SalesGene, a startup that worked a niche category of sales force automation called "marketing sales effectiveness," has renamed itself and repositioned its product in order to better serve its potential buyers.
The firm is now called "Landslide Technologies," echoing the name of the firm's portal-like application introduced in early 2006. The application functionality is mostly identical, but the company is now targeting individual sales reps in addition to the enterprise's management structure, CEO Razi Imam told CRM Buyer.
Remote Assistance
The company has introduced Landslide Personal Edition, which features a personal assistant, communication channels for qualifying prospects, and guidance for closing deals, among other tools. As with earlier editions, the personal assistant is Landslide's most distinctive offering, literally offering users a remote, human assistant to complete sales related administrative tasks, such as updating a contact list or contacting prospects.
Other features can help users qualify prospects via validation sources, which can be customized. In addition, Landslide offers six sales guidance templates for distance selling, enterprise 
software sales, enterprise hardware sales, consulting and services sales, federal sales or the CustomerCentric selling methodology.
Links to Marketing
Sales marketing effectiveness is too small to be sized as a product category -- or even a subcategory -- according to Martin Schneider, an enterprise software analyst with 451 Group. It is, though, an area of growing interest to both enterprises and software vendors.
Historically, sales and marketing activities have been siloed activities -- both in the office and in CRM applications. Providing intelligence across these two application types is a specialty category that some firms are developing. Many suite and CRM vendors are tightening the links between sales and marketing internally, Schneider explained.
"We are seeing [this in] companies like Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) 
, with its Kieden acquisition, and similar functionality within NetSuite," he said.
Best-of-breed providers such as Landslide are approaching this space in any number of directions, he added. "Some vendors, like ATG (Nasdaq: ARTG) with Primus, are using intelligence in a knowledge-centric way, keeping the customer and salespeople better supported through the process. Other vendors are approaching it from a CRM-SFA angle. Eloqua, for instance, has added much more intelligence into the hand-off between sales and marketing."
One driver behind the development and adoption of this technology is management's need to better track campaigns, so that they can choose the most effective ones and also decide which salespeople are best at following up leads, Schneider said.
For that purpose, Landslide may not necessarily be beneficial. The company is marketing and pricing the product for individual sellers who want to do a better job, whether or not their company supports the application in-house.
"For the ambitious salesperson, however, there is no time to wait for your company to grow into a solution -- or for your IT team to find the budget and bandwidth to approve one," said Imam.
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