California, USA – Global software company SugarCRM has recently introduced its new integrated ‘playbook’ functionality which allows support of guided selling and advanced CRM process automation. 

Through the new functionality, the no-code toolset enables business users to easily design, visualise, and automate sales, service and marketing processes. SugarCRM customers can create playbooks and templates for sales plays, sales methodologies, guided selling, service processes, lead nurturing and more.

Said functionality follows the recent acquisition of plug-in solutions AddOptify, a provider of guided selling solutions for SugarCRM customers worldwide. The solutions have aided SugarCRM customers through enabling mid-market companies to translate their customer engagement best practices into playbooks to optimise both the user and the customer experience at every stage of the customer journey.

For the company, the need for sales engagement technologies was accelerated by the pandemic and their use is increasingly becoming a key factor in defining and distinguishing high-functioning customer-centric sales organisations. 

Rich Green, chief technology officer and chief product officer at SugarCRM, said that the new functionality will allow customers to leverage proven playbook capabilities within the Sugar platform to streamline sales processes, improve marketing operations and optimize customer service execution.

“This empowers sales, marketing and customer success teams to boost buyer engagement, drive greater customer trust and satisfaction, improve win rates and increase revenues. It also reflects Sugar’s commitment to offer more no-code/low-code capabilities designed to put change in the hands of non-technical business users,” Green stated.

In the near future, SugarCRM plans to provide additional out-of-the-box playbooks and templates for processes including lead qualification, customer on-boarding, case management, troubleshooting and other human-in-the-loop customer interactions spanning the sales, marketing, and service realms.

Singapore – Global technology computer corporation Oracle has launched a new solution called the ‘Oracle Fusion Marketing’, a part of its ‘Oracle Advertising and CX’ suite that enables marketers to automate lead generation and qualification from campaigns that span traditional marketing and advertising channels.

Fusion Marketing uses artificial intelligence (AI) as well to automatically score leads at the account level, predict when consumers are ready to talk to a salesperson, and generate a qualified sales opportunity in any customer relationship management (CRM) system.

For the company, CRM has become the system that both sellers and marketers love to hate, due to disconnected workflows, too much manual administration, and siloed data often preventing sales and marketing teams from working with each other to engage customers and drive revenue. They also added that because of this, the experience for most salespeople is that their CRM system doesn’t help them sell – and this disconnect between sales and marketing teams is a growing challenge as the B2B buying process becomes more complex. 

“Customers and prospects are now interacting with organizations across an increasingly broad range of digital channels, buyer expectations are growing, and the need to access information at any time means much of the purchasing decision is now made before a salesperson is engaged,” Oracle said in a press statement.

Meanwhile, for Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president and general manager at Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience, said that this newly-launched solution lines up with their vision of making this time that the industry needs to think differently about marketing and sales automation so that they can transform CRM into a system that actually works for both the marketer and the salesperson.

He also added that this is not about forecasts and rollups or a reporting tool to see how the sales force is performing, but instead about turning CRM into a system that helps sellers sell.

“A huge part of that change is bringing marketing and sales teams together and eliminating the low-value, time-consuming tasks that distract from building customer relationships and closing deals. That’s why we have invested so much time engineering a system that will help marketers fully automate lead generation and qualification and get highly qualified leads to the sales team faster,” Tarkoff stated.

Fusion Marketing aims to simplify and accelerate the creation and execution of marketing campaigns by automating the end-to-end process of lead generation and qualification. With Fusion Marketing, marketers can build and run campaigns with consistent messages across advertising and email channels, all in a matter of minutes. This helps marketers improve the performance of campaigns by increasing the output of highly qualified sales opportunities.

Part of the solution’s campaign execution features includes building the target audience of known contacts, audience expansion, customer reference identification, simplifying campaign configuration, campaign launch, and results monitoring. Then, Fusion Marketing works by doing the automation of the lead generation, including personalized campaign microsites, AI-powered lead qualification, and delivering qualified opportunities to CRM systems.

As part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, Oracle Advertising and CX connects data across advertising, marketing, sales, and service to make every customer interaction matter. Going beyond traditional CRM, Oracle Advertising and CX helps business leaders create, manage, serve, and nurture lasting customer relationships.

Singapore – Global rewards management platform Giift has announced the launch of Giift Engage, a marketing tool that helps drive customer experience through reward-based offers.

Giift Engage allows companies to promote themselves to customers through points-based promotions like enabling mile points or an egift card program in the form of personalized digital customer experiences, games, and more across multiple communication channels. 

With more than 50,000 program affiliates collectively built into the platform with industries spanning from banking to hospitality, Giift Engage can be used by companies for a wide range of client activities across acquisition, lead generation, portfolio usage, digital adoption, among others. Moreover, Giift Engage will be used internally as well, for instance, to incentivize staff for activities and outcomes, productivity, project completion, collaboration.

“Loyalty is a consequence of sustained and relevant engagement between a brand and its customers. Most of the time, programs fail due to their inability to engage meaningfully with their customer base. Giift Engage seeks to address that without brands having to go through a stressful implementation exercise and in a more cost-efficient manner,” said Pascal Xatart, co-founder and director for Giift.

Giift operates within the APAC region, with offices in Singapore and Jakarta.