Folloze VP wants marketers to focus more on the sales side of CX
Randy Brasche is one of those people who remembers the days when marketing and sales teams were not only at odds with each other, but never even really got to know each other.
“You would have people in marketing who might spend their entire time at a particular company and never talk to a single salesperson,” the VP of marketing at Folloze recalled.
“Those roles have changed a lot in the past year or so. Where marketing was more focused on top-of-the-funnel activity, now as head of marketing you’re looking across the entire lifecycle, accelerating deals mid-stage, figuring out how to how to build, land and expand.”
While there has been no shortage of technologies aimed at helping marketers increase their value, San Mateo, Calif.-based Folloze last month announced it had doubled booking revenue in 2019 and won over customers including B2B giants like Cisco and Autodesk.
Folloze’s applications assist marketing teams with personalizing the way they approach prospective customers — the same territory that has been well trod by the likes of Marketo (now owned by Adobe). However the company sees room to compete, in part by focusing more on the need for marketers to focus on mid-stage of end of a buying journey. This is sometimes an overlooked or neglected area of the customer experience (CX), according to Brasche.
“The sales process is not linear — customers are moving forwards, backwards and then starting at the beginning again. And the buyer is the one driving this bus,” he told 360 Magazine. “Marketing teams don’t just need more leads, but need deals to move faster through the pipeline.”
Folloze uses artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies to help identify data that demonstrates an intent to buy, Brasche said, and then help marketers tailor their account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns accordingly. This continues to be a big area in B2B, where CX is not aligned on a single individual but could include a team of up to eight different people, he added.
Brasche said Folloze recognizes B2B marketers often feel they’re drowning in too many different tools and platforms. That’s why, last summer, the company not only enhanced its own products but developed integrations with some of the most popular martech systems, including Oracle’s Eloqua, Salesforce and Demandbase.
Making it easier to orchestrate technologies is critical, given that, as Brasche said, many B2B firms are trying to develop CX for those who sometimes don’t appear to want an experience at all.
“We live in this kind of interesting world where (customers) don’t answer their phones or e-mails,” he said. “Ironically, we have all the data and tools we need now to really make personalizing the way we approach them pinpoint-effective.”
