A fresh cup of the latest CRM insights and tech trends

Recap: Act-On I Heart Marketing San Francisco

Yesterday I was one of the keynote speakers at Act-On software’s “I Heart Marketing” event in San Francisco. The event is aimed at marketers looking to better optimize the generation and management of leads with an eye on personalization and understanding the preferences of customers in today’s business world. And as we all know – it is harder than ever for businesses to stand out and deal with disruption coming for so many angles: digital native startups, existing competition, and the changing expectations and demands from the modern, connected customer. Marketing is usually dealing with these issues head-on.

Given the great response to my talk topics, and the conversations I had with many attendees – today’s marketers are feeling disruption and are being pressured more than ever to stand out and offer a differentiated experience to their prospects. And, of course, they are looking to their marketing software to help them build more customer engagement and retain more customers. In short, marketers are feeling the kind of pain we are looking to solve here at Sugar: helping companies stand out from the status quo and be disruptive rather than be disrupted.

Act-On is developing some really cool features inside its core offering to better optimize the lead generation process based on machine learning tools that look to understand how and when an individual prospect wants to be contacted, and what kind of content they might prefer. Act-On is calling this feature “adaptive journeys.” This “self-learning” marketing automation system, already deeply integrated with Sugar, offers really innovative solutions for marketers and even sales organizations – helping them to both better nurture early-stage leads, but also to get in front of the competition with relevant and targeted messages earlier in the lead-to-sales cycle.

Again, Sugar and Act-On have a great partnership in place. We will be hitting up other cities like NYC and London later this year, so if you’re in the area come check out how we’re working together to improve your lead conversion rates, improve the customer experience, and lower marketing spend.