Dear reader, just so you know - this blog starts out a bit philosophical but will become more tangible as you read through.
I’ve always considered curiosity to be the fuel of humankind. Looking at what we’ve achieved as a species over the course of history leads me to be amazed: “how did they even think of that?” There must be an unstoppable drive to know more about nature and the universe and to push the boundaries and limits. Just look at the last 30 years during which technology, following Moore’s law, led my generation to watch the entire world changing in front of our own eyes. Some call it the 4th Industrial revolution. However, curiosity spans far beyond technology and is grounded in every human interaction, in both personal and business settings. One of the topics I am most curious about is business and, specifically, understanding businesses -- their markets, products, business models and value proposition. I tend to spend time with customers and prospects understanding their strategies, goals and success KPIs. Not only is it the favorite part of my job, but it is also a super important one: understanding your customers extremely
well -- it earns you a seat at the table to be their provider and trusted advisor.
When I first embarked on the journey of being a marketer (after years of being a product guy), some 13 years ago, I was fascinated by the potential for understanding customers digitally and being able to serve them in the best way possible. That’s the genesis of the idea of customer context -- understanding the multiple dimensions of your customer - who they are, their goals, situation, stage, pain point. In the digital world, similar to the physical world, understanding your customers is key -- and this is the root of the big news we are announcing today.
18 months ago our team came together to write the next chapter of Folloze. Specifically, how to build the next generation solution that will power the customer life cycle of B2B buying teams.
These new buying teams expect vendors to know them, to deliver consistently high-value materials, and to do it in real-time and via an excellent experience. We realized that the foundation of it all is an experience layer powered by a “personalization brain” that is able to constantly identify, learn, recommend and deliver experiences that are optimized for customers and prospects - both for individuals and the buying unit. We also took on the challenge of making the platform self-service and simple to use by any B2B marketer; a sophisticated tool that can be used by many, not just by a few, across the entire organization. Moreover, the platform would apply equally well to a myriad of marketing situations: ABM programs, demand generation, field campaigns, events, partner marketing and more.
AI am extremely excited to unveil this innovation and the months of work by our product, design and engineering teams and announce the Folloze Personalized Marketing Platform.
So what exactly is it? The Personalized Marketing Platform is an end-to-end platform that empowers organizations to identify, contextualize, recommend, deliver and measure personalized customer journeys collaboratively by Marketing and Sales. The platform is table stakes in delivering 1:1 Account-Based Experiences at a huge scale. We call it Limitless Personalization - remove the limits in the number of accounts you execute via automated personalization, the limits of customer touch points onto supporting the buying journey with both marketing and sales touches, as well as the resources and budget limits with a super easy, all-in-one and self service approach. We are proud of our customers such as ServiceNow, RingCentral, Fireeye and more that are implementing ABM use cases with high business outcomes.
Here is a short synopsis of some of the platform components:
The Content Intelligence Center optimizes personalized experiences with the best performing content for a given account’s context. It is a recommendation, analytics, and management service that engages customers at the right time with the most relevant and highest-performing content. To consistently optimize these content experiences, the platform uses AI-based self-learning from fellow marketing teams, data-tagging, and matching rules.
The Personalization Studio employs an intuitive drag-and-drop authoring environment to let marketing teams quickly execute high-impact personalization campaigns at any scale. For each unique campaign and customer journey, the Personalization Studio uses rules and dynamic decisions that define the underlying content, messaging, creative, and calls-to-action.
The Data Services provides a common and comprehensive data layer that reflects the account and context framework, to facilitate sales- and marketing-orchestration of personalized and intelligent experiences. To achieve this goal, the platform combines multidimensional data from first- and third-party account data sources including embedded firmographic, business context and intent.
Sales Activation functionality lets Folloze take B2B sales and marketing collaboration to a new level. The Folloze platform activates sales teams by enabling marketers to create and execute highly targeted and personalized campaigns – across every stage of the customer lifecycle – on behalf of their sales counterparts.
The Engagement Analytics yields deep metrics and analytics that measure account engagement across experiences – determined by content viewing time and conversion rates. By scoring and measuring both account engagement and topics of interest, Folloze delivers timely insights to sales and marketing teams and dynamically informs next steps for each unique customer journey.
Ready to learn how to show your customers you truly, deeply, know and care about them?
I’d like to personally invite you to our webinar where we will explore the new platform on Thursday, March 19, 2020 9:30 AM (PST)/ 12:30 PM (EST). I hope to see you there!
