured data that is focused around individuals, companies, and events that potentially can impact a sales deal. It is a specific subset of social listening but combined with the more traditional transactional and demographic data that sales has used forever to figure out how to sell better. It can reach the level of being a great contributor to insights around customer (read: B2B customer) behaviors and actions that impact the direction that a sales deal might go in – allowing the sales person to have much better success with the next steps they have to take to “influence” a deal.

Thanks in particular to the work of Blanc and Otus’s Joan Levy, an excellent PR and analyst relations manager, I’ve “known” Xactly for about 3 years. They’ve made a couple of attempts at the Watchlist in the past, but this is their first win. And frankly, not only did they deserve to win, but they’ve crafted the pieces to knock it and their particular market out of the park.

For those of you who don’t exactly (with an “e”) know what they do, Xactly is the leader in what I think are important niche markets: incentive compensation management and sales compensation. They have a 100% cloud-based, pretty much complete platform to create and administer compensation programs which, as anyone in sales knows, are the lifeblood of company after company. While they cover the gamut of pieces needed to craft a custom or even good out of the box comp program, more important than any pieces of the components is their approach to compensation planning and systems. It is that compensation’s focus should be around reward, not management of dollars. Which I love them for.

To that end they have spent the last several years building systems that are deep and able to handle complex compensation schemas yet navigable and via cloud delivery both easily consumable and affordable for the most part. They’ve attempted to spend some tealeaf reading time so that they could stay on top of trends that might impact them.

So, for example, they’ve added gamification to their newest release of Xactly Express, their emerging companies focused solution. That means the standard stuff that you would expect – contests, leader boards, badges, social streams. Even though this isn’t a foundational component, it is a good example of how you can do something that actually makes sense in the context of your product in your market. It’s a level of smart applicability that indicates crisp thinking, not just “gamification for gamification’s sake.”

They are laser-focused in the compensation market and there is no doubt that they are staying that way. With their focus there, they are able to provide the enablement of workplace performance (which is not strictly CRM but it is part of the collaborative ecosystem necessary to provide value for both the business and customer) via not just the compensation, but the ability to monitor the performance relative to the KPIs set up for the compensation’s realization.

The laser focus has given them the opportunity to crank out the kind of thought leadership material that can give them mindshare in this growing market. They have multiple assets in different media formats that describe the practical and strategic side of incentive compensation.  To their credit, they don’t stray beyond that.  They are visionaries in the context of their marketplace. Big fish, modest pond.

They have a tight, complete company with a notably great culture. Many companies that I deal with provide homilies to their cultures and while they may or may not have a great culture, they don’t prove it, they merely say it. Xactly proves it. Interestingly, their culture, in part, reflects their beliefs on compensation. Compensation is based on reward, not financial management. So for example, they incent their staff with a formal program that provides everything from iPads to cash to trips to stock options. But they also have a non-profit arm, XactlyOne, for Xactlians (their name for the employees of the company), dedicated to service in their community (San Francisco area). XactlyOne raises money for worthy causes like Turning Wheels for Kids or Relay for Life. Of course, as is the nature of a growing contemporary company, they’ve injected the aforementioned gamification not only into their applications, but into their culture with contests, leaderboards etc. –another way to reward performance.

This culture hasn’t been unnoticed. In 2012, they were named one of the best places to work by the Great Place to Work Institute (GPWI) – an accolade which appeared in Fortune Magazine.

I could go into a lot more, including an extensive product review – let’s save that for another day. The Watchlist is an impact award and products are just a part of the factors that go into a big footprint on an industry and customer base. This company has nailed all the elements and, truthfully, has only to tweak some things.

Let’s see what they are…

More cowbell – While they have a pretty substantial partner network from both technology partners and most importantly consulting and systems integration partners, they need to do that more. The reality is that their consulting/SI channel consists of small niche players who have a nice place in the market, but if Bruce Dickinson has a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell, then you have to give him more cowbell. Meaning, start courting the larger Sis and consulting firms. Sales compensation fits nicely into the pantheon of pieces needed to optimize sales operations and opportunities in a large enterprise. Surely, the larger SIs and consulting firms can understand that, n’est ce pas?Tell a more ecosystem-focused story – Sales compensation fits into an ecosystem that is built around sales optimization. Sales optimization is defined by its objectives, which are better shots at closing deals. Obviously, it involves sales intelligence, predictive modeling etc. but it also involves how sales people are compensated and for what. There is a great story to tell here from Xactly’s perspective that still needs to be teased out but the story is there.

From the time that I met Lattice Engines two years ago, I knew they were going to get somewhere. They had a unique value proposition (unique at the time) – one which combined what InsideView does with what Oracle attempted to do with Sales Prospector and added their own signature capabilities. What that meant is that Lattice Engines was able to ascertain what was the best possible route to take, intelligence to have, moves to make and team to provide the most likely successful result when it came to closing a sales deal.

“Big deal,” you say, “lots of companies claim that." Well, some do, but the thing that made this compelling besides their components and their approach to what I’m saying is sales optimization, is that they had measurable results to prove it. Even though the results are confidential, suffice to say, there were significant increases in sales volume, value per deal, etc. in enough clients to convince me that they are on to something.

So how do they do this thing?

Their core product is called salesPRISM and to dumb it down a bit, it’s able to do three things:

Intelligent sales targeting – This is a combination of a strong predictive analytics platform in combination with sales intelligence that is gathered the way that sales intelligence often is – a combination of internal sources (customer records, etc.), structured external sources like Reuters, Dun and Bradstreet, Hoovers and LinkedIn and the more contemporary unstructured sources – social web data sources but in the case of Lattice Engines also their own proprietary data “lattice” – which includes social media, but also government contracts and funding announcements etc.  Salespeople are able to take this disparate information, and through the application of predictive analytics can forecast things like likelihood of customer acquisition, estimated deal value, products likely to be purchased, and several other attributes.  This is, to some extent, what Oracle’s Sales Prospector attempted to do with a much higher risk involved than Lattice Engine’s sales targeting.Talking points – This is an umbrella for several things. First, it provides a way of getting in the door with executives by using analytics to identify what Lattice Engines calls “Gaining Access Talking Points.” Not only does it chart a course for the sales person on what hot buttons to hit, and actions to take, but it identifies historic data from similar selling situations that might be of value and makes product recommendations that provide a basket of goods that is the best combination for the customer – and thus most likely to sell. Sales optimization, uh huh.  Plays – These are arguably the most interesting differentiator that Lattice Engine has. These are highly specific sales campaigns organized around the when and how of engaging with potential and existing customers.  They can be manually determined or algorithmically determined based on “historical behavior and purchase patterns” among other things. What I do know is that these are NOT generic pabulum. They are granular and targeted and actually valuable.

I emphasized their product here, even though I make the point in the Xactly analysis that product isn’t the focus per se of the CRM Watchlist – an impact award – yet in this instance, to some extent it is – they are a juiced super sales optimization suite that has solid measurable results in an area that measurable results have often been either specious or non-existent.  That’s meaningful – and has impact.

But they are a young company – with some pressures due to substantial backing from Tier One venture capital firms Sequoia and NEA.  Results are expected sooner rather than later. They’ve nailed the product and a few other aspects that do them proud – a highly capable management for example – but they are at one of those inflection points where they have to push even harder than they have with all 140 plus employees involved.

Here’s….
What they need to do

Big Data for Sales is a bit limiting – While this is certainly a good bit of messaging, it actually undersells what Lattice Engines does and really doesn’t make it seem like much more than highly scaled sales intelligence. They need to probably shift their emphasis a bit to making Big Data for Sales a component rather than a tagline. They are a sales optimization star – and the world needs to understand that. Not just Big Data. They need to be clear on their distinctions from the more narrow foci of their likely competitors – without falling prey to the bane of our industry - attacks on the companies that they compete with. Big Data for Sales sounds like amped up sales intelligence, which is only an aspect of what they do. While they can ride the Big Data wave for a while longer, it isn’t going to be a trend forever. It’s defined by the inability of technology to handle it if you read the extant literature. Not where I’d be hanging my hat.Drop sales effectiveness, pick up sales optimization – the former is a concept; the latter is becoming a market. They need to lock themselves into the market they are in.Next product steps should be to link to demand generation – there is a sales optimization ecosystem that incorporates what Lattice Engines does, what InfoHive does (Reputation capital management); what Xactly does – among other pieces. However, it all begins with demand generation – e.g. lead scoring, lead nurturing etc. If Lattice Engine is already making marketing claims (“Lattice is revolutionizing sales and marketing by harnessing BIG DATA to develop the most informed sales professionals…” ), then back them up by placing them squarely in the sales optimization market category – e.g. focus on developing a solid demand generation set of applications/services.Have their Lite release out the door in early-to-mid 2013 – The danger they face is that their product is easy to underestimate and it’s easy to mistake what it does. A Lite product, which they claim they are producing, will go a long way to helping customers and prospects see the distinction. But they don’t have forever to do this.AR time – I’ve said this often for other winners, so in order to not just take up space; I’ll make it simple. They need an analyst relations program not just an analyst relation’s person. I don’t often say that for a company this size, but in their case it’s merited.

When Forrester first came out with the Wave around process-based CRM, I saw it as an artifice. I mean, who would want to be thinking about CRM that way? Process in my head meant the idea of having an engine to “keep the ordinary, ordinary” no matter how complex an activity that turned out to be.  That meant a strong workflow creation toolset and a business rules engine that could handle complex flows. That meant a company that put time and effort into deeply understanding the  nuances and variances of business processes in different vertical industries and in different contexts. 

I still think that process-based CRM isn’t a legitimate category – in part because there are so few players that meet the criteria that something like that would require. But interestingly, two of the best at doing that are Watchlist winners this year – industry heavyweight Pegasystems and up and coming slugger BPMonline.  Which does tell me there is something valuable about companies who can provide that specialized an approach to CRM. 

Let’s see what we have here.

Two years ago, BPMonline was the first EMEA winner of CRM Idol, a competition for emerging companies in the customer-facing space.  They were our Kelly Clarkson, so to speak. One of the prizes was to guarantee them a spot as a winner of the CRM Watchlist for 2012.  But this is (forgive me if you’re not a baseball fan here) like saying that a Rookie of the Year is going to get attention.  Of course they are but what about when they are no longer rookies? 

Well, BPMonline figured that they didn’t have to believe in a sophomore season jinx – and they did what every other potential candidate had to do – submit a questionnaire – and guess, what, unlike most of the others – they won. This time without guarantees.

It’s not really all that surprising. This is a company with 3500 customers in 35 countries. They have 350 employees plus (note the increments of 35 here…grand plan in the universal scheme of things?). They have a headquarters in London but their true base is in Kiev.  They are doubling their office space there because of their rapid growth. They have managed to get the attention of large consulting firms like Capgemini, though there is a lot more to do there. They have a reseller channel of over 250 partners.  They are no longer an emerging technology company; they have emerged.  There are reasons for that:

They have a vibrant, mature, but still young and innovative management team led by CEO and co-founder Katerina Kostereva, who not only has a savvy sense of business, knows the industry and what kinds of products and services BPMonline needs to produce.  She and the other members of the management team has one other vital characteristic – a sense of humor (check here for that).They have a cohesive and friendly culture that encourages hard work and innovation and reward for the work.They have been particularly savvy about making sure that they expand their market reach and mind share. They attend the events they need to attend; they have a strong outreach to analysts and other industry influencers. This led to industry recognition not just through CRM Idol but through CRM Magazine where they were recognized as a rising star in customer service in 2012.They do a lot of opportunity development.  They build their own events with customers that are designed to show how capable a company they are.  I had the distinct privilege of speaking at one in 2012 that drew 350 customers and prospects from seven former Soviet republics. Their development team is strong. The company focuses on not just the product sets, but also the platform. They concentrate not just on the workflow and business rules and process engines but the user interface and the user experience – trying to tie the navigation flows to natural movements of users.

They've come a long way in a year. They've made it as a player on the stage and have shown themselves to be young potential force for a long time. But that doesn't mean that they don't have things to do. The impact they will have in 2013 can be magnified extensively if they start to do them.

Expand to the United States – This is a company that has a universally good product platform and engine; has an Anglicized version of it; They have U.S based enterprise customers – and there is room in the U.S market now that Pegasystems is the only player that is directly competitive though Sword-Ciboodle’s acquisition by KANA puts KANA into the mix too. Make an idea, reality. There is a serious opportunity for them in the U.S. because of the nature of their offering and the need for what they provide. Plus the amount of direct competitors is small, though to be fair, its formidable.Slow down the road map when it comes to constant new product releases – In 2012 there were about 6 products released which for a several hundred employee company is a lot. Slow down product development – perhaps be a bit more opportunistic about it for the time being.  Concentrate on expanding their market opportunity by developing partnerships with companies like they have (at least ostensibly) with Capgemini. Move the needle a bit more in one direction or another –They claim process based CRM for customer service, sales and marketing but the preponderance of products (and marketing) are aimed at customer service.  Time to move the needle toward sales and marketing a bit more and provide the focused effort that normalizes the balance between sales, marketing and customer service as Pegasystems is beginning to do or move the needle all the way to customer service until they have enough to show a true marketing and sales offer.More around outcomes and less process based –There’s no doubt that process is BPMonline’s DNA. But no one needs to hear constant detail about genetic structure; only about the person that it created. What that means is a refocus of their messaging around the beneficial outcomes that process-centric CRM provides.  While they have a website that certainly is a pleasure to navigate, the content is very much product focused and technology brushed.  They need to revamp around the idea that process-centric CRM provides outcomes like “x” or “y” that are immensely valuable to those using the enabling technology, rather than the feature/function focus their messaging currently has.

If BPMonline does even half of what I suggest, they will be a shoo-in for the CRM Watchlist in 2014. Seriously.

Pegasystems has a long heritage in the Business Process Management technology world – they have been the market leader in that space for many years.  They were and are so strongly invested in that world that they used to talk about “dead CRM” as part of their messaging to try to establish the dominance of BPM over CRM – which, actually is not really in competition – they are different animals with complementary characteristics. It could be explained away if one wanted to – they were an engineering culture that did what engineering cultures do – operate in the “build it and they will come mode.” Which meant that they would specialize in the things that going into building it, not what happens when “they” actually decided to show up.

But Pegasystems turned out to be very different than the standard engineering company. First, they are able to read the trends and respond accordingly and with the flexibility necessary in a technology world that makes rapid and sometime breathtakingly pinpoint pivots.  Second, they were able to admit that they had erred – something that companies in the technology world are loath to do – and stupid not to.

They started mending their rip by buying Chordiant in 2010. (Here’s the collective view of Forrester on that acquisition) which gave them some strong CRM functionality (marketing automation, multi-channel contact centers); some vertical power (insurance) and some street cred in CRM. They saw this, at least in the eyes of Forrester as a way of bolstering their capability around customer experience. I would agree and that’s what makes them interesting.  Customer experience is the right brained polar opposite twin of the highly left-brained process centric thinking that dominated their past. They weren’t reducing their power in the process world.  But they began to see that processes weren’t agnostic. In fact, though I can’t say this is their view, more mine, the best processes are those that are impacted by customers and that impact them. Hardly agnostic.

Much of this 2010 turnabout was driven by the communications revolution that drove social media’s ascension to business thinking and Social CRM’s morphing of CRM into its new format.  The channels that were not easily parsed to allow processes to automate them, were big and unruly.  To the vast credit of Pegasystems, they got it – and they acted on it – and have been working with their increasingly  flagship product – PegaCRM to make it something that not only handled the more standard and somewhat routine operational processes and capabilities of “classic CRM” but also could begin to tame the more wooly, crazy unstructured conversations out there on the social web, and interactions that were necessary between customer and company.

So, why does that make them a Watchlist winner in 2013?

For one, because no one else is doing that at the level of complexity that Pega is.  What the hell does that mean, you might ask? Or might not. Well if you do, it means that one of the hallmarks of all good process-centric CRM companies, typically focused on customer service to start, is their ability to “keep the ordinary, ordinary.” That means being able to handle the 90% of queries that are not complaints in an easy, repeatable and hopefully automated fashion, regardless of the channel of communication

Complexity gets added with the rise of social channels but the concept remains the same. What makes Pega a bit different is that they are also trying to “make the extraordinary, ordinary” too. Meaning that they can anticipate the queries or even the complaints and deal with them via the use of predictive analytics  so the next best action is suggested, not just reactively but proactively. 

Are they fully there yet? No, but they have made progress and it’s a technology that even with gaps elsewhere puts them on the hot side of an impact heat map – to create a very clumsy metaphor.

They are also expanding their bet on CRM and rather than just resting on their serious chops in the customer service arena, are moving into sales and marketing, with available applications.  They are able to use their best technologies and knowledge of process to allow them to spread both broad and deep.

For example, in the deep category, they rely on their technology to provide some strong market differentiators. In customer service, they have dynamic case management – which is a near real time highly unified action-focused enablement for solving complex service cases.  In both marketing and sales, they use their process knowledge and predictive capabilities to support a well-documented next best action” facility – a way of determining what action to take with a campaign (marketing) or with an opportunity (sales). 

But they also go long with deep process and workflow knowledge for multiple vertical industries – including insurance, financial services, telcos, and healthcare among others. SAP probably has deeper vertical process maps (and more) but the quality of Pega's process maps and G2 about the specific industries they cover is laudable.

But they aren’t quite where they can be yet either. They are into Year 3 of their revival of the dead CRM and there is a lot to do around their messaging and thought leadership, despite their active participation in the industry, thanks to the leadership of Steve Kraus– a really good "acquisition" who was former GM at KANA.

Keep in mind, they are placing some pretty big bets too. Maybe not at the level of Microsoft and Windows 8, but nonetheless, big enough. They are investing in areas they don’t have a proven expertise – sales and marketing – which means they need to prove it with the mindshare and market share.

Don’t get me wrong. They have a strong sales product to go with their customer service product. (I haven’t seen the marketing product yet so I can’t comment on it.). But that isn’t enough to make them competitive to the more established players there. In addition, they have been a BPM company and to make inroads even deeper than they have in the CRM world, they have to overcome their public image – engineers who love process more than they love humanity – in a manner of speaking. Totally untrue, but it’s a public image that lingers. 

Last year, they won in Customer Service; this year they win in the more eclectic side – process-centric CRM along with BPMonline.  I’m not ready to put them in the suite category like an Infor, let’s say, but they do deserve something for their efforts beyond customer service. So let’s see what they have to do to make an uber-impact in 2013, rather than just an impact.

Tell me a story - They are claiming a true “CRMish” expansion, meaning process based CRM for customer service, and now marketing and sales.  They need to tell a much better tale, rather than trumpet the sales and marketing features they offer.  What makes this company powerful is what rests underneath the sales, marketing, and customer service capabilities – not the features and functions they offer per se which are I would say more than standard but less than unique. Tell a CRM story that emphasizes the true strengths – the keeping of the ordinary ordinary via their incredible process, rules engines and workflow creation tools.  But it’s a story to be told, not a set of products to be promoted.Tell me a story #2 – I hate to be too blunt here, but they need to get past a strong perception that they are a left-brained, very stiff engineering company. To their credit, they are 60% of the way there already in part due to the personable teams that run their CRM application.  So, I can personally attest that they aren’t what they are perceived to be.  But acting in two areas can make this perception a relic. First, their collateral.  They need to get past the currently constituted old school product marketing in their literature - meaning feature/function/feature/function/blah/blah/boring/not truly useful. Rich media, telling stories, role-based focus; outcome based discussion. That will work.  Second, PegaWorld this year can be a real marker, given the importance of annual user conferences for the subsequent public perception of the company holding it. Let’s see Pega wherever they are talk about outcomes, have a good time, show a sense of humor, provide CMO talk rather than CTO or CIO talk – or in addition to that. Make it more about  the genomic process than the business process.   Give more than lip service to customer experience – Pega has had a somewhat awkward, almost adolescent relationship with customer experience – making links to process and “great customer experience” but the depth provided tends to be at the level of a sentence or two. This is a put up or shut up time for that one.  From the technological standpoint they are providing powerful tools to support a company’s efforts to enhance and support great customer experiences – Next Best Action as a capability; predictive analytics as a component.  But now they need the mind share here and make it more than lip service. I’m doing something with them that might help that (they are clients) but it isn’t enough.  They have to work through a program and make a conscious, bold effort to give substance to the link to who they are and substantive outcomes leading to great customer experiences.

There’s a lot here because, of the companies in this group, Pegasystems is the one that has pivoted the most in the last several years and is the largest and most established of the lot. But they are also resource rich, smart, and have solid products. They are also actually interested in making this work both in market share and mind share. I bet they do. I know they'll take the next best action in 2013.

Analytics, especially predictive analytics, is hot. Superheated, turbocharged, jet engine…hot.  There is nothing better than being able to reasonably forecast the behavior of a customer down to the individual’s likely next actions.  But equally as good is the ability to capture a customer’s moods and emotional responses to a brand or an action and then be able to ascertain the need to respond and the how to respond in conjunction with the value to the business of that interaction. 

By no means has this reached an exact science, but more and more we are seeing companies who are using the power of predictive analytics (Oracle, SAP, Pegasystems, Lattice Engines to name a few) and companies that are doing sentiment analysis that is tied to business rules and workflows so that the analysis becomes actionable quickly.

This is the world that our Analytics winner this year, Clarabridge lives in. They don't do predictive, but damn it, they do the other stuff so really well.  Stay attuned to this sector. Its heat will burn blue-white for the next several years (he said smiling and confidently.).

Clarabridge is just simply a winner. When I was doing my scoring, there was no doubt about the outcome after I was about halfway through (though they hadn’t achieved the threshold yet.). I know this company.  They do some brilliant things – and arguably some of those things better than anyone else.

Yet, they could do even more than they are.  Greater scope, reach, more customers, a power player – all within reach. 

They are a bit enigmatic. Have you ever run across those people who you think you know and they make you think you know them, but when you sit down and think about it, you don’t really? You know only what they will tell you about themselves – and that’s just enough to be satisfied but not enough to really KNOW them?

That’s Clarabridge. So some of what I write here is impressionistic. But here’s what I do know of them and what I think is the power of this excellent company.

They have what might be one of the most powerful analytics platforms in any venue. Note I didn’t say products, though they have excellent products.  Their power rests with their platform.  It’s what you would expect – an excellent natural language processing (NLP) engine and dozens of connectors that allow it to integrate to systems of record or mine sources. So, for example, they integrate with salesforce.com and the Radian6 Insights Platform (they are an announced partner) and on the other hand they use the full Twitter firehose via GNIP. Plus they have a highly flexible and customizable API to build whatever connectors are needed for data sources or operational systems.  It’s also what you wouldn’t expect. They have an 11 point sentiment scale that just kicks the crap out of the idea of a five point (positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative, and negative) sentiment scale. It allows you to distinguish between irritated, furious and mildly peeved if that’s the route you want to take.They have a solid partnership strategy with over 40 partnerships in the technology and consulting side (the list that the link brings you to is not complete). They are highly regarded by those partners. In a recent conversation with one of their most important partners, I found out how highly regarded they are. They focus tightly around feedback and customer experience from the actual product configuration to the messaging they use.  They don’t really waver much on that and have been in that area more or less consistently for several years (at least the feedback part). They have a good management team headed up by the highly intelligent Sid Banerjee who is not only a good operational CEO but an excellent spokesperson for the company.Their customers love their results. I really don’t have to say that much more on that. Its what I hear a lot from their customers.

All of which is good, but they aren’t as ubiquitous a presence as they could be because in certain areas they move slowly, or little.  If they decide to deal with the lacks they have – because I wouldn’t classify them as “problems” they should be able to accelerate to the point that prospects on the one hand and people like me on the other, will say, “Clarabridge? Oh yeah, I know them really well.” 

AR/PR major escalation – In the last few years, they have become lackluster when it comes to their AR/PR program. While they, like everyone else, cultivate some of the institutional analysts. After some informal checking around I find little or no evidence of even a standardized briefing of the analysts or influencers.  Look, while I recognize that AR/IR/PR is an unfortunate circumstance – meaning products/services should just sell on merit, that’s not realistic and the AR/IR stuff has to be done – because influencers influence buyers and public opinion which matters to a company. Clarabridge, which does something very important to businesses but is not easy to wrap heads around at the same time, is at the point in their existence where they need a regularized AR/IR program – not just an occasional outreach or engagement here or there with one or two. Time to get serious with this.Deal with ongoing setup complexity – I applaud their product expansion – Collaborate and Engage add a lot to their self-designated CEM suite. But they also need to deal with a problem that I keep getting feedback on which is that the results that Clarabridge gets are mind-blowing but that setup, especially of feeds, is a real bitch.  That means that they need to once and for all crack the setup bottleneck – because it could bite them hard at some point. Make the investment in time and money to improve the set up.  While I’m guessing it will always take professional services to set up this powerful but complex product, the difficulties of set up and maintenance (meaning altering the setup at some point during the use of the products) remains an issue – less so than it used to – but still an issue.  Or, prove me wrong.Case studies built around 11 point sentiment benefits – Because they have a genuinely valuable differentiator – 11 point sentiment – they need to put that out there – not as  feature lost in some technical matrix – but as a series of outcomes. That means colorful tales of different levels of emotion. How did the difference between irritated and livid lead to a beneficial measured efficiency with the customer service team?  Eleven point sentiment is a granular sentiment scale. Tell me the stories with the outcomes that were measurably beneficial to the company that utilized this.  Tell it in emotional terms and with the results. The ambiance matters to the right brain; the measurement to the left. Be whole brained.Overhaul their website - I don't think I have to make a case for the value of a good website. The social world didn't eliminate the need to have a site that reflects the dynamism of a company and its products and services. Clarabridge's site just doesn't do that. It is product feature focused - there's nothing that speaks to line of business people in any serious way;  its got ONE named case study - ONE.;very light on thought leadership; story telling for a company that is focused on sentiment analysis - is almost non-existent. Its nowhere near representative of the quality of this company. I could go on but I won't. I'll make the point again. An overhaul is in order.

Clarabridge is going to have an impact and be part of the buzz in 2013. No doubt. But rather than a low-zzzzzzing impact it needs to be at the level of earsplitting. I’ll be furious…no, mad….no, irritated…no, kind of peeved if they don’t make it that this year. I'll let their outstanding platform figure out which I am if they don't it.  But do the above, take a little chance, invest and the journey won’t be sentimental – it will rock. I'll be happy, no...ecstatic; no...wait...joyous. Hey, they actually CAN figure that out. No matter what, they win in 2013. But I think they can go all the way.

That’s it: next up the social guys – Attensity, Get Satisfaction, Gigya, Jive, Lithium and Nimble.

Topics: Enterprise Software, Emerging Tech, Tech Industry, Social Enterprise

In addition to being the author of the best-selling "CRM at the Speed of Light: Social CRM Strategies, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers," Paul Greenberg is President of The 56 Group, LLC.

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