Today I attended a briefing on an overview of the sales tools for Eloqua as well as a what’s coming. Love the road map pieces, so fun to see what enhancements are planned.
The session was presented by Taha Skeikh who is the Director of Product Management and Nard Linders who is part of the EMEA Product Management team. In the half hour, there was a lot of great details that they presented. I’ll give you a small glimpse into what they presented and if you would like to hear the whole presentation, you can listen to the recording here (you can also find the previous three sessions, too). If you prefer to read about the previous session content, see my recent blog posts…Oracle Marketing Cloud – Program Canvas verses Program Builder click here or Oracle Marketing Cloud – Release Details and Roadmap click here
Presentation Highlights:
Vision: Sales has many tools they are using in the course of identifying leads, generating proposals, and CPQ. Some of these may not pay off, but all companies are investing in tech.
The challenge is to not overload sales, but to provide sales with smart solutions that allow for easy adoption without causing a new way of working.
Bucketing the Investment:
- Alignment: creating a solution where sales and marketing have the capabilities to get to the customer.
- Adoption: Key capabilities at the fingertips of sales that are intuitive and easy to use.
- Everywhere: Embedding these tools in the experience so the work is done.
Sales Tools:
- Profiler: Digital body language view for sales. Ability to see relevant buyer behavior and understand which emails and marketing materials a customer is interacting with as well as the webpages that are visited and be able to drill down to the view of the page. Activity alerts provide the ability to analyze and take action on the details learned. Interactive timelines to toggle lead scoring.
- Engage: Marketing approved templates where sales can view the opens and click-through as well as add additional personalization.
- What’s new, the ability to filter email groups and add attachments either as a file or a clickable link.
- Chrome Plug-in: Extends the ability for sales reps to visit a website and Profiler and Engage will be able to lookup contacts in the database that match the domain. For Engage, these contacts will be able to be added to an email send for targeting.
- Responsive Design: Both Engage and Profiler have gone through a redesign to make them mobile friendly. They will work on all mobile devices and platforms! This is extremely important for those sales people who are in their car more than at a desk.
Coming Soon:
- Outlook Plug-in: Will provide a full digital profile for real-time validation. Emails will be sent from your company’s Exchange server with Eloqua embedded code for tracking, this way the thread is maintained in Outlook and not a reply from Engage. Also, the plug-in will give the ability to see what details are known in Profiler about the person being sent too, details on which activities have been interacting with. The BETA will start in January of 2017, with Controlled Availability sometime in April 2017 (before or by MME).
- Advanced Reports: Filter on emails sent and the ability to analyze the effectiveness of the emails. Compare and contrast the emails being sent and what is doing better, based on clicks or opens. This is in correlation with the new reporting capabilities that were released in the 484 Release in November.
- Account Profile Data: Aligning more on the account based marketing across platforms so that sales can aggregate data across the account and see the life cycle of the account.
Future Enhancements:
- Engage:
- Chooser: being able to select templates in a better manner than via email groups. Oracle has realized, based on client feedback, that email groups may not be the best way to organize the email templates available in Engage, so they are looking at ways to enhance this by creating a better folder structure.
- Permissions: based on varying needs, Oracle is looking at ways to enhance this capability in Engage as well such as ways to gate functionality like contact creation.
- Contact View and Fields: exposing views that marketing has created so that fields that are required for the organization are filled in before the contact is created.
- Profiler:
- Displaying details of Custom Object records in the view of the contact. Valuable information is stored in Custom Objects that may be pertinent for a sales person to know.
- Page Tags: making it visible in Profiler, and not just what pages were viewed.
- Account Based view: previously mentioned above.
- Engage and Profiler:
- Usage Tracking: report available for admins to view the usage and adoption of the sales tools.
- Native: having apps for both iOS and Android to make the functionality even easier for sales to access.
- Third-Party Extensions: exploring integration of apps within the Oracle suite and with Partners.
- Sales Driven Campaigns: automation of responses, such as with a webinar/seminar invite being able to automate the interaction so that another email would be sent from Engage with additional details if needed.
Just a few of the questions answered during the end of the session:
- Outlook Plug-in Release and Cost?
- Available for BETA in January of 2017. There is an agreement that needs to be reviewed and signed. Contact your Account Rep to get on the list and to be sent more information.
- No additional cost, it will be part of your current Sales Tools license.
- Outlook Plug-in versions and tracking?
- Versions are currently Windows 7, 8, and 10; with Outlook 10, 13, and 16. They are looking into Outlook 365 and Outlook for Mac as well as other email clients like Gmail.
- Engage templates will be available via the plug-in.
These sessions are packed with details. There is going to be one more session, on Thursday December 8th, registration is here.
