Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 2)

Carol O’Kelley: I think the most interesting thing is the proliferation of different solutions in both the sales and marketing technology spaces and the level of complexity it brings to the job of a marketer. It’s not enough anymore to be a good marketer. You also have to be a technologist and be able to prioritize what types of technology makes sense for your business.

In particular, companies in the small- and mid-sized market that Salesfusion targets have more limited bandwidth and limited financial resources with which to spend on technologies. Figuring out which technology makes sense is an enormous challenge. When you look within the different technologies, I think the ones that are most interesting are the ones that are figuring out how to make the marketer or sales organization smarter. Those that are doing things with predictive technologies and taking some of the modelling and the statistical analysis.

I also like the ones that are helping sales and marketers work together. Often, there’s a lot of natural tension between sales and marketing. Anything that can help it be a healthy engagement where you’re raising the game of both parties is a good thing. I also like the trend that we’re seeing towards easier-to-use solutions, particularly in marketing automation, you’ve seen a lot of the larger players who play at the large enterprise end of the market become incredibly complex and consequently, incredibly expensive. The combination of the complexity and the expense takes some of those solutions out of reach for your average marketing organization. I love seeing some of the things that are emerging at Salesfusion right now about trying to design things that are intuitive, easy to adopt, and quick to get implemented.

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to put you through a bit of a thought exercise. Let’s say you’re running a small to medium business. I imagine your company is a small to medium business.

Carol O’Kelley: Yes, it is.

Sramana Mitra: What are the top technologies that you would be buying from a sales and marketing technology point of view?

Carol O’Kelley: I think that you have to start with CRM. You have to absolutely understand who your customers and prospects are and how you’re interacting with them. I then think that marketing automation makes a lot of sense. For a small business, that may even start with something as simple as an email marketing solution. Email marketing is a great place to start.

I think it’s important to be able to look at things like web analytics and be able to get more visibility into who’s hitting your website and try to do some account level profiling or data enrichment. Even retargeting in terms of trying to put your dollars to better use. Those are the things that I would start with. To my point about proliferation, you could certainly have a very long list of technologies in your portfolio.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion
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