Applications for Marketing & Sales
There are an increasing and bewildering number of applications and technologies now available for marketing and sales.
The challenge for many marketing and sales leaders and professionals is how to choose and use the most appropriate applications to gain the productivity and sales benefits, while avoiding the costs in terms of time and expenditure.
Hopefully this website and our services can help you understand what you and your business needs, and how to get it.
Marketing and Sales Application super-categories:
At Wurlwind we identify the main categories of applications, aligned with the sales funnel stages as:
- Social Media along with Search and Online Advertising (PPC etc)
- Website, Blog and Content Management Systems
- Email Marketing, Campaign Management, Lead Scoring
- Customer Relationship Management CRM including Sales Force Automation, Forecasting and more
- And not forgetting the business or back-office applications for production, accounts etc.
There are a myriad of applications within each of these categories, and other significant categories too. However we find that the focus of businesses is primarily on those above, and only once they are in place then to look at others. For each of these there will be a monitoring and measurement element to provide the ability to manage that activity
Linking applications together is becoming ever more important for several reasons, such as:
- A better customer experience
- Data analysis and decision-support
- Usability for staff and customers
This integration is becoming easier in one respect as APIs are more available and more widely used, and for some major applications there are eco-systems of plug-ins that can be found on App Stores.
Major applications such as Twitter, WordPress, Mailchimp, Salesforce and Netsuite, to identify one from each category above, have extensive integration capabilities and developer communities.
There is additional information about Applications on our sister website about Hosted Apps and Tools for Marketing and Sales .
Which applications are you using?
If you haven’t done so recently, make a list of all the applications (internal and cloud based) that you, your team and your company use for marketing and sales. Include those where you keeping lists of customers, diary and calendar, task and to-does, document creation and storage, online and off-line communications, forecasts and into delivery and finance.
Chances are there will be overlap, disconnects, fragmentation, islands, manual work-arounds, and potentially risk and exposure due to lack of back-ups of data and software.
Contact Wurlwind if you need help with a systems audit, or for assistance with application selection and use.
