The News

On May 10, 2022, Zoho released Zoho Marketing Plus, its suite of marketing solutions.

You can read the complete press release here.

The suite combines multiple Zoho applications including Campaigns, Social, Webinar, Analytics, Marketing Automation, Workdrive, PageSense, Survey, and Backstage. It shall provide digital marketers with a unified platform of integrated capabilities that help them achieve their objectives more easily through a combination of simplification, integration and embedded collaboration capabilities.

Zoho Marketing Plus brings together marketing activities throughout the whole campaign life cycle from ideation through creation, execution to measurement. This allows to manage campaigns and provides the whole marketing organization with a single shared view of information.

"Consumers and digital marketing continue to evolve at warp-speed, and marketers are struggling to keep up. It's becoming increasingly difficult to properly manage multiple campaigns, channels, customer profiles, data, and ROI," said Mani Vembu, Chief Operating Officer at Zoho. "The complexity of data and personalization at-scale only raises pressure onmarketers and CMOs to deliver effective campaigns and revenue. By eliminating redundancies and confusion arising from multiple siloed solutions, Zoho Marketing Plus maximizes productivity and teamwork, allowing marketers to stay nimble and collaborative amid evolving customer needs. When marketers aren't bogged down by operations, they can deliver creativecampaigns that promote meaningful relationships between the brand and customers."

With Zoho Marketing Plus, Zoho addresses mid-market companies with around 250 to 1,000 employees and a structured marketing organization with a progressively thinking leadership.

Early customers show themselves impressed with the breadth of the functionality as well as the support for the end-to-end support that is offered by the platform. Says Saru Saadeh, CEO of Iron Roots Inc. "Everything at Iron Roots starts with the data. But there's a huge hole in the market, where channel solutions are siloed. Zoho marketing platform gives us a comprehensive view of our omnichannel marketing campaigns, allowing touchpoint cadence and the ability to visualize our entire strategy in one place. From this unified platform, we can install heat-maps, see the traffic to our landing and product pages, use PageSense to identify the average fold, engagement, and then extract incredibly valuable data from on-page experiences, which then fuels our subsequent marketing activities. In a nutshell, Zoho's new marketing platform solves so many problems that are neglected by most marketing operations and marketing tools."

The Bigger Picture

The marketing landscape is as cluttered as never before with nearly ten thousand solutions that address different aspects of marketers’ daily challenges. At the same time, there is a growing appetite for platforms or at least integrated solutions that do not only solve a particular challenge created by a marketer’s daily work but a wider range of issues. This also in combination with other parts of the enterprise.

For marketers it is of crucial importance to be able to work with a single, consistent set of (customer) master data to be able to meaningfully engage customers with relevant conversations – or at least content.

An additional challenge that not only marketing departments face, are processes that go across different, unconnected systems and, caused by this, an inability to efficiently plan, set up and follow through campaigns.

A third big challenge for marketing teams is attribution, in a more and more data/number driven world. What is the return of a particular campaign, or a segment of a campaign?

Lastly, IT departments are getting more and more overwhelmed with the need to integrate and maintain an ever-increasing set of applications and systems. Even in times of SaaS and cloud solutions, this causes a workload and expenses that then are missing for innovation. The IT department stays too busy just “keeping the lights on”. It is not uncommon that around 80 percent of an IT budget is used for maintenance. And this is a quite unhealthy quota.

My PoV and Analysis

With Zoho Marketing Plus, Zoho sets a visible mark in the highly contested market of marketing solutions. The Martechmap meanwhile counts nearly ten thousand solutions.

Zoho Marketing Plus sits firmly on the ground of supporting end-to-end processes over the functional depth that some specialists can offer for their niche. Still, the solution offers sufficient depth and breadth that it can deliver value fast. It therefore addresses a good number of the challenges mentioned above.

Zoho addresses mid-market companies with around 250 to 1,000 employees and a structured marketing organization with a progressively thinking leadership. This is also fitting the company’s sweet spot but does not mean that smaller or larger organizations are out of scope.

Zoho Marketing Plus is a young solution that targets at distinguishing itself in two ways. Firstly, it supports the complete marketing process, starting with the budgeting. Secondly, it makes it as simple as possible for the different stakeholders and roles to accomplish their objectives. Being based upon and integrating existing Zoho products that mainly complement each other, Zoho Marketing Plus offers quite strong collaboration, campaign management and marketing automation functionality, including good analytics capabilities. This is partly at the expense of the UI not being fully harmonized. Still, the offered user interface is slick and easy to handle.

With all the integrations offered and an attractive price point, Zoho Marketing Plus is a solution to look at if the own company looks for an end-to-end digital marketing solution that not only integrates well into Zoho, but also other products.

If you are interested in more, you can download and read my complete report about Zoho Marketing Plus from this page.

Since February or March of Anno Domini 2020, the Corona pandemic is making the headlines and is driving digital transformation, or at least the digitalization of businesses.

For sure, this crisis has forced and is continuing to force many a company into enabling its employees to work remotely. This has accelerated an already ongoing fundamental change of the way people work.

It has also had an impact on work culture.

People can no more just drop by a colleague to ask a question, but need to pick up a phone. Meetings do not happen in the meeting room around the corner anymore but by utilizing technology – virtual meeting rooms – voice and video. Salespeople can no more travel to their customers for face-to-face meetings. Instead they were forced to adopt and master virtual meetings, something they didn’t believe they could possibly do in 2019. It seemed far too alien.

Many of us have learned that this change is rather an opportunity than a threat. We needed to, and did adapt, on a business- and a personal level. In doing so, we realized that many things that we thought of “will never work” actually work quite well.

This adaption happened and happens in three distinct steps. We first used any available technology, just to keep the lights on. Then we started to put processes around them to become more effective and now we are looking at improving efficiencies. These efficiencies, that we look for, will be achieved by the harmonization and reduction of the number of the used tools and their deep integration into each other and essential business systems.

And make no error, the change we have done will stick to quite an extent as a recent Stanford study, that surveyed 15,000 Americans, found. The survey evidence suggests, that more than twenty percent of all full work days will be supplied from home or distributed offices even after the pandemic ends.

This jibes with results of the fourth editions of the Salesforce State of Service and State of the Connected Customer surveys. According to the State of the Connected Customer report, the phone is customers’ second-most preferred communication channel (up from place three in 2019).  According to the State of Service report, It is also the communication channel that is most widely supported by service organizations.

In addition, the report finds that “agents also prefer the phone for complex issues that require two-way conversation, and don’t see the phone being replaced any time soon. However, how agents answer and process phone calls is evolving. The majority of service agents – aside from those on underperforming teams – are more likely to handle voice calls through a computer than a desk phone.”

Figure 1: Service Organizations that report using the following channels; source Salesforce State of Service 4th edition

What is also notable is the strong growth of online chat, messenger apps, and video support between 2018 and 2020.

By extension, the same preferences apply to colleagues cooperating on any given topic. They, too, need and want to communicate using phone, chat, or video.

In addition, they want to use this without hassle, anytime, from everywhere, and with any device.

So, there is certainly a necessity for businesses to enable their workforce for efficient digital communication. This can be done using standalone specialized tools, integrated and embedded tools, up to and until full communications suites like Slack or Microsoft Teams, which are mainly run standalone and in parallel to business systems.

From an efficiency and user experience point of view, integration is key. Employees need to be able to stay within the frame of the business applications they use rather than switching between applications and changing contexts. The communication tool needs to share data and information that is created directly with the business applications it is integrated into. Only then is the tool of maximum help for the people and hence gets best acceptance.

From an IT point of view, installation and configuration must be smooth and simple, done without a major project or cost, which means that they need to be built into the business application, rather than attached to it.

This is where vendors like e.g. Ringcentral, Aircall or Fastcall come into the picture. Searching for CTI on Salesforce AppExchange reveals many options. These vendors offer the tools that extend Salesforce to enable CTI. The differences between the former two and Fastcall are that Fastcall is specialized on, built exclusively for one vendor – Salesforce – and made part of the Salesforce code stack, whereas the others are not. Hence Fastcall is best suited to fulfil the needs of Salesforce users, including a seamless UX.

And for the geeks amongst us: without API calls, which reduces the complexity of the IT landscape and therefore increases the RoI.

Summarizing, if business leaders are looking out for a strong, integrated toolset for internal as well as external communication to gain the efficiencies they want, they need to look out for the following traits offered by the software:

• First and foremost: The software needs to do the job of making life for the employees easier
• It needs to be embedded into the host software, and not run side by side
• Ideally, the vendor is specialized on the software stack that your employees use and the software uses the same UI as the host software
• The software needs to share information and data with the host software and write into the same database
• The vendor needs to offer good support and regular, frequent updates to the software

That’s it. This catalogue will point you into the right direction for finding a well-integrated solution for your CTI needs.

The News

Today various media outlets broke the news that Salesforce is in advanced talks with Slack Technologies about a possible acquisition. The news had two effects: Slack stock went up nearly 40 per cent during trading hours while Salesforce stock loses out by 5 percent, which basically says that Salesforce investors are not so convinced about this acquisition being a good thing, whereas Slack investors clearly are.

Slack and Salesforce share an integration, which is listed on appexchange since 2019.

There have been speculations on Slack being a good target for Salesforce that date back till August 2016, basically ever since the integration between Salesforce and Slack got announced.

The Bigger Picture

There are several aspects to this news.

Salesforce already has Chatter, a tool that often gets negative feedback. The company also owns Quip, which is essentially a solution for the collaborative creation of documents and spreadsheets.

And Salesforce has created work.com, as a solution to increase business resiliency and to improve collaborative work.

On a larger scale, and accelerated by the Covid crisis, the need for fast and efficient communication and collaboration of distributed work forces and their customers, using various means of communication is there. Actually, it has been there for quite some time, as the emergence of solutions from Slack to Teams, Zoom, etc. proves. E-mail is still very important, but only a part of this communication, which includes near instant chat, voice and video communications as well as collaborative work on documents – inside and outside an organization.

Another part is, that this communication needs to be tied to business processes and enable three things: Better outcomes by connecting all documents and communications to business processes and business objects, the ability to use this additional data to feed models that enable better predictions and/or actions and a reduction of efforts for the involved people, e.g. when it comes to finding information.

Businesses have a challenge here and are looking for solutions to fix it, and fast. This can be seen by the revenues of Zoom nearly quadrupling between Q2/19 and Q2/20 or the usage of Microsoft Teams skyrocketing from 13 million daily active users in July 2019 to 75 million daily active users in April 2020. At the same time Slack grew its paying customers between February and July 2020 by more than 20 percent, too.

Because of this, vendors of CRM solutions have increasingly been strengthening their built-in collaboration and productivity suites or are forming partnerships with companies in this space.

My Analysis and PoV

My first reaction was: Wow!

Slack, coming out of the developer community, has been an early player in the communications tools space. It does not only allow chat, voice and video communication for (smaller) groups but also allows embedding of bots as well as workflows. The company is clearly loved by small companies and startups and has been able to get a substantial number of customers.

As the numbers above show, Slack has not been able to capitalize on the Covid crisis and grow as fast as the competition. Further, Slack has not yet become a profitable business and also has a negative cash flow. Especially Microsoft putting an increased focus on Teams, put Slack, as well as Zoom, under significant pressure, as there is a considerable benefit to use MS Teams in an environment that already uses MS Office. Given that, I think that Slack is in a tight position. I dare saying that Slack on its own would not have been viable for much longer.

When it comes to Salesforce, Slack makes for a terrific addition to its portfolio for various reasons.

Slack enables Salesforce to significantly strengthen its productivity/collaboration suite, bringing it to a level that is no more far behind Microsoft. Productivity/collaboration is one of the four core pillars for a platform player. While Salesforce already has Chatter, this tool only works within a company and does also not allow for voice or video communication.

Neither Oracle nor SAP have a similar technology, although Oracle has its Beehive product that offers web and audio conferencing, plus a strategic partnership with Zoom, which it increasingly embeds into its CX suite. SAP has a strategic partnership with Microsoft and deployed MS Teams throughout its organization.

Slack also comes with far more than 100,000 customers and an expected revenue of in excess of $860 million in FY 2021, which would nicely add to Salesforce’s platform revenues, which in Q2 of FY21 rose to $1.2 bn.

In addition, the customers that Slack brings, are predominantly SMB businesses. In FY 20, less than 900 of 110,000 paying customers spent more than $100,000 for using Slacks services. This opens up a huge opportunity for Salesforce to tap into the SMB CRM market, which is a market that all big players are trying to scale down into. It remains to be seen in how far especially the smaller Slack customers accept a Salesforce that is seen as an enterprise player, as a partner.

In conclusion: For Salesforce, acquiring Slack makes perfect sense. It enriches the platform and therefore the Salesforce CX play. It is at least a jab against Microsoft and ringfences the Salesforce portfolio in the Clash of Titans with Oracle and SAP.

The News

Fastcall, a renowned developer of CTI solutions that are exclusively dedicated to Salesforce, recently announced the release of its Intercall solution. Intercall helps teams to communicate and interact internally from within Salesforce. The app allows phone and video communication. Using Intercall, an employee can call coworkers via their Salesforce user profile instead of using a particular phone number, making it unnecessary to know the current location of the coworker or to perform repeat calls due to unavailability.

It is a first-of-its-kind Salesforce app and offers video and screen sharing within an integrated Salesforce phone application by leveraging Salesforce and Twilio.

Intercall is the latest addition to Fastcall’s suite of applications and is designed to enhance work-from-home productivity for Salesforce users.

Phone applications found in the Salesforce AppExchange today, including Fastcall’s namesake application, enable companies to increase productivity by empowering sales and service team members to communicate quickly and effectively with clients and prospects via phone. Intercall allows companies to streamline their internal telephone and video conversations whether within or between departments, therefore complementing Fastcall’s capabilities.

Main benefits of Intercall include:

• Screen sharing and video conferencing in virtual meetings while working within Salesforce instead of an external application. Intercall also creates Salesforce activities for every Intercall call.
• Replacement of phone directories that are more often than not outdated while enabling a centralized phone directory with data that is already in Salesforce.
• Calling coworkers via multiple endpoints at the same time with ringing the softphone, mobile phone, and desk phone all at the same time, Intercall prevents wasting time by dialing multiple numbers until you connect to a teammate and the hassle of leaving, listening to, and deleting numerous voicemails.
• Building transparency and accountability via automated call logging within Salesforce. Just like an external dialer automatically records external communications with customers in Salesforce, Intercall enables greater accountability, tracking, and transparency in the work-at-home environment and empowers managers to get a comprehensive view of team interactions and collaboration.
• Call recording for future reference, training or to share directly with team members for easy information sharing.
• Easy and efficient one-click information distribution of voicemail messages to team members or the whole company via voicemail drop.

Richard Rosen, CEO of Fastcall says “Success doesn’t depend solely on interactions with clients. A business is only as strong as how its teammates interact with each other. Intercall makes it easier for colleagues to collaborate and communicate. Imagine a work environment where you could reach a teammate on the very first try, without having to dial their office and mobile phone, with the click of one button. I am excited about the efficiencies Intercall creates and what we have planned. Intercall transparently extends the range of products that are offered by Fastcall by offering an intra team facility in addition to the outbound and inbound services that are already available”.

The Bigger Picture

With growing office campuses and team members working more and more from home it becomes increasingly important to provide employees with an easy and efficient way to collaborate with each other and to communicate and share information with their customers. 

Businesses are looking for solutions that fix their problem fast. This can be seen by the revenues of Zoom nearly quadrupling or the usage of Microsoft Teams skyrocketing from 13 million daily active users in July 2019 to 75 million daily active users in April 2020. At the same time Slack grew its paying customers between February and July 2020 by more than 20 percent, too.

Because of this, vendors of CRM solutions have increasingly been strengthening their built-in collaboration suites or forming partnerships with these companies or specialists like Fastcall, which usually is the faster way of achieving this objective.

My Analysis and PoV

The Corona crisis has increased the demand for online meeting solutions, which has caused a growth spurt for companies like Zoom, Webex and co, but also for collaboration services like Slack or Microsoft Teams, or telephony solutions like simplii that integrate with various applications.

With the exception of Microsoft Teams, none of these solutions are services that are natively embedded into business applications, but are either standalone or integrated via APIs. At minimum, this causes some additional integration labor and often leads to double maintenance of valuable information, with the corresponding risk of information loss or ambiguity and a reduction of user satisfaction. In addition, the user interface of the collaboration solution normally differs, which further deteriorates the user experience as the communication software does not follow the UI style guidelines of the surrounding software.

Then there are a few solutions that are built directly into the application stack of the solution that hosts them. They specialize in optimally supporting this single platform and are built directly into the application stack of the solution that hosts them. One example for these is service providers is Fastcall.

Most businesses are already sold on one CRM solution or another, or have even committed to a platform. Especially for these businesses, solutions that integrate directly with them are the first consideration.

In the case of a business committed to using Salesforce, it should have a deep and hard look at what is available via AppExchange. 

Intercall certainly fits the bill here; although it is still a young product and might miss some sought-after features, like virtual backgrounds, or scrapbooks etc., the combination of features is already giving considerable value to corporate users. 

The News

• Mail for business e-mail
• Cliq, as a messaging system
• Meeting for online conferencing
• Connect, a social intranet solution
• Writer for word processing
• Show for collaborative presenting
• Sheet for spreadsheets
• Workdrive as the cloud based document management system
• ShowTime for online training and/or webinars.

The Bigger Picture

My Analysis and PoV

• First of all: They must not be part of the problem.
• They need a relentless focus on solving real business problems with technology.
• They need to deliver easy and simple to implement solutions to these business problems.

Don’t be a part of the problem

1. Normally, the cost comes before the value can get harvested. This was true in the old days of on premise software and is also true in a subscription economy. The fee is to be paid. And consulting, e.g. the implementation of business software, is usually paid by the hour.

2. Especially after a crisis the clients may not be able to invest enough to be able to get significant value out of the investment. This even happens at the best of times. How many projects needed to get stripped down so much that software users feel the urge to circumvent the newly implemented processes? It happens all the time.

Focus on solving real business problems

Deliver easy and simple to implement solutions to real business problems

Call to Action

Sharing Economy

• Airbnb is apparently the biggest hotel chain. But it does now own a single hotel, rather than a bed
• Uber, the biggest taxi corporation. It does not own a single taxi

What Does This Mean For The Service Center?

1. Contain cost. This is achieved by more automation, which in turn puts more strain on the employees
2. Employ and retain a highly skilled set of service agents, which additionally have matching character traits, which drives cost. Skilled people tend to be more expensive than unskilled ones, and moving a call center into a low-salary country helps only so much – if at all. Training comes at an expense as well. This will be somewhat augmented by reduced hiring cost