Cetrix Blog

Remember the days as a little kid, playing with the neighborhood kids imagining a future filled with robots, hover cars, and smart homes? Well, those childhood fantasies are here. Artificial intelligence is no longer the next best thing, it’s here, and it’s coming in hot. Automation has been changing the job market for centuries, and you may not even realize it. The cotton gin automated how cotton fibers and their seeds were separated back in the 1700s. Henry Ford automated the production of cars with his assembly line. Now, chatbots have automated how companies interact with their customers to resolve issues.

Statistics for CRM trends in 2019 show that more and more businesses already have a CRM in place and customisation is becoming more important to them.

Findings also indicate that businesses are willing to change their CRM for one that is more suited to their industry needs. The CRM audience in general has become more tech-savvy, leading to a more well informed audience who know what they want and expect technological advances in the systems they use.

We are also ushering in the fourth industrial revolution, or 4IR, and this has it's own challenges and rewards. How we react to the changes can have a drastic impact on both commerce and society.

Key takeaways

• As a lead generation tool, user intent is even more powerful than predictive prospecting alone. Intent data, paired with historical data from predictable prospecting, gives B2B marketers a clear picture of their ideal customer and informs effective marketing practices, which can dramatically increase ROI.
• Qualified user intent data—built from first- and third-party data sources—plays a critical role in determining user intent. With the right data and real-time activity monitoring, marketers can reliably predict a B2B user’s next action and then deliver targeted messages at just the right moment.
• Intent-based marketing programs can drive up ROI by enabling teams to prioritize leads, focus their efforts on the most profitable activities and develop custom campaigns that are more likely to convert to sales. By becoming more efficient and effective, marketing teams can realize positive impacts to ROI and the company’s bottom line.

Introduction

With user intent data, B2B marketers have a powerful tool for identifying ideal customers, influencing their buying journey and positively impacting the company’s ROI, pipeline growth and other key metrics. Similar to predictive analytics, intent-based marketing relies on user data to predict behavior. However, unlike predictable prospecting, intent-based marketing looks at a user’s current actions paired with historical actions, to determine the next likely behavior and then delivers marketing messages designed to influence the purchase decision at the moment a decision is being made.

Key takeaways:

• Salesforce Sales and Marketing Alignment produces greater insight into the entire customer experience, allowing the entire team—from marketing to customer service—to access and use valuable data to enhance their customer interactions.
• Salesforce’s Customer 360 View can be achieved through integration of a company’s existing technology stacks and all MarTech tools in the native environment.
• A Salesforce Predictive MarTech Alignment solution harmonizes systems so that data sharing and syncing is performed seamlessly and accurately across the entire technology stack.

Introduction

In the face of a digital transformation, one of the greatest challenges facing organizations is how to capture the full value of the data and technology available to them. To fully leverage new capabilities, companies need a holistic look at the customer journey—they need alignment between sales and marketing teams and integration between platforms and tools to share data and insights in an actionable way.

"As B2B marketers increasingly lead the entire buying experience, they must establish a foundation of insights and pivot from campaign to engagement design that encompasses both digital and human interactions. In 2019, we predict that vendors' response to this need will accelerate as their customers commit to full life-cycle marketing"

Forrester - Predictions 2019: B2B Marketing And Sales

Transforming Sales and Marketing Alignment from Linear to Multi-Dimensional and Holistic

Approaching 2019, integrating marketing and sales around common results has never been more critical. It has become a prerequisite to getting full value out of the new capabilities enabled by new technology and data-driven capabilities. Many B2B companies are reaching the point where they must accelerate their digital transformation to engage their customers impactfully. Empowering your teams with AI-powered tools is essential to delivering the level of customer experience today’s B2B buyers expect.