Commercial open source companies are transforming the software industry and adding innovative business tools to keep up with demand. Traditional business models utilize CRM to some degree but most organizations use it as a glorified contact management system. Because of the high traffic patterns of most commercial open source companies, there needed to be a better system to keep track of all the activity.

Enter Closed Loop Marketing (CLM). CLM works in the background to measure and analyze the activities of your prospects as they visit your website, landing pages or open emails. Every digital footstep is tracked giving the sales and marketing organizations a holistic view of the people visiting their web properties. By continuously tracking the prospects through the sales pipeline, Sales and Marketing can proactively engage prospects with the right information at the right time.

The combination of all these factors results in an improved ROI, happier customers (since you’re only talking to the interested), reduction in sales time and an improved bottom line.

During the past few years, open source companies have adopted a powerful one-two punch by utilizing SugarCRM and Loopfuse. In fact, according to a MindTouch best practices study, over 40% of the respondents were using the combination to track the activities of the most active prospects in their sales pipelines. The study found that the companies with the highest sales conversion rates used lead scoring methodologies, automated drip campaigns, and understood their key sales metrics (conversion ratio, trials to sales, cost per customer, etc.)

Now traditional companies are starting to take note. These powerful tools are quickly moving out of the open source domain to companies like IBM, Yahoo and Microsoft. Recognizing their large volume of traffic is anonymous, they have taken additional steps to empower their sales and marketing managers to maximize the customer lifetime value of their most profitable customers. The additional benefits of penetrating untouched markets, creating market awareness, and increasing sales revenue by delivering targeted promotions, emails and campaigns make it a must have for high volume web traffic.

CLM Converts are proclaiming their businesses can’t function without these tools. Others worry about privacy issues and upsetting customers, but most haven’t found that to be a problem. Converts recommend starting small. Start with marketing automation. It doesn’t take nearly as much time as most think. Once comfortable with that, move on to real time behavior monitoring and situational activity alerts. As a result, CLM users claim the financial rewards are high.

Question: Do you use CLM? If not why not?

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