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Brainshark Streamlines Sales Training and Coaching with Integrated Solutions to Drive Rep Mastery

Brainshark, Inc., delivering SaaS-based sales enablement and readiness solutions, announced the expanded integration of its award-winning training and coaching solutions, helping organizations better prepare sales reps to effectively engage buyers.

All too often, organizations fail to maximize sales training investments by neglecting to provide reinforcement such as coaching. The Sales Management Association found that 77 percent of companies say they don’t provide enough sales coaching. Without systematic, ongoing learning and reinforcement, half of sales learning content is forgotten within five weeks, and 84 percent is lost within 90 days, according to CSO Insights and Sales Performance International.

Brainshark’s expanded capabilities empower sales leaders to more easily reinforce training with coaching activities. Now organizations can ensure reps not only complete their training, but also achieve mastery of critical messages via video coaching challenges. Salespeople benefit from a seamless way to practice critical skills and messages – enabling sales managers to be more confident that their reps are truly ‘field-ready.’ The solution also allows for continuous peer-to-peer coaching to help reps learn from colleagues about objection handling, industry-specific sales strategies and more.

The newly integrated offerings make it easy for sales teams to:

  • Reinforce sales learning with follow-on coaching activities as part of formal courses and curricula.
  • Better measure training effectiveness to ensure reps are ready to engage in successful sales conversations.
  • Drive peer-to-peer learning by capturing and sharing the best example challenge responses from reps in Brainshark’s unique interactive video format. These examples can be shared via a link, in a learning portal or as a part of a formal training course.
  • Validate that reps are ‘field-ready’ through the combination of onboarding, training and coaching evaluations.

In addition to the integration of training and coaching activities, new sales coaching enhancements enable content reviewers to create detailed coaching reports for deeper insight into the effectiveness of coaching initiatives. This helps sales enablement leaders gauge reps’ strengths and areas for improvement, while making it easy for sales managers and coaches to provide more meaningful feedback and share best practices based on reviewer activity.

Brainshark’s customers are driving tangible results and better sales mastery by structuring their sales readiness programs around an integrated training and coaching solution.

It’s important for us to train our field reps in four different stages: delivering the initial information, providing learning reinforcement, assessing retention and simulating real-world applications,” said Pete Bell, head of sales enablement and execution at Spectranetics, a cardiovascular medical device manufacturer. “We selected Brainshark for its versatility, ease of use, and streamlined training and coaching experience. The user experience is fantastic, and our engagement levels have been off the charts. We had a testing booth at our recent global sales meeting, where reps had to recite key facts that have been part of their learning, and had over a 95 percent pass rate – which is absolutely unheard of without using a solution like Brainshark.”

Michael Salerno, Brainshark’s vice president of product, said: “Adding coaching reinforcement within a formal learning process is a highly effective way to help sellers master the material. This product release empowers our customers to quickly embed coaching activities within their sales training and readiness strategies, increasing their capacity to outsell the competition.”

Invoca Brings VoIP Analytics to Brands that Use Adobe Marketing Cloud

via Invoca

Invoca, a call intelligence platform for marketing clouds, has announced a key partnership with Adobe, unveiling a unique call analytics tool. Branded as Invoca for Adobe Marketing Cloud, the new call intelligence solution aims at bringing meaningful insights on personalization and campaign optimization to the omnichannel customer journey. This collaboration is powered by Invoca Signal.

“The evolution from screen-based interactions to voice conversations is fundamentally changing how consumers interact with brands.” Kyle Christensen, Senior VP of Marketing at Invoca

Christensen adds, “Today, you can seamlessly shift from typing or tapping to having a conversation, whether it’s through an automated bot like Amazon’s Echo or a conversation with a live agent on your mobile phone. As a result, it’s critical that leading marketing cloud platforms like Adobe Marketing Cloud give marketers both the digital and voice insights required to create customer experiences that drive revenue.”

Read Also: 5 Things You Should Know About Adobe and Microsoft Cloud Partnership

Invoca for Adobe Marketing Cloud is a revenue-driven platform for B2B marketers that rely on phone calls to engage customers. The new phone call intelligence platform adds a deep layer of insights that can be customized to optimize marketing campaigns and personalize customer experience across diverse digital channels.

How Invoca for Adobe Marketing Cloud works

Invoca Signal enables marketers to automatically capture custom, actionable insights from hundreds of data points on every phone call and live voice conversation. Marketers can leverage the new call intelligence platform over their marketing cloud to—

Optimize their marketing spend

Marketers can create a Signal that identifies a “hot prospect” as someone who placed a call from a specific search keyword and mode of engagement.

By passing this data from Invoca to Adobe Media Optimizer, marketers can automatically reallocate more budget to the keyword that drove that “hot prospect” to call.

Personalize the caller experience

Marketers using Adobe Target can extend personalized web experience they serve to their customers to a phone conversation using Invoca Signal. This allows marketers to add engaging conversational elements on phone calls, based on language preference and past experiences. Enhance customer journey and drive follow-on purchases.

Recommended Read: Adobe Marketing Cloud Partners AppsFlyer for Extended Analytics and Attribution Capabilities

By using Invoca with Adobe Marketing Cloud, Call marketers can create a consistent experience across channels by triggering the next best engagement based on voice insights such as what was said during the call, and whether someone converted.
When Signals are passed from Invoca to Adobe Audience Manager, retargeting ads or personalized web content is automatically triggered with upselling or cross-selling messages.

Expand reach to lookalike audiences

Marketers can use Signal to identify their best customers who convert over the phone. Using lookalike modeling with Adobe Audience Manager, marketers can expand their reach into new audiences that resemble the customers who called and converted.

VoIP Integration with Marketing Automation Crucial to Customer Experience

According to a report by Newsmaker, the global mobile VoIP (mVoIP) market is set to grow at an CAGR of around 28% between 2016 and 2020. In another report supporting this humongous growth of VoIP industry, it is expected to touch $140 billion by 2021. According to Google more than 20 percent of searches on its mobile app and Android devices are done with voice. As Alexa-powered devices continue to pick up impressive sales figures, it is evident that B2B marketers should try to bridge the gap between digital engagements and call efforts. Invoca for Adobe Marketing Cloud, therefore, fits into marketing stack as a unified platform for diverse experience initiatives across web, social, video and VoIP initiatives.

Cody Crnkovich, head of platform partners and strategy at Adobe, says, “We’re keenly aware that helping marketers make smart connections between what happens online and offline is what drives great customer experiences.”

Crnkovich acknowledges, “Customers value Invoca’s integration with the Adobe Cloud Platform because it gives them a simple way to apply voice insights to the digital campaigns they’re running across Adobe Marketing Cloud.”

Invoca’s latest partnership with Adobe comes just weeks after SaaS and telecommunications sales veteran, Ben Sullivan, joined their executive team as senior vice president of sales. Ben’s experience in building and handling strategic SaaS partnerships will be critical in continuing Invoca’s impressive growth trajectory. Earlier, Invoca had announced about embedding IBM Watson’s AI capabilities to its Voice Marketing Cloud, enabling marketers analyze and act on voice data in real time. Despite the rise of digital engagements in B2B and B2B segments, marketers acknowledge the importance of phone call analytics in creating superlative customer experience within optimized limits of technology investments.

Despite the rise of digital engagements in B2B and B2B segments, marketers acknowledge the importance of phone call analytics in creating superlative customer experience within optimized limits of technology investments.

Interview with Anthony Reynolds, CEO – Altify

[mnky_team name=”Anthony Reynolds” position=”CEO – Altify”][/mnky_team]
[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/areynolds5796″ profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyareynolds/”]
[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“Be Fearless. A mentor early in my career told me that I could tackle anything I set my mind to and that perseverance would always win.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

On Marketing Technology


MTS:
Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got here.

I began as CEO for Altify in February of this year. Before joining, I evaluated Altify for five months and examined all aspects of the operation. Over that period, I became was deeply impressed by the passion of the Altify people. I also fell in love with the company’s vision to create the best cloud based sales performance management solutions for our customers. With a team this dedicated and a product this strong, I felt sure this was the right place for me.

I’ve spent the past 18 years working professionally in enterprise software. I started as a product manager with Crystal Reports in Vancouver, Canada and then moved from Canada to San Jose, California to work for the CEO of Business Objects 11 years ago. The majority of my career has been focused on analytics, mobile and cloud applications, having spent six years at SAP after they acquired Business Objects in 2007. Since then, I’ve travelled all over globe in a number of different roles: general manager, operational and sales focused roles while at SAP. My last job was EVP Operations and Chief Customer Officer at Anaplan, where I helped the company grow  from 250 to over 600 people and up to $100M+ in revenues.

MTS: Given the massive proliferation of marketing technology, how do you see the martech market evolving over the next few years?

Altify recently published the Business Performance Benchmark Study 2017, which found that when sales and marketing are aligned, win rates increase by 26% and sales cycles decrease by 18%. The focus of the market in the coming years should be to continue to develop technology that furthers the alignment between these two critical parts of the revenue engine. This is a major area of concern for us at Altify.

Core to the Altify sales methodology and software platform is enabling salespeople to have meaningful business conversations with their customers, such that they are delivering real value to the customer, educating them on different perspectives as to how their business problems can be solved. Marketing plays a key role in enabling sales people to have the right messages for the right business problem at the right time, and we will continue to develop sophisticated technologies that allow marketing to land those messages into the field at the most impactful time.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?

Augmented Intelligence is the single most important trend that will drive sales and marketing performance in the next decade. Here’s how it applies in sales: every sales organization has star performers, and every sales manager is constantly seeking ways to get every seller to perform at this same level. Augmented Intelligence can shift the bell curve by dynamically serving best practice knowledge and guidance in the context of each individual deal as they arise, so that every salesperson has the best chance of success working the right opportunities in their portfolio. With Augmented Intelligence, software and salespeople can evolve and grow in tandem.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?

I spent a lot of time looking at other players in the sales performance management space when I was looking at Altify. I became a Board Advisor to OpsPanda, which I think is doing some interesting things around sales planning. Given my background in analytics and performance management, I’m always looking at new applications for combining company data with social and other external data sources.
Visier is a company that is focused on Workforce Analytics and has some of the brightest product minds in the business—I’m very interested to see where they go.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

Our marketing stack consists of Salesforce CRM, HubSpot for marketing automation, and then we leverage our own platform to deliver sales enablement and content management capabilities.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)

Account Planning is a sales best practice that allows companies to maximize revenue in key accounts. In December 2015, Altify launched a 6-month focused campaign to deliver Account Planning education through an Account Planning email course, delivered every day for 7 days, to educate sellers on the key benefits and the steps required to implement Account Planning.

The campaign targeted sales, front line sales management, sales operations and sales enablement. Success was measured by engagement and achieved an overall open rate of 49%  and engagement of 17%. Although we aren’t able to attribute all opportunities directly to the campaign, overall our Account Planning sales for that fiscal year were a larger percentage of revenue than previous years. We were pretty happy with this outcome.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?

I see AI as opportunity rather than a threat. AI will deliver more consistent and accurate data which will fuel marketing’s ability to hone campaigns and better target relevant and impactful content and messages, so that we can identify qualified opportunities more effectively.  For long complex B2B sales, AI is a welcome addition to the technology stacks of both marketing and sales.

 

This Is How I Work

 

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.

Quickly. I walk fast, talk fast and try to make decisions quickly.
I like the quote: “It is not the big that eat the small, but the fast that eat the slow” by Jason Jennings.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

Here are the mobile apps on the home screen on my iPhone:Facebook, Sonos, Uber, LinkedIn, Evernote, Skype, Sharks Hockey, DoorDash, OpenTable, Expedia, Ring…my wife would probably have Amazon on there as well!

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?

Evernote is pretty nifty at keeping notes organized. I’m big on taking notes; it helps me remember things. I have it connected from my iPhone to my iPad to my Mac so I never let things slip.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis. I just cracked it and looking forward to the read. It’s generally about how the mind makes decisions.

I’m a big sponge for information and am enjoying learning everything there is to know about the Altify business.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Be Fearless. One of my mentors early in my career told me that I could tackle anything I set my mind to and that my perseverance would always win. I’ve found that to be very true.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?

Work harder. I know it’s a cliché being a Canadian in Silicon Valley, but I just maintain a feverish pace.

MTS: Tag the one person whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

@jeffbezos Amazon is changing so many industries. He is just a really smart guy.

MTS: Thank you Anthony! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.

Mr. Reynolds is a forward thinking business executive with 18 years of experience in enterprise software. He has a proven record of leading large cross-functional teams across multiple geographies. He is an excellent communicator who has worked in senior sales management, operations and product focused roles with deep involvement in a multitude of M&A and strategic partnering initiatives. Mr. Reynolds is able to learn complex technical topics and synthesize quickly in simple terms.

He has hands on experience in working with hundreds of customers and internal deployments with Analytics, Big Data, Data Science, Enterprise Performance Management, Cloud and Mobile applications.

For B2B sales organizations, Altify provides proven enterprise sales methodology in software sellers want to use. The Altify platform helps sales teams win the deals that matter and increase wallet share in existing customers.

With Altify, sales people, managers and executives achieve revenue growth consistently. Altify does this natively on Salesforce for more than 250 customers, including: Autodesk, BMC, BT, GE, HP Enterprise, Johnson Controls, Optum, Salesforce and more.

[mnky_heading title=”About the MarTech Interview Series” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fstaging.loutish-lamp.flywheelsites.com%2Fmts-insights%2Finterviews%2F|||”]

The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.

5 Things You Should Know About Adobe and Microsoft Cloud Partnership

The partnership builds on a deal Adobe inked with Microsoft in September 2016 

Microsoft and Adobe have joined hands to make their respective marketing and sales products more revolutionary. Both companies intend to add more spice to the highly competitive SaaS and Cloud market in the US. The latest partnership in the marketing technology ecosystem comes the same day Adobe unveiled its Adobe Advertising Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud to help marketers in offering best-in-class customer experience across devices and channels.

The new Microsoft-Adobe partnership comes as a potent combination to take on other competitors in the business, including Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM. Just two weeks back, Salesforce and IBM agreed to bring together Einstein and Watson, delivering a unified AI-based customer engagement platform for B2B clients.

Here are five things you should know about the recent announcement from Adobe and Microsoft.

Microsoft Azure as Adobe’s Preferred Cloud Platform

With the partnership, Adobe will make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform for the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud. Azure provides Adobe with a trusted, global cloud and a powerful data platform for intelligent services, including comprehensive machine learning and cognitive capabilities in Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite and SQL Server.

The partnership builds on a deal Adobe inked with Microsoft to deliver its cloud services on Microsoft Azure and that will make Adobe the preferred marketing service for Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Enterprise CRM solution.

Microsoft will make Adobe Marketing Cloud its preferred marketing service for Dynamics 365 Enterprise edition, giving customers a powerful, comprehensive marketing service for Microsoft’s next generation of intelligent business applications.

New Partnership to Muscle Its Way to Top in SaaS Market

Back in September 2016 at the Microsoft Ignite conference, Microsoft announced about teaming with Adobe to help enterprise companies embrace digital transformation and deliver compelling, personalized experiences through every phase of their customer relationships.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had said, “Adobe and Microsoft have had a great partnership, we have innovated together, we have partnered to really drive the success of our customers over a variety of technology platforms, adding that the partnership “marks a big milestone in our partnership with the leading SaaS services from Adobe coming to Azure.”

Read Also: Adobe Recreates Beethoven’s Magic with Adobe Experience Cloud

By announcing Adobe Experience Manager Sites Managed Service now made available on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform, Adobe intends to offer a unified marketing and sales cloud solution. Businesses that use SaaS suite to run digital marketing and advertising campaigns represent about $1.2 billion of Adobe’s $4.6 billion in revenue last year. Microsoft has been trying to expand Dynamics, its software system for sales people.

Adobe Analytics + Microsoft Power BI: Organizing Business Data More Effectively

By partnering with Adobe, Microsoft intends to merge its Power BI platform into Adobe Analytics. The conjoined semantic data model for understanding and driving real-time customer engagement will standardize how data is structured and vastly expedite the process of gaining insights from massive amounts of data.

This will bring marketers enhanced vision across the enterprise, enabling them to pull behavioral data into Power BI and efficiently visualize the impact of marketing campaigns across segments along the customer journey.

Adobe and Microsoft will Collaborate to Create Shared Data Format

Adobe, at its annual marketing conference, confirmed its plan to collaborate with Microsoft to create a shared data format between Adobe Experience Cloud, and Microsoft Dynamics 365, allowing their SaaS clients to seamlessly integrate their marketing and sales processes. Their first set of joint sales and marketing software solutions will heavily focus on transforming customer experiences for enterprises leveraging shared data format.

Abhay Parasnis, executive vice president and CTO, Adobe said –

“Today’s customers have high standards when it comes to brand interactions. Enterprise companies must deliver exceptional experiences at scale or risk losing customers to competitors,” said. “Bringing together Adobe’s and Microsoft’s sales, marketing and customer intelligence solutions enables brands to better understand and engage with their customers across all touch points.”

via Microsoft Power BI

“It’s going to enable to customers to go beyond the current (software) silos they have to navigate today,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise division at Microsoft.

Guthrie added, “We believe the combined power of our technologies will allow enterprise businesses to harness their data in new ways, unlocking critical business insights and actionable intelligence.”

Read Also: Adobe Marketing Cloud Partners with Insert to Personalize In-App Mobile Campaigns

Adobe Experience Cloud gives you access to customer profiles, centralized assets, powerful tagging, and an ecosystem of partners and developers to build campaigns, manage your advertising, and gain deep intelligence about your business.

Adobe Advertising Cloud is industry’s first end-to -end platform that makes simple to deliver video, display and search advertising on any screen in nay format. It lets brands and agencies manage TV and digital buying across platforms to targeted audiences.

Collaboration that will benefit B2B customers

Adobe-Microsoft cloud and data partnership is designed to extend its benefits to other leaders in the industry. Partners like AppDynamics, Acxiom, Dun & Bradstreet, Qualtrics, Zendesk, [24]7 and MasterCard are participating with Adobe and Microsoft in the development of this new data model, committed to building applications based on the common language.

via Microsoft
via Microsoft

Both companies are expected to provide an update on the progress of their Cloud and data sharing platform at Microsoft Build 2017 on May 10-12.

SaaS and Cloud Market Projections for 2017

Enterprises in the US are investing more on ERP and collaboration than ever before. According to the latest report from Synergy Research Group, enterprise SaaS market grew 32% YoY, touching $13 billion in quarterly revenues in Q4 2016. The SaaS market is now more matured and more dominating than public cloud computing services. The report mentions Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Adobe, ADP, and IBM, reflecting how big names have performed in 2016. Surprisingly, Synergy Research Group identifies Google and Oracle as the top SaaS vendors that registered highest growth rates.

saas_q416

According to John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group – “There are a variety of factors driving the SaaS market which will guarantee substantial growth for many years to come.”

“Traditional enterprise software vendors like SAP, Oracle and IBM are all pushing to convert their huge base of on-premise software customers to a SaaS subscription relationship. Meanwhile, the relatively new cloud-based vendors like Workday and Zendesk are aggressively targeting the enterprise market and industry giants Microsoft and Google are on a charge to grow their subscriber bases, especially in the collaboration market.”

In another interesting report, 2015 Global Technology Innovation Survey picked Public cloud computing, mobile platforms and apps, IoT, machine-to-machine and data and analytics as the most disruptive technologies till 2020.

B2B Cloud users can finally experience the power of working with data-rich business intelligence collaboration.

Adobe Recreates Beethoven’s Magic with Adobe Experience Cloud

via Adobe

Adobe Experience Cloud– The “First, Ubiquitous Cross-Channel” Cloud suite in the industry announced at Adobe Summit, Las Vegas

In less than 48 hours, we have Adobe Experience Cloud climbing to the top of marketing technology stack! Adobe chose the perfect stage to unveil one of its finest Cloud products till date- the Adobe Experience Cloud. The new Experience Cloud for marketing and analytics that integrates with Creative Cloud was introduced during the ongoing Adobe Summit in Las Vegas.

At the same event, the marketing cloud and technology innovation firm also released the Adobe Advertising Cloud, branding it as industry’s first end-to-end platform for managing advertising across traditional TV and digital formats. The cloud for cross-channel advertising is the result arising from Adobe’s acquisition of Tube Mogul in December 2016.

Recommended Read: Revel Partners Adobe to “Keep Innovation Flywheel Spinning” in B2B Digital Transformation

Like Beethoven, Adobe is aiming at bringing the joy of pure marketing with a creative touch, putting various elements of Clouds like Creative, Document, Marketing Analytics and Advertising into a single enterprise suite.

What is Adobe Experience Cloud?

via Adobe
Adobe Experience Cloud

Adobe Experience Cloud is a comprehensive set of cloud services, designed ingeniously to provide B2B enterprises everything they need to deliver extraordinary customer experiences. The new cloud solution comprises of Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Advertising Cloud and Adobe Analytics Cloud. Built on the Adobe Cloud Platform, Experience Cloud leverages Adobe Sensei’s machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. Adobe Sensei was itself announced in the last Adobe Summit in March 2016.

via Adobe Quote

 

Enlightening the industry on how Adobe intends to leverage customer intelligence and cloud integration for better experiences, Brad Rencher, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Digital Marketing, Adobe says –

“At Adobe, we believe experience is the great differentiator, the make-or-break attribute to ignite life-long customer advocacy and growth. Leveraging deep customer intelligence, Adobe Experience Cloud gives businesses everything they need to deliver a well-designed, personal and consistent experience that delights customers at every touchpoint.”

Adobe  Experience Cloud  Marks the Maturity of Marketing Clouds

Adobe Experience Cloud combines best-in-business solutions, bringing a complete, extensible platform, comprehensive data and content systems, offered through a robust partner ecosystem for an unparalleled experience delivery expertise.

Adobe Marketing Cloud

Brand Differentiation for Proactive Engagement  

Marketers can craft experiences that differentiate their brands, connect with customers and proactively engage them using Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Social and Adobe Primetime within Experience Cloud suite.

Brands can manage, personalize, optimize and orchestrate campaigns and customer journeys at scale.

Adobe Advertising Cloud

Embrace Programmatic for Cross-Channel Advertising

Integrating with Adobe Experience Cloud, the latest advertising solution aims to solve problems arising from increasingly complex and fragmented landscape, with legacy silos for media planning and buying across TV and digital.

via Adobe
via Adobe

Now available globally, Adobe Advertising Cloud includes –

  • AMO Search: the leading search management platform
  • AMO Demand Side Platform (DSP): automates display, social, video and programmatic TV buying
  • AMO Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO): dynamic creative optimization tied into Creative Cloud

Adobe Experience Cloud will deliver sweet amalgamation of all marketing efforts through centralized advertising planning and buying platform, bringing full transparency into exactly where ads appear and how effective they are at driving business results.

Adobe Analytics Cloud 

Turn Insights into Actions, Real-time

Adobe Analytics Cloud, powered by new enhancements in Adobe I/O,  is the customer intelligence engine. It powers businesses by enabling them to move from insights to action in real-time by uniquely integrating audience data across all Adobe clouds.

via Adobe
via Adobe

Adobe Analytics Cloud combines Adobe Audience Manager, the leading data and audience management platform, and Adobe Analytics, the industry leading solution for applying real-time analytics and detailed audience segmentation across all marketing channels. Built on the Adobe Cloud Platform, which provides open APIs, a standard data model, and Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s unified AI and machine learning framework.

New I/O Events and Creative Cloud APIs offer developers access to Creative Cloud assets and events. For example, a developer can build a custom application that responds when a creative file is changed, or a new Creative Cloud asset is uploaded, and programmatically move that content into marketing execution.

Adobe Analytics Cloud enables brands to better capture, aggregate, rationalize and understand vast amounts of their own disparate data and then translate that data into singular profiles of their customers.

Exchange Partner Integrations

Several partners, including Acxiom, AppDynamics, Clicktale, Decibel Insight, Dun & Bradstreet, Mastercard, Ooyala, SapientRazorfish and others announced new integrations with Adobe Experience Cloud.

Marketers can plan and activate more effective programs by combining Adobe Analytics data using Adobe Audience Manager.

Adobe also deepened its partnership with Microsoft and unveiled the first set of joint solutions that integrate Adobe Experience Cloud with Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft PowerBI.

Adobe Sensei for Enterprises

Adobe also released several new Sensei capabilities for the enterprise including Fluid Experiences to enable brands to deliver the experience consumers expect across any connected screen, including social, VR, IoT devices and physical screens. In addition, Auto-Target eliminates the complexity associated with manual testing and deterministic or rule-based content personalization. The company also released Enhanced Anomaly Detection and Contribution Analysis to help brands identify statistically significant events, pinpoint sources and take action to optimize the user experience.

via Adobe
via Adobe

Adobe Sensei, as the intelligence layer in the Adobe Cloud Platform, provides customers with a unified AI and machine learning framework as well as intelligent services to help them work smarter and faster. In Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe Sensei already powers over 100 intelligent capabilities including Intelligent Alerts, Automated Advertising Insights, Anomaly Detection and Lookalike Modeling.

Apart from the launch of Adobe Experience Cloud and vital additions to other cloud stacks, the company also announced integration between Adobe Sign and Adobe Experience Manager Forms. This will help marketers optimize complex, form-based work processes and deliver engaging, mobile-friendly digital experiences across the customer journey.

Will Adobe Experience Cloud become the “First, Ubiquitous Cross-Channel” Cloud suite in the industry?

We will have more insights on this development very shortly.

Informatica Partners With Google Cloud to Bring Quick-Scale Marketing Analytics

Informatica integration with Google Cloud BigQuery via YouTube

Informatica Cloud extends partnership with Google Cloud. It will offer data integration solution for Google BigQuery. The company also announced world’s first Cloud Lake Data Management solution to support existing SQL Data Warehouse platforms.

Informatica®, the leading data integration and Cloud management company, announced about extending its partnership with Google Cloud at the recently concluded Google Cloud NEXT’17. The extended partnership with Google Cloud will enable Informatica in providing best-in-class services in areas of cloud integration, marketing analytics, and data warehouse modernization.

By partnering with Google Cloud, Informatica aims to transform the way businesses mine, use and scale data adding more power to their existing platforms with more accurate and faster insights, agility and lower costs of operation. The expanded collaboration between Informatica and Google offers unified customers easy, frictionless data migration to Google Cloud. The unified data management and cloud integration platform help in scaling up marketing efforts via “one-stop-shop” for the complete and accurate view of marketing data in Google BigQuery.

In addition to the latest partnership, Informatica also announced world’s first Cloud Lake Data Management Solution. Built on the Informatica Intelligent Data Lake®, the new cloud data lake management solution offers authoritative data from across the entire organization in their hands for more informed decision making. Informatica Cloud Data  Lake Management supports Amazon Web Services Redshift, Amazon Aurora, Microsoft Azure SQL Database and Microsoft SQL Data Warehouse.

Informatica’s Mission: Provide Quick-scale Enterprise Cloud Data Capabilities at Lowest Cost

“One of the great challenges for marketers today is that they are awash in data about their customers,” said Sally Jenkins, executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Informatica.

via Informatica
via Informatica

“A decade ago marketing was a discipline driven by preference, experience and gut-feeling. Today, marketers are one of the most data-driven function in organizations. With Informatica, customers can pull data from the critical marketing systems, such as Marketo, Eloqua, and Salesforce, into Google BigQuery. By combining Google Cloud Platform, an extremely powerful, scalable and cost-effective big data analytics platform, with Informatica Cloud® which offers connectivity and data management, customers can expect powerful insights, recommendations and offers, which is what everyone is looking for.”

How will CMOs benefit from this martech partnership between Google Cloud and Informatica?

via Informatica

Marketing analytics is the ubiquitous requirement of every CMO, and hence investments are achieving hyper-growth attention from martech companies that focus on bringing an unadulterated real-time data. Informatica working with Google Cloud intends to help marketing professionals experience the ease of using data-driven market engine within their organizations, at the lowest cost of deployment and operation.

As Ajay Gandhi, VP Informatica Cloud Marketing puts it –

“Increasingly, CEOs and CFOs are asking CMOs for the spend accountability and show ROI on marketing spend. The simple marketing mantra is: do NOT spend money if you cannot measure it. Gone are the days of spending millions of dollars on marketing initiatives that aren’t targeted and relying on a “spray and pray” approach.”

Accelerating Marketing Analytics with Automatic Centralizing of Data

B2B marketers can put marketing data in a supercharged mode using Google Cloud, which announced the introduction of BigQuery Data Service. This will automatically centralize data from AdWords, YouTube, DoubleClick and Google Analytics 360, offering marketers a single, unhindered ‘source of truth’. Informatica Cloud will provide exclusive Google Cloud Platform Connectors to kick off BigQuery projects seamlessly.

via Informatica
via Informatica

Pointing at the expected outcomes from the collaboration, Gandhi adds, “The result enables CMOs and their team to address many of the biggest data and operational challenges in moving to a high performing data-driven marketing organization.”

Quick Seamless Integration for B2B Customers

Informatica’s data management offerings are well aligned and are expanding their support for the Google Cloud Platform, providing integration with Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL.

Google BigQuery

Informatica Cloud for cloud integration scales from proof-of-concept to petabyte-scale production systems. With the Informatica Cloud connector for Google BigQuery, Google Cloud customers can use Informatica Cloud’s native, high volume connectors to transform and load data into and out of BigQuery from cloud applications, social IoT and on-premise sources.

Google Cloud Storage

With the Informatica Cloud connector for Google Cloud Storage, Informatica Cloud can move and synchronize data of all types and volumes into and out of Google Cloud Storage for big data analytics.

Cloud SQL

Informatica Cloud support for Cloud SQL will simplify the migration of data from on-premise databases into Cloud SQL, Google’s fully managed, transactional database service.

Informatica further enhances the value for marketing organizations by combining, enriching and augmenting existing Google Marketing data with data from social, CRM and marketing automation sources.

via Informatica
Informatica Cloud integration

Informatica’s out-of-the-box connectivity to sources such as Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics quickly transforms and loads the desired data into Google BigQuery for a holistic view of the entire marketing landscape. These powerful insights allow organizations to provide next great offers to their customers based on past purchases, preferences, and behaviors on the web.

Additionally, Informatica will also support all new Google Cloud Platform products with planned availability of connectivity to Google Spanner.

As execution becomes the core ‘point of action’ in digital marketing initiatives for CMOs, Informatica’s readily applicable cloud data management and marketing data analytics platform helps businesses save time, effort and revenue with buffer for adjustments and fine tuning.

CMOs can now execute and experiment competitively with their data, unperturbed by the fear of failing.