The AI Content Trap: Multiplying Mediocrity at Scale

Marketing has always suffered from a volume addiction; however, the advent of generative AI has turned a bad habit into a terminal condition. In the recent discussion with Volker Hildebrand in our CRMKonvo, we explored the uncomfortable reality that while AI has made marketing faster and cheaper, it has largely failed to make it better. The cynical view, which I happen to hold is that marketers frequently confuse the amount of content produced with the actual impact on the customer. We are now in an era where everyone has the same tools to flood the market with what in the words of Volker just “multiplies mediocrity” – or in mine creates instant mediocrity.

The core problem is that generative AI multiplies mediocrity by definition. It ingests existing data and spits out an average of what is already there; consequently, when every startup uses these tools to build their websites and social posts, they all end up saying the same. If you look at the CRM space today, the messaging is often nearly indistinguishable. Everyone promises "revolutionary" efficiency and "seamless" integration. As Volker noted, this is a trap for startups; if they cannot differentiate their story, they simply will not survive the noise.

TL;DR

If you want to watch the full CRMKonvo, please go ahead here (optimized for smartphones) or here (optimized for tablets/computers).

Else, be my guest and continue to read.

Or do both …

The Productivity Mirage

Vendors love to sell AI based on productivity gains. They promise you can save 20 percent of your time on content creation. But as we discussed, productivity is a hollow metric if you do not have a plan for that saved time. If you save 20 percent of your time just to produce 20 percent more "slop" or low-quality content, you have solved nothing, nor have you saved anything. You have actually made the problem worse by increasing the background noise for your customers. The real question for any marketing leader hence is how that saved time can be reinvested into understanding and resolving the customer's actual pain points.

Product Marketing: The Center of the Universe

Volker makes a compelling case for Product Marketing as the organizational "center of the universe". In a tech landscape where products are increasingly complex, the role that sits between engineering, sales, and the customer is the only one capable of maintaining narrative integrity. He argues that this role should report directly to the CEO. This is because the items product marketing owns: pricing, packaging, roadmap strategy, and win-rate optimization: are the literal lifeblood of the company.

If you bury this function under a traditional marketing silo, it becomes a "content factory" for sales decks and brochures. When it reports to the top, it becomes a strategic filter. In the age of AI, this filter is more necessary than ever. AI can draft a battle card, but it cannot understand the nuanced political reality of a specific enterprise buying center.

The "center of the universe" concept is about architectural integrity. Product Marketing must ensure that the technology actually solves a business problem rather than just serving as a shiny new feature to mention in a press release. If the messaging does not address what keeps the customer up at night, then all the generative AI in the world will not improve your win rate.

From Personalization to Individualization

We have been chasing "personalization" since the 1990s; Volker’s PhD thesis touched on it back in the 90s. Yet, most of what passes for personalization today is still just "segmented mass marketing". The real shift happens when we move toward true individualization. This could be the death of the "campaign" as we know it. After all, a campaign is, by its nature, a scattergun approach that is irrelevant to most people in the target group.

True individualization, powered by a combination of predictive and generative AI, means the customer journey is unique to the person. If Thomas visits a site, he sees the architectural whitepaper because the predictive engine knows he’s an analyst. If a procurement officer visits, they see the ROI calculator. This isn't just swapping a name in an email: it's a dynamic reconstruction of the entire engagement layer.

The Rise of the Agentic Customer

Perhaps the most significant strategic shift on the horizon is the rise of the "agentic" customer, the shift from B2B (Business to Business) to B2A (Business to Agent). We are rapidly approaching a time when the initial 80 percent of a purchase journey isn't conducted by a human researcher, but by an AI agent. When 80 percent of the interaction is bot-to-bot, traditional marketing fluff becomes useless. How do you market to a bot? You can't appeal to its emotions with a fancy hero image or a catchy slogan. You have to provide structured, high-quality, verifiable data that the agent can ingest. The bot cares about structured data, proof points, and reliability. This will force a radical return to "the fundamentals" Volker repeatedly mentioned: reliability, relevance, and proof points. Marketing leaders must prepare for a reality where their "customer" is no longer a person, but an agent looking for the most rigorous solution to a defined problem.

A Pragmatist’s Guide to Avoiding the AI Slop-Pocalypse

If you are an enterprise leader looking to "AI-enable" your customer experience, stop listening to the vendor slide decks for a moment. Take a breath. You might be about to make a very expensive mistake if you don’t follow three simple rules.

Here is the pragmatist's guide to not making that mistake.

Prioritize Predictive Over Generative

Currently, everyone is obsessed with the "Gen" in GenAI, but for CX, the "Predictive" side is often more valuable. Don’t just buy tools that just help you write faster. Instead, use AI to identify patterns: which customers are about to churn, which leads are actually ready to buy, and what content actually helps close deals. As Volker noted, tools that track actual consumption or customer journeys (did they stop at the pricing page?) provide infinitely better data than "clicks". Use AI to find the needle; don't just use it to make a bigger haystack.

Kill the "Auto-Pilot" Content

If your marketing team is using AI to generate content and pushes it directly to customers without a rigorous human-in-the-loop review, you are actively eroding your brand equity. AI-generated content is, by definition, an average of everything that already exists on the internet – it’s instant mediocrity. It cannot innovate; it can only regurgitate. Use AI for drafts, for brainstorming, and for reformatting (e.g., turning a long webinar into short clips, or a blog), but never for the final "voice". Authenticity is about to become your scarce resource.

The Training Gap is a Strategic Risk

You cannot simply buy a subscription for a tool and expect "transformation". The most common failure point is the "dump and run" approach. If you aren't investing in training your people on how to prompt, how to critique AI output, and how to integrate these tools into a unified RevOps workflow, you are just buying shelfware, or worse, something counter-productive. AI is a skill, not just a software category. If your team doesn't understand the "human-in-the-loop" necessity and how to work with AI, they will eventually be replaced by the very mediocrity they are producing.

The news

On April 3, 2025, Nimble introduced e-mail marketing capabilities including a template editor to power scalable campaigns and outreach. This new capability empowers businesses to send unlimited, HTML-powered, and trackable emails, enabling large-scale outreach. This can be used e.g., for newsletters, webinars, product announcements, seasonal promotions, and more — all from within the Nimble platform. According to the press release, Nimble Email Marketing allows users to send unlimited e-mails and to create campaigns using a drg-and-drop editor or pre-delivered templates. Jon Ferrara, founder and CEO of Nimble says that “With Nimble Email Marketing, our customers can now scale their outreach and strengthen relationships like never before.”

The e-mail marketing tool leverages existing features like group messaging and sequences. This enables teams to manage outreach, nurturing of leads and deepen relationships.  With the combination of these capabilities, Nimble offers the ability to send one-off e-mails to larger audiences as well as to automate a multi-step outreach.

Nimble’s e-mail marketing capabilities including the template editor are available as an add-on for Nimble users for the price of $15 per company per month. For this, each user gets an allocation of 1,000 e-mails per month with the option to purchase additional packages as required.

The bigger picture

There is a lot of scope for full-fledged CRM solutions targeting smaller businesses. Many of the existing solutions correlate smaller companies with lower complexity of requirements. Most of these solutions also cover only a part of the CRM processes, be it marketing, sales, or service, sometimes even being more niche, focusing on engagement only.

Although pronounced dead multiple times, e-mail is still one of the dominant communication channels, According to statista, there are around 240 million e-mails sent every minute at the end of 2023 by around 4.4 billion e-mail users with a projection of almost 5 billion e-mail users in 2027. For comparison, statista estimates about 3.5 billion messenger users in 2025.

Having said that, conversational interactions become more and more important. I attribute the growth of e-mail partly to it being used “messenger-style”.

With this goes along the other trend, which is increased automation, which is important not only for bigger companies but probably even more so for smaller ones that do not have the scale for manual work. Although this trend these days is highly connected to AI and AI agents,

My point of view and analysis

Nimble goes marketing.

For the longest time, Nimble focused on personal social outreach to facilitate relationship building and sales. A while ago, sequences and workflows got added to the mix, helping organizing work better.

However, the personal outreach of a salesperson, important and powerful as it is, has a significant challenge: scalability. Therefore, it is a very important step for Nimble to add scalable marketing and inbound capabilities.

Combining the new e-mail marketing feature with the existing sequences and workflows offers a very powerful package. It allows for the creation of multi-step campaigns and the triggering of a variety of internal actions based upon customer’s reactions to these campaigns. Combined with actually useful pre-delivered templates for e-mails, webforms, sequences and workflows, this helps users hit the ground running.

Still, the main challenge that I see is that this combination of powerful tools, sequences and workflows, can appear overwhelming to users. A business process potentially consists of a combination of all four elements: e-mail templates, web forms, workflows and sequences. Getting this right requires some thinking and planning beforehand although the tools invite to “just do it”. They are deceivingly simple. Nimble addresses this to some extent by offering very regular webinars, tutorial videos, documentation, even sessions with the team. However, I see some further scope here to keep things nimble for the users. One possibility could be an ability to create a process based upon prompts. After all, we are living in the age of generative AI and Nimble is built on the Azure stack that offers the tools necessary for it. A simpler possibility would be to offer pre-built business processes as templates.  

Pricing stays competitive with a company-wide, as opposed to seat-based, pricing for the e-mail marketing add-on that comes with a quota of 1,000 mails per user and month. If there is a need for more e-mails, then there is the option for a pay-as-you-go option for buying additional e-mail packages. This offers a blend of fixed price and consumption-based pricing with what I’d call speed bumps that gives an extent of budget control by making purchases a conscious act.

With the e-mail marketing feature, Nimble makes a foray into the world of marketing, thus getting closer to what “CRM” means. Doing this, Nimble focuses on the still most important communication channel. Having said that, messengers, chat and voice as a consequence of increased AI muscle, are becoming more important, and fast. This means that Nimble needs to extend its outreach, template, and form capabilities to support these channels soon. This is on the roadmap.

The e-mail marketing feature offers to create the all-important consolidated view on the customer for both, marketing and sales teams. What is more, it also offers the potential of simplifying the tech stack to an extent by removing the need for e-mail outreach tools.

All in all, a thumbs up to Jon Ferrara and the Nimble team for this new capability. While maintaining a focus on SMBs, Nimble grows up and potentially moves upmarket a bit, too.

Rest in peace, Social Media!

Yes, I know, you have been pronounced dead numerous times already, and that as early as 2011 by the Sillicon Valley Watcher, if not earlier. You lived on. Still, now you really need to admit that you are a dead thing walking.

You had a short, yet exhilarating life. And you, admittedly, developed astonishingly fast and far from your humble beginnings in the early 1970s and the first bulletin board systems around 1980. These have been the glory days of FidoNet, CompuServe, or AOL. SixDegrees.com followed later. The early noughts gave us a flurry of messaging systems, LinkedIn and XING, not to forget the infamous 4chan.

Anno domini 2004 brought us Facebook, 2005 brought us YouTube, Twitter followed in 2006. Google attempted repeatedly to get the hang of you (Orkut, Google+, anyone?) and still has some messaging services up and running.

All of these platforms have in common that they started up with the claim, some of them even with the objective, to make the Internet more social, to foster user generated content and to, ultimately, shift the power balance from corporations to their customers. Who does not remember the war cry “the customer is in control”. This referred to the idea that the customer could get more information that is not controlled by brands, so that they can be better informed, instead of being forced to rely on corporate broadcasts.

This should have been achieved by giving customers a voice that is as strong as the corporate one, albeit without the (marketing) budget behind. In line with the definition of social, it enabled the tendency “to form cooperative and interdependent relationships with others” – mainly other people.

Your power skyrocketed with the advent of the iPhone in 2007 and the subsequent flurry of smartphones and other mobile devices. With mobile devices, you have fully become a ubiquitous set of “forms of electronic communication through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)”.

At the same time, the advent of mobile devices was your undoing – the begin of your end.

You have been truly social, in the sense of the word, as you enabled the formation of cooperative and interdependent relationships with each other.

But only for a short period.

Why?

Because, of course, the potential of reach created a caste of broadcasters, who were not interested in interdependent relationships or even interaction. Instead they were interested in reach and in creating their own brand identity … i.e. in broadcasting. Naturally, this led to some voices being louder than others. Also naturally, this led to brands becoming interested in these persons. The social media influencer was born. Of course, brands learned to leverage your power as well.

Poly-directional discussions with many equal participants got reduced to a unidirectional model with creators – broadcasters – addressing their audience. This audience has largely turned into consumers. The bullhorn that we knew from analogue times had returned.

Even worse, the platforms that called themselves social media platforms collected increasingly more data to help their paying customers – the brands – to target their customers – the social media users – even better than any time before.

The users have ultimately become the product. The excessive “use” of this “product” has led to an increasingly restrictive regulation, as the power balance between users, platforms, and brands is strongly against the users.

RIP Social Media!

The Social Media resurrection

To quote Martin Luther King, Jr., “I have a dream”. This dream is that social media resurrect, but in a better way, based more on consent and respect.

To be clear, it is by no means illegitimate for both, the social media platform, as well as brands, to be have profit objectives. The same holds true for influencers.

The secret sauce lies in setting this up in a way that maintains the user as a participant on eye-to-eye level.

The way to achieve this is making the platform instead of its users the product. The goal is to create a community again, a community that connects users with users, users with brands, and brands with brands, while equally serving everyone’s interest.

Communication between brands and users strictly happens based on explicit interest and consent expressed by the users. Longer term interests, like hobbies, affiliations, etc., are either made part of their profile or explicitly expressed during an interaction.

If users wants to interact with a brand, they subscribe to its communications, if they don’t – they don’t, and the brand does not have the ability to reach these users. Imagine this like tuning in to a radio station, or, to use a better image, joining an interest based chat room. Basically, relationships are consciously initiated by the users who also decide how much to share with which brand. Relationships can be ended by both parties.

This was also the core idea behind my former venture EpiKonic (the website is still up as a blog platform), a mobile social media and engagement platform. Some of these ideas are also part of Ephanti, a startup that I am currently working with. There are more ideas behind Ephanti, of course.

For the users, the advantages of this model are obvious. Relationships are initiated and built by them. These relationships are based on their expectations, needs and, last but not least, trust.

But what is in it for brands? After all, this approach turns the traditional social media norms and conventions upside down.

Quite simply: Precise targeting! As the user initiates the conversation and explicitly shares immediate and longer term interests, nearly all guesswork is taken out of the equation. The brand can offer journeys that the user can choose from and solutions with minimum own effort. The better the journeys and solutions are, the more trustworthy the brand becomes. The more trustworthy the brand is, the more likely it is that the user stays in contact and hires more solutions that the brand has to offer. In essence, the user becomes loyal – not captive. Ideally, the brand is even able to turn the user into an advocate, then using their own influence to convince other users.

This way, the brand can extend its business by looking at its own success as being a consequence of its customers’ successes.

The same holds true for influencers.

The platform becomes the trusted matchmaker, but more in a broker model. It needs to be fully trusted by all parties. To earn and maintain this trust, it enables the users to interact with each other, and to find brands based on their needs and interests. In addition, the platform makes sure that there is no surreptitious advertising.

The business model sounds almost the same as the one of current platforms. The service delivery is different.

The technology is there. The need and the opportunity, too.

Long live social media.

One of the most overused buzzwords these days is „hyperpersonalization“. But, apart from the hyperbole around it – pun definitely intended – there are a lot of questions around this term, starting from, what is it? What is the purpose? Does it work at all? Does it have one or is it just a fad? After all, we know personalization since the early 80s, just that we called it 1:1 marketing then. Of course, we didn’t have the technology then to scale it, which is definitely something that we do have now.

On the other hand, improving technology is faced by an increased desire for privacy, which is at odds with what hyperpersonalization, personalization in general, stands for. 

This blog post is based upon a CXChangersTalk that I had with CRM industry analyst Marshall Lager, who observes and shapes the industry since 2004 in various dependent and independent roles, most notably atCRM Magazine, G2 and Informa.

In his words, hyperpersonalization “doesn’t go away and evolves constantly.”

And, of course, it doesn’t always work!

Marshall explains that one of the main reasons for this is that not every business has the right idea of what personalization, let alone hyperpersonalization, is. He continues that “To some, putting somebody's personal name in an e-mail or in an ad on Facebook is hyperpersonalization because it's going right to you. It's your name. Hey Thomas, look at this. Your name is on a t-shirt that I am holding up on this ad.

That's not hyper personalization, that's mass marketing, that just happens to have your name on it.”

But then, how does it work? Or rather: What is hyperpersonalization at all? The general consensus is that personalization becomes hyperpersonalization when behavioral, real-time data in conjunction with artificial intelligence are used on top of the more static and demographic information. 

Or, more succinctly in Marshall’s words, it is “fine-tuning search results and product offerings and deals to the preferences that a customer has already specified. Or that you have swept from their digital fingerprints, as they call them, around their activities, on the web: their search results, their buying history.” It is about the continuous observation of customer interactions and the fine-tuning of interactions, using their current context, based upon these observations.

To make this work, it needs a good process and technology foundation, notably a good CRM system that bases on or delivers – and here is another buzzword – a customer data platform and appropriate engagement engines. 

Once this platform is in place it is about getting the customer’s trust. Trust, that customers are not continuously tracked, their data is not just arbitrarily collected and, even worse, given to third parties; instead, they need to be sure that their privacy concerns are considered and respected. 

Companies “have to behave in a way that makes customers willing to share their information” with them.

There is an increasing desire for privacy and data sovereignty, at least in the older generations and there are more and more regulations that help enforcing customer privacy to some degree. In addition, the browser manufacturers are increasingly blocking third party cookies.

The cookie monster will be gone soon, and businesses will need to change the way they engage with customers. But how, as trust doesn’t just happen by accident? At best, trust is a credit given and it can be withdrawn quickly.

One surefire way to make customers not trust you is giving away the data that they shared with you.

The way trust works is incremental and by giving as much as asking. Marshall recommends to initially only ask for simple, basic information that people are willing to share, while in parallel offering value to them. Over time, based on the results of the previous interactions, and still in exchange for something else, that is of value for the customer, businesses can ask for more information. What people are willing to share easily, is something that Forrester Research evaluated in an admittedly no more brand-new study.

Figure 1: What customers are comfortable sharing; source Forrester Research

Still, this all needs to be in the context and with the consent of the customer. What brands usually offer is targeted messaging on customer preferred communication channels and deals, plus convenience, although they still need to get their priorities straight, as another Forrester Research Study shows. 

Figure 2: The value gap, what customers want; source Forrester Research

As Marshall maintains, it is important to make it easy for customers to interact with you and then to share data instead of making them chase you to do business with you. Know who your customers are, regardless of what channel they are using, and be sure that there is the relevant information at hand to help them solve their need, be it via self-service on the web, an app, a company representative, or any other communications channel. This requires two things: First, all data and information need to be brought to the relevant applications that are used by customers and company representatives, and second that whoever the customer talks to, not only has the information at hand but is also empowered to take decisions and act to help the customer.

Not all customer interactions have a direct financial result for the company. Initially, it is more about learning and identifying the interests and to make it easy to conversate the way they want to. Companies need to learn to not push too hard for the sale. In Marshall’s words, the relationship needs to “mature like wine instead of age like milk. The more you poke at your customers the more it sours. Continue the relationship, but don't overload it.” Or in other words, the business needs to earn the right to sell to the customer.

Kai Stübane of SAP recently laid out how an approach that bases on value exchange can work in a practical example with one of his customers.

So, what does hyperpersonalization boil down to?

Hyperpersonalization is the ability to meaningfully engage with customers on an individual level. It is not new as a concept but the continuation what we knew as 1:1 marketing back in the day. It is enabled by contemporary technology to appropriately use not only static but also dynamic data and the customer context. From a technological point of view this means having the ability to ingest, connect, analyze and activate a lot of data from various sources in real time.

This also means that hyperpersonalization is not only relevant for marketing! 

Hyperpersonalization is highly dependent on accurate data, so a big lake of purchased, grabbed, or just old data is likely not helpful. The most accurate data is what the customer willingly gives and what is in-moment.

The core foundation for it to work is gaining and nurturing the customers’ trust.

Businesses can do this best by offering value whenever they ask for something and they must not ask for too much too fast but build their customer profiles gradually and based upon recent interactions.

And make no mistake: What the customer values is different from what the business values. To identify what customers value it requires the maintenance of a strong outside-in view. 

 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.

The news

On November 2, 2021, SugarCRM held an analyst summit to share what is going on at the company and to get some candid feedback of the participants. As usual for this type of event, there is quite some information that is still under NDA, so I will be able to cover some of it only in broad strokes rather than the detail that the matters deserve.

After a business update by CEO Craig Charlton, the event itself revolved around two themes:

• customer success stories, including customers describing how they are using SugarCRM to improve their own business by better serving their customers in an interview style format
• SugarCRM business development, technology, and its future trajectory. Naturally, this part is largely under NDA.

There were breakout sessions covering Sugar Sell, Sugar Service, and Sugar Market

As usual, and with the notable exception of the customer interviews, the event was slide-driven with giving the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the respective agenda items plus offering a brief Q&A with the executives.

Last, but not least, part of the event is a 1:1 session with a SugarCRM executive a few days after the summit.

After a short opening by Sarita Kincaid, Craig Charlton offered a business update, showing how SugarCRM developed in the past twelve months. The company is focusing keenly on the mid-market. Craig painted a bright picture that shows a very high customer retention combined with a good growth rate. Noteworthy are a steep increase of the recurring ARR. He quoted a nearly doubled number of new logos, combined with a more than doubled new/upsell ARR and an average deal size that went up by 160 plus per cent. 

The ratio of business outside vs. inside the US is increasing.

Another trend that he sees is a continued adoption of the SugarCRM cloud solutions with the US counting more than 90 per cent of new customers in the cloud, not surprisingly trailed by Europe and, more interestingly, Asia..

This success he attributed to the overall three-pronged strategy of investing into platform, product, and customers, with a strong focus on the mid-market. Focusing on the customer means for SugarCRM focusing on making them successful.

This strategy was supported by information about new wins and customer testimonials. Customers very much focused very much on integration, visibility of data/information via a holistic view and the overall flexibility of the application platform.

This combined with ease of use and quick time to value.

Technology-wise chief product officer and CTO Rich Green emphasized upon the value of the underlying time aware (data) streaming model and an AI that works with data augmentation using external sources via the acquisition of node.io about a year ago.

The bigger picture

Every CRM player that addresses the mid-market and above sends two messages. The first one is that they provide a platform and the second one is that they are CX players, not mere CRM players. All of them are also increasingly deploying machine learning based solutions to achieve this. 

For companies, it is quite important to get a fast time to value and not have month- or yearlong projects before a system can go live.

Users increasingly demand a consumerization of business applications, especially those that are implementing customer facing processes – i.e., CRM systems. In essence, what they want is an easy and simple to use application.

For them a CRM system, to get value out of it, needs to exhibit three basic tenets:

• it needs to be there where they are, physically or digitally
• it needs to show the users what is important in the current context and to make solid suggestions or even take actions.
• it needs to speak with them, their way.

Be where I am

Their CRM system is but one of many applications people are using across devices, laptops, tablets, and smart phones. By their very nature, CRM systems are tools that ingest, aggregate and enrich data, so it can be used for a purpose. The result is actionable information that needs to be provided to its users. This way, e.g. interactions with contacts are logged without any explicit intervention or are pulled from various sources to be then also visualized via different applications or communications tools.

Furthering this thought, the system must offer is services across channels, be available within social media tools, productivity tools and especially within the used email client. The latter part being fairly easy as probably 90 per cent of all business users use either Outlook or GMail. Still, what this means is that the system must embed itself and be available in the tool of choice, either by means of a chatbot or by offering a user interface that becomes a part of the social media tool or mail client and that from there, intelligently using the users context, provides relevant information.

Speak with me

The mobile aspect is a given, too. No CRM system that is worth a grain of salt comes without mobile capabilities, as an app or at least via responsive user interfaces. What they are lacking, though, is the ability of being used in a hands off fashion, e.g. using voice as the interaction channel. How about getting a call from your friendly CRM system after a customer visit, asking for a visit summary while you are driving to your next appointment or creating a report via voice commands? 

Voice as an interaction channel will become an increasingly important interface to CRM systems, be it initiated by the user “hey CRM” or by the system itself as in the example above.

Show me what is important and make solid suggestions

Last, but not least, the system needs to be able to show the users what is important for them at any given time. This includes AI-supported lead- and opportunity scoring, the creation of target groups and campaigns based upon interaction quality, frequency, change thereof, deal size, and sentiment, business objectives, to name a few criteria. This It also includes the ability to suggest next actions that provide the best chance to further nurture a lead or opportunity, or to resolve a service case. On top of this, the system might unearth opportunities for the sales representative, which provides tremendous value.

My PoV and analysis

A bit more than two years ago I asked whether SugarCRM is getting its mojo back. At the end of 2021 the company clearly shows that the answer to this question is a yes. 

Thanks to a strict focus and several smart acquisitions, the most important one to me being node.io, Sugar has re-established itself as a formidable competitor in the CRM market. The now embedded AI engine named Sugar Predict makes the AI a ubiquitously available helper and not a geeky and not necessarily trustworthy technology. This, and its being available to everyone (not only management), some explanation capabilities, should increase user acceptance. The system “speaking” the user’s language by for example classifying an opportunity as “more likely” instead of giving it a pseudo-accurate likelihood of 85 per cent is the icing on the cake.

Generally, making sure that the platform does the work for the user by reducing busy work, making what still needs to be done simple and by surfacing relevant information in context is key. It looks like SugarCRM has really found a way to not only claim this but to also deliver. 

With the acquisitions of W-Systems and Loaded Technologies, the company has increased its ability to deliver professional services and to enable partners.

It is a smart move to focus on serving the upper mid-market segment, although there is some competition in this area. The enterprise market is just too saturated with the big four although SugarCRM should be able to successfully compete in some areas. The solution does scale, so customers do not need to be worried to outgrow it.

SugarExchange, the Sugar app marketplace, is fairly young and lists about 360 apps at the time of this writing, which is a fairly small number. Increasing the number of available partner solutions would surely help increasing SugarCRM’s reach even further. SugarCRM has a number of loyal implementation and technology partners.  However, compared to the other vendors, the size of the ecosystem is fairly small. According to the company, it has more than 300 ISVs, 111 reseller partners, 9 solution partners and 2 distribution partners.

I am not a financial analyst, still it appears to me that SugarCRM’s growth figures are in the range of other companies, which indicates that SugarCRM, being a smaller player in the market, does not outgrow it yet. But then, the pivot happened less than three years ago.

And, as said, I am not a financial analyst.

All in all, what I see is a company that has established a core platform with a solid solution set on top of it, that has a sound strategy and a strong team to implement the strategy. And it has an investor with the funds to support important acquisitions. This is important, as there are still some gaps to close – but then, who doesn’t have gaps?

What is more, the team is emphasizing on an outside-in mindset: Make your customer successful in making their customers succeed. There are only few companies who work this way. 

Together with SugarCRM’s Clint Oram and fellow analysts Kate Leggett, Liz Miller and Michael Fauscette, theCRMKonvos team discussed first impressions of where SugarCRM is going. It is worthwhile watching the discussion (shameless plug: Please subscribe to our channel. We deliver interesting content on a weekly base).

Kudos all around. SugarCRM has gained considerable traction and visibility. I am curious to see what comes next.

The News

On September 20, 2021 Oracle announced during an Oracle Live event named “The future of CRM” Oracle Fusion Marketing, which is not the same as Oracle Marketing.

According to Rob Tarkoff, EVP and GM Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience, Oracle Fusion Marketing is a layer that automatically executes account based marketing and sales campaigns. 

The product aims at enabling an end-to-end process from creating a marketing campaign to closing the sale, bridging the divide between marketing and sales. 

It does so by combining services that are delivered by three products:

• Unity, Oracle‘s Customer Data Platform
• Fusion Advertising, Oracle‘s digital advertisement platform
• Fusion Products & References, Oracle‘s recommendation platform

under one easy-to-use user interface that is modeled as a guided procedure. 

Oracle Fusion Marketing simplifies and accelerates the creation and execution of marketing by

• Building a target audience of known contacts: Marketers can select a product or service that is the focus of the campaign, and then select a list of known contacts from any CRM system
• Expanding your audience: From that audience, Fusion Marketing will automatically generate a highly targeted audience profile for use in online advertising to target people who are potentially relevant to your campaign – byt unknown to your contact database
• Identifying the best customer references: based on the focus of the campaign and specific industry of each customer, Fusion Marketing recommends the best reference stories to promote in the campaign
• Simplifying campaign configuration: Fusion Marketing provides a single user interface to assign all of the campaign assets required to run your campaign across email, website landing pages, and advertising channels
• Launching the campaign: the marketer can easily set up advertising budget, star and end dates and launch their campaign
• Monitoring results: a prebuilt dashboard that provides marketers with real time visibility into campaign performance.

After campaigns are launched, Fusion Marketing automates the generation and qualification of leads:

• Personalized campaign microsites: emails and ads take people to an automatically generated „microsite“ landing page for each campaign, which includes customer references personalized to match the industry and interest of the customer
• AI-powered lead qualification: Fusion Marketing monitors engagement across all campaign channels including emails, online ads, and microsite visits. Because interest at the company level is what matters, Fusion Marketing will qualify account level interest by aggregating engagement frompeople at the same company. This AI algorithm automatically generates qualified opportunities for salespeople when it detects sufficient engagement.
• Deliver qualified opportunities to any CRM system: Wen identified, qualified opportunities are delivered to any CRM system.

According to Oracle, Fusion Marketing helps marketers and sellers focus on what they do best: building relationships and closing deals.

The Bigger Picture

As I have often written and said, sales representatives do not love their system. One of the main reasons for this is that salesforce automation systems and CRM systems are often targeted rather at the management than the actual workforce. They are good at collecting data and reporting, but not so good at helping sales representatives – and marketers, for that purpose – getting their job done easily. The result is widespread dissatisfaction and poor adoption. Phil Winters spoke about an adoption level of 25 per cent in a recent CRMKonvo.

In the words of Larry Ellison: „The sales automation system has value. It keeps track of your opportunities, it allows you to communicate with management, and say „I expect these deals to close in the quarter“. It is really a management tool for individual salesprople and their bosses to make estimates; how many deals will close in the quarter and figure out what revenue will look like in the quarter.

Now, that has value! But the sales system does not increase sales. It doesn‘t automate selling. It autmates sales, forecasting and improves communication. But what we want to do is actually build systems that help you sell more“. He continues „We realized that we couldn‘t just do a second generation sales automation system. To help sell more, we had to also include marketing to generate, and most importantly, qualify leads. The question is being able to figure out which of those leads are high quality.

Which of those leads do you want to turn over to salespeople, and then get them engaged? So, we thought, we had a two step process. We had to autmate lead generation and qualification – a new second generation marketing system. And then, as soon as we got that don, build a second generation sales automation system that would maek the salespeople more productive and help them sell more“.

What needs to change is that the systems are available where the users are, in a physical and digital way, that they work like the users work and give them relevant information as and when needed and finally, that the systems are enabled to interact with the users in natural ways, which includes language, text and voice.

Two specific problems facing marketers and sales representatives are that it is often hard to set up multi channel campaigns, especially when they include advertisements in the public web and walled gardens like Facebook or in the Apple ecosystem and then to hand over well qualified leads that are generated by the marketing department to the sales department. Who hasn‘t heard of the eternal fight between marketing and sales, one side claiming that it doesn‘t get any leads and the other side complaining that leads are just not taken up.

Oracle Fusion Marketing sets out to solve both challenges.

My PoV and Analysis

Let me start with that the event’s naming raised quite some expectations that led me to state during the CRM Playaz Watch Party to the event that I haven’t seen much that I haven’t heard from other vendors, too. I stand to this statement, especially when it comes to integrating or aligning marketing and sales departments. Every suite vendor that is worth a grain of salt can either move a qualified lead out of the marketing subsystem into the sales force automation system and/or directly create an opportunity there (which is something that the sales reps often like to do themselves). An agreement about what constitutes a qualified obviously needs to be achieved before. Most of the vendors can also fairly easily create campaign templates basing on existing objectives, target groups and marketing assets.

However, there are three main differentiators that I can see. 

• As shown in the demo of a campaign creation process as used at Oracle itself, the user interface to create this campaign is extremely sleek, also thanks to the new Redwood UI.
• The ability to combine traditional campaigns with web advertising out of one single technology stack, which Oracle can do using its Advertising line of products.
• The  tight link into the, again own, enterprise content management system.

As I do see it, there are only two companies that could deliver close to this value proposition using an own stack, and these are, Microsoft and Salesforce, maybe Adobe as a third one. Still, Oracle has clearly an edge.

The other suite vendors are either not there at all, or do rely on partners for parts of this process.

Still, building a campaign in a few steps while automatically identifying relevant content for targeted accounts to serve on landing pages and in personalized emails is quite a feat. So far, I have only seen this based upon rules. Oracle seems to have done a great job at this and I would love to have a peek behind the scenes.

I believe in technology and am less sceptic about the power of AI to qualify leads etc. based on existing interactions than esteemed colleague Jon Reed expressed in his article; therefore I am quite convinced that Oracle Fusion Marketing is able to find and deliver the relevant high quality leads to be created as opportunities in a sales force automation system of whatever couleur. This ability is of great help to salespeople. As I like the emphasis on openness, I would have loved to see both, what it takes to create an opportunity in an Oracle as well as a non-Oracle system.

Will there be false positives or negatives when creating these opportunities based on an AI?

Of course!

Is there a very good chance that the system is better than the average salesperson?

Yes!

This ability, however, is nothing that sets Oracle apart from the tier one competition in my eyes. This competition in the case of marketing consists of Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce and SAP. All of these have the ability to create either qualified leads or opportunities in sales force automation systems. And these are only the tier ones. The difference will be in the degree of effort that is necessary to do so.

The business objectives that are covered by Fusion Marketing are currently quite limited. There are only few business objectives and the need to supply a target group to the system. This is due to it being a very young product and is ok for now! There is no reason to assume that these objectives will not be expanded fast, by either Oracle itself or by partners. I think that it would be a good idea to have the system also identify target groups based upon business objectives, similar to or better than what e.g. Emarsys is already capable of in the B2C arena. Building on that, it would be great to see a system that is able to build or suggest campaigns based upon identified customer needs. This would tie neatly into customer journey analytics and orchestration and build a story of outside-in capabilities.

The process that Oracle demonstrated to create a campaign towards an objective is amazingly simple. It can be used by any person, including non marketing personnel. This means that there can be quite some upside in offering it to salespersons or sales teams. Marketing as a service. The objectives are there, the collateral is there, why not enable salespeople to create campaigns targeted to their objectives, based on predefined templates? 

Having said all this, there are a few things that I would like to see as neither the announcement nor the demo covered them.

Assuming that a good number of Fusion Marketing customers also owns an e-commerce site that is based on Oracle technology it would be great to see how Fusion Marketing integrates to e-commerce, especially Oracle technology.

The demo is based upon existing target groups and existing e-mail templates; it did not cover the actual segmentation process, be it based upon personas or on static target groups, nor the creation of the email- and microsite-templates. I‘d love to see how this is done and what products it needs. 

Because this is where the the effort is hidden that helps Marketing Fusion be so simple.

In summary, I applaud Oracle to what it announced here. I am a sceptic and would love to see the answer to some of the questions and doubts that I have. 

I also see that, marketing buzz or not, the competion now needs an answer to the challenge that Fusion Marketing is.

CRM, in various incarnations, has been around since the 90s. If one counts in contact managers like Goldmine, then we are actually talking about the 80s. Some consider it a strategy, but whether it is or not, is a discussion that has been closed long ago.

Still, there is a lot going on. And I mean a LOT.

So, it is time to talk to someone who accompanies the industry since it was immature, someone who also contributed to shaping the industry and some of the solutions around.

So, we reached out to Volker Hildebrandt.

Volker is a fountain of information about where it comes from and where it is heading to. So, if you are interested in the current state of affairs and in the trajectory that the industry is likely to take, then listen in.

You will not regret it!

The CRMKonvos gang had the immense pleasure to chat with Ginger Conlon, CRM Playaz alumna and freshly minted Thought Leadership Director at Genesys.

Throughout her career, Ginger has seen and and gained more than a little marketing experience, looking more at the strategic angle than tactical execution. How to build brands and messaging around brands etc.

Some fascinating questions around these topics are: Who does own customer experience (besides everyone)? Or how to create win-win situations?

Listen to Ginger who opens up her in-depth experience for us.

This was good for a lively and insightful conversation, hopefully not only for us but also for our audience. And it is not only talk, Ginger also has the data.

It was a Tuesday again. This time Ralf Korb and I greeted Raj Balasundaram, Senior Vice President of AI at Emarsys as our guest - and had a second one, but more on this special appearance below.

Of course we were interested in both sides, Emarsys, the marketing automation company that was recently acquired by SAP, and in his deep experience with the implementation and use of AI based systems. We had lots of questions like:

Where is the marketing automation market headed? What is your view on marketing automation tools at the intersection of CDP’s, personalization, RTIM, Customer Journey Orchestration? Will these market segments merge? Will they jointly create another one?

What is the difference between Marketing Automation and Marketing Clouds? Is one used rather for B2B purposes and the other one more on the B2C side? Or is it different concepts?

What is the role of AI and M/L? What is AI after all? Is it just a vendor generated hype? Why should AI work now, after the previous hype cycles failed to deliver on the promise? What are promising applications of AI and machine learning in marketing?

Lots of ground to cover. And then we also touched pricing, which currently is a very hot topic. Raj has an interesting point of view - that I like a lot.

Last but not least, Ray Gerber, Chief Solution Officer at Thunderhead, who started to follow the CRMKonvo as an interested and active community member came in for some more in depth AI discussion. Things couldn't get any better, and of course we didn't stick to the hour that we gave ourselves. Too much high value conversation to be digested.

Enjoy this epic 1:30 h episode that is packed with expert information of two persons who know.