I thought that I would share some ideas that we have been working on in the areas of Sales/Marketing/CRM… We are calling it Data Driven Marketing, and it is all about making it easier for our customers to use our products better, and to use more of our products.  We are looking around for a platform to base this on, and a CRM with workflow (maybe an add-on), and good external systems integration capability seems to be a starting point.

Some requirements

• Ideally Free Open Source Software, so that we can quickly deploy it and manage it
• Available as SAAS (Software as a service) or as something that we can install on our servers
• A graphic flow designer, so that our sales, marketing and customer teams can plan the experience directly
• Can “listen” to customer events (e.g. open email, click email link, system reports customer missed a phone call)
• Can communicate with the customer (e.g. send email, put onto a customer call list)
• Can talk and listen to our other systems
• Gives us access to the CRM data within the system
• Good reporting, so that we know how the flows are going on, maybe with A/B comparison

Some candidate systems for Data Driven Marketing

Hmmmm…Here is a little experiment that I am working on, I thought that I would do the comparison and research in a google docs spreadsheet, and publish the result on the web. It is very much a bit of work in progress, so please forgive the “alpha” nature of this