Mashups in Action: Connecting the Sales and Marketing Dots

A friend recently said I was the 'king of repurposing'. I am not entirely sure if he was referring to my blog about reuse as an important step in the Mashup lifecyle, or if he was was referring to my life-long quest to teach others how to reuse content (like this blog) whereever and whenever possible. Regardless, it reminded me to write this Mashup in Action blog.

As you might know, we have written a number of blogs about Mashups in Action over the last few years. A few of my favorites case studies include Thomson Reuters (part 1 and part 2), The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and Accival.

But this Mashup In Action is special. It's MINE.

Like every good marketer, I want to help my sales guys find, nurture, and ultimately close deals. We use many media channels to do that and we have great metrics on the early parts of the process until the moment we hand the prospective customer over to the sale folks. Why? Because then we are focused on their problems, and our proposal to address them. We (sales and marketing collectively) often miss subsequent interactions our prospective buyer has with the marketing channels that got them interested in the first place.

I've seen this same disconnect occur in every organization I have ever worked for. So my mashup addresses this quintessential marketing-and-sales problem: matching prospects in the sales pipeline to their subsequent interactions with our marketing channels. Afterall, if you've got a deal in the pipeline, wouldn't you want to know that your prospective customer just visited your company's website? And what they looked at? And for how long?

Here's a recording of my Marketing-and-Sales Mashup given by JackBe's Deepak Alur on stage at the Web 2.0 Expo a few weeks back:



This mashup gives my sales folks some great intelligence on their sales prospects. It helps them understand what parts of the corporate website that individuals in the prospect company visited, what features/modules/functions they may have liked/disliked, and perhaps even what medium (video, print, blog, etc.) was the 'stickiest'. Equally important, it helps us marketing folks understand the real influence we are having (or not having) on sales prospects.

I know this kind of problem isn't universal. It is less prevalent in organizations that used highly-integrated all-in-solutions (like Eloqua, perhaps). But there always seems to be one more source of information you want to connect to the prospective customer. 'Just one more thing' is always on the lips of a good sales rep.

I love a good hypothetical demonstration as much as the next guy but nothing can match a real-world applications like these. Oh, and because of this, my sales guys love me. Now that is priceless.

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Spreadsheet data is dead; not live. Don’t try to Recover(y) it!

Whenever you copy data into spreadsheet you instantly render it 'dead'. In other words, you severed its connection to the source and in essence created copy of the real data. This may be fine if you’re doing historical analysis and trust that the data is valid. But it isn't fine if the data always changes and the source/timeliness of the data is as important as the data itself.

Here’s a great example: Recovery data. As part of the Recovery effort billions of dollars are flowing to the government agencies such as FDA, HUD, HHS, etc. These agencies get the money and distribute it. But they are also the ones responsible for reporting on the data internally, ‘upternally’ (a word I made up to denote reporting up the agency chain) and externally (to the public). Multiply all the agencies times the number of distributions times the frequency of data changes and all of a sudden the government has a major data problem.

Welcome to the ‘Decade of the Data’.

We know that this effort is being coordinated at www.recovery.gov and President Obama has appointed Vivek Kundra as Federal CIO. I’m a big Vivek fan and applaud his past efforts on data visibility work in the DC government. His zest for innovation and data transparency (such as Apps for Democracy) is inspiring in a public servant.

So like any good citizen, I went searching for the Recovery data and discovered all the weekly Excel Recovery reports. It’s great to see the data making it’s way to the public but I’m troubled by the notion of having this data put out as Excel. What happens when the data changes? Do I wait for the next spreadsheet that updates the prior spreadsheet’s data? It’s easy to see that this data is dynamic and ever-changing. Manual reconciliation just won’t do. Oh, since Excel is a manual process, mistakes in the data can easily make their way into the reports.

The problem is seductively simple: Spreadsheets are so ubiquitous and so easy to use we tend to use it for just as many wrong things as good things. Specifically, Excel is not the right tool to manage real-time data. Worse still, spreadsheet data is not governed, not secure and not easy to aggregate with lots of other spreadsheets. Excel fails to meet 3 of the ‘5Cs’ of enterprise mashups.

I think it is easy to define the exact characteristics we need for true Recovery data visibility across the entire government. And here’s why: when it comes to live data across multiple sources, the value in this data is not the individual set of numbers, but rather the ability to look at the data aggregated, sliced and diced, geographically transposed (i.e. on a map), temporally depicted (can you say timeline?), and any other way we need to see it right now. This means speed in creating and visualizing the data is just as important as access to the data.

And if you think spreadsheets, data warehouses or portals can do this, think again. My fellow blogger Chris Warner often talks about his 'Dead-and-Deadly Data Matrix’ that I think nicely lays out how other enterprise technologies fit into the ‘Live and Secure’ information management spectrum.

There’s really only one way to do this and that’s using enterprise mashup technology. Enterprise mashup platforms (EMPs) are built exactly for this purpose: to provide the fastest way to interact and visualize data from multiple disparate sources in real-time and safely. They do it in hours and days, not weeks, months or years. And EMPs plug directly into the authoritative data sources and provide the necessary security and governance to make the data available and visible internally and externally.

And true EMPs let you publish the mashups as REST/XML services as well as mashup widgets (we call them 'Mashlets') that can land in your 1.0 portal, 2.0 portals (like Netvibes and iGoogle), collaboration platforms (like Sharepoint and Jive), mobile devices (like the iPhone) and even back into Excel as a live data source.  And that’s exactly what users want.  They want to have the data and visualization where they work, not where we want them to work.

The ‘Decade of the Data’ is definitely here. Let’s just make sure we do it the right way.

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