Marketplace: Where Local Search and CRM Meet
By now, it’s no longer considered rocket science, figuring out how to promote a business online without breaking the bank:
- The transparency of the internet makes it very easy to research your competitors and their markets, to carve out a unique message for broadcasting online.
- Hordes of talented website designers have flooded the market in recent years, making the design and launch of a professional-looking website easier and more cost-effective than ever.
- Free tools such as Google Analytics allow you to capitalize on essential market research, which will help you prepare for business cycles, launch new products, and maintain profitability in a changing environment.
- With a little experience in keyword research and know-how in campaign design, search engine marketing can turn your website into a veritable money printing machine.
But there is one issue which is often overlooked: is there a cost-effective way to use digital technologies for sales management?
Salesforce.com and other CRM (customer relationship management) heavyweights have built a fortune on streamlining the process of collecting, analyzing and following up on new business opportunities.
Meanwhile, a slew of internet properties have leveraged the potential of localized search and e-commerce: events sites like Meetup, review sites like Yelp, classifieds like Craigslist, and of course, the local renditions of all the major search engines.
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New York-based Briz.com brings its users right in the middle of these two important trends. By simply building up a network the same way one adds contacts on LinkedIn, the user then has a pool of partners and prospect with which to streamline many operations:
- Send email blasts, quickly and easily, to everyone in your network to announce a new promotion
- Coordinate event planning, including program, invite lists, and new registrant followups
- Effortlessly engage partners and suppliers to help you gauge and meet a new market need
- Create affiliate network potential — incentivize your partners to refer business by way of promotion codes
Automating the key relationships that drive your business is an essential step in getting to the next level. While the partnership between Google and Salesforce.com is a nice synergistic step forward for sales management, the overwhelming majority of businesses in the United States simply do not have the scale to justify such an investment. For everyone else, there’s Briz.com.
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This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 @ 5:11 pm on the category Local search, Small business.
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