By: Joe Cordo, CMO Extraprise

It’s 2012, and with a new sense of optimism and a gradual level of economic improvement, CRM continues to evolve in ways that if implemented, strategically, will create even more sustainable competitive advantage. Here are four top trends for marketing and sales organizations in 2012:
 

1. Big Data 2.0 – Hyperbole aside, this is the big daddy of all trends. It drives real customer interaction history into CRM and marketing automation systems that if not rapidly leveraged, become a missed revenue opportunity. Big Data 2.0 embodies offline and online customer interaction history that is integrated through Cloud-based, intelligent marketing data marts into your CRM system. The result? The capability to drive intelligent-based multi-channel marketing campaigns with the right offer, at the right time, to the right buyer.
    
2. Marketing Automation 3.0 or the Cloud-based Marketing Data Mart – Marketing Automation 3.0 is about the deployment of Cloud-based marketing data marts that are fully and seamlessly integrated into your marketing automation and CRM platforms. This integration creates a true closed loop sales and marketing system between your marketing automation platform and CRM systems that harness and extend your Big Data. Why? Databases in marketing automation and CRM systems do not capture your offline and online customer interaction history, and as a result, cannot create a complete customer profile that can be leveraged by your marketing and sales campaigns at each stage of the customer lifecycle. When you use today’s marketing automation and CRM platforms, you get boxed into basic levels of segmentation and prospect and customer interaction history. The Cloud-based marketing data mart enables you to go much deeper on segmentation, and hence really drive revenue performance from your campaigns.
    
3. Customer and Sales Intelligence – Customer intelligence and sales intelligence will come together within closed loop marketing and sales environments. Customer intelligence is a trend moving beyond marketing analytics, which is characterized by static dashboards. Customer intelligence makes your customer interaction history actionable, leveraging the Cloud-based marketing data mart, to get too far more sophisticated forms of segmentation and profiling that drive new customer acquisition and create upsell and cross-sell opportunities more efficiently. Embracing customer intelligence, and making it a part of your closed loop sales and marketing system, enables the transformation of this information into sales intelligence that flows freely to the sales force automation system.
    
4. Right Time Multi-channel Marketing – Social media will soon be monetized through Right Time Multi-channel Marketing. Right Time Multi-channel Marketing takes these conversations and customer interactions, through social media listening platforms and Cloud-based marketing data marts, and makes them part of customer profiles that can then be contextualized in campaigns that drive the right offer at the right time to the right buyer. What sales and marketing organizations require are a closed loop sales and marketing system that treats marketing automation, customer intelligence, CRM, social media listening platforms, and any data source as a holistic environment all based on customer profile information.

Sales and marketing alignment has continued to trend as a hot topic, and a key driver of closed loop sales and marketing environments. Closed loop sales and marketing environments are now evolving toward much more sophisticated levels of customer and sales intelligence that are infinitely more accessible, affordable and scalable. To achieve these benefits for sustainable competitive advantage, these environments need to be integrated through Cloud-based marketing automation platforms, intelligent marketing data marts, and CRM systems.