posted by Development
Get the sale. Retain that client. Improve the bottom line. Generate those leads.
The goals and demands of business, no matter if you are B2C or B2B, are ever-growing and expanding. The ability to produce more with less seems to be a requirement of employment these days. If you aren’t that terribly fond of putting in 15 hour work days, this may be an interesting read for you.
If you are looking to improve your business and your employees’ lives, think about improving your marketing stack.
We wrote a previous post on this subject a few months back, but wanted to revisit just how simple it can be, even if it seems a bit overwhelming at first. Every business, no matter the size or amount of technically trained staff, should have systems that empower and enable their employees and organize their customer data and marketing efforts.
We have identified five key components of a typical marketing stack:
- A customer relationship management (CRM) platform
- A scalable content management system (CMS) for your Web presence(s)
- An email marketing platform
- A social monitoring and execution platform
- A search optimization platform
Also, if you sell directly online, you will want to include your ecommerce platform as a component to link into.
Technical Example:
We wanted to show in more detail how easily you can connect your marketing stack components.
For this example, we will highlight a typical online customer lead generation flow:
- Customer visits website
- Customer fills out form
- Customer information sent to sales or lead generator via email
- Customer information sent to CRM
- Customer information sent to email platform
We will also stipulate the following technologies and platforms:
- Website is built upon a CMS (our TACC) using ASP.NET
- CRM will be Salesforce
- Email platform will be ExactTarget
For the website customer form, we will just aim to capture the bare minimums for this; name, email and phone number:
The subsequent coding of the integration with Salesforce will be driven by the application programming interfaces (APIs) available to us, which we include a link to
here. The process involves having appropriate credentials (username, password, token), plus an appropriate WSDL (Web service definition language…AKA blueprint) for the Web services open for your specific account. We have removed the majority of code for brevity:
Looking forward in the flow, once we have successfully sent the information to the CRM, we will want to alert the appropriate sales staff with a quick notification. This will come in the form of an email.
With Salesforce and ExactTarget, you have different options of integration, so you don’t have to absolutely rely on the sending of duplicate data to both systems at the same system point. You could leverage the existing integration hooks with Salesforce that ExactTarget lays out
here.
Finally, we will notify our team members of the new lead:
That is how simple it really is to bolster a critical decision and lead generation point for you and your business. And the best news…it isn’t a big investment to get this going!
In fact, if you simply want a Web form for Salesforce, you don’t need to look very far for
a quick embed code for less-advanced scenarios.
If you have an idea of how you may want to connect your platforms or if you would like to see more examples, let us know!
About the author::
Bruce Williams loves a good database schema and watching his team astonish clients with new JQuery tricks. He is the
Data team manager at thunder::tech during the day (and occasionally at night). When he isn’t programming, he and his wife are pulling their kids through the neighborhood in their favorite wagon.
TAGS:
thundertech, Data, web, Development, marketing, stack, digital, code, salesforce, exacttarget, exact target, CRM, CMS, link, linking, marketing stack
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