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PandaDoc integrates with your CRM, saves your team time, and provides transparency into your sales performance. \r\n<p class=\"align-left\">In 2011, <span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">PandaDoc</span> set their eyes on changing the way companies work with documents, specifically improving an organization’s document workflow to increase revenue. Too often, modern businesses still use dated processes because of habit or comfort. This wastes tremendous amounts of time and has a negative effect on their bottom line. 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It is sometimes referred to as &quot;on-demand software&quot;, and was formerly referred to as &quot;software plus services&quot; by Microsoft.\r\n SaaS services is typically accessed by users using a thin client, e.g. via a web browser. SaaS software solutions has become a common delivery model for many business applications, including office software, messaging software, payroll processing software, DBMS software, management software, CAD software, development software, gamification, virtualization, accounting, collaboration, customer relationship management (CRM), Management Information Systems (MIS), enterprise resource planning (ERP), invoicing, human resource management (HRM), talent acquisition, learning management systems, content management (CM), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and service desk management. SaaS has been incorporated into the strategy of nearly all leading enterprise software companies.\r\nSaaS applications are also known as <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Web-based software</span>, <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">on-demand software</span> and<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\"> hosted software</span>.\r\nThe term &quot;Software as a Service&quot; (SaaS) is considered to be part of the nomenclature of cloud computing, along with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Desktop as a Service (DaaS),managed software as a service (MSaaS), mobile backend as a service (MBaaS), and information technology management as a service (ITMaaS).\r\nBecause SaaS is based on cloud computing it saves organizations from installing and running applications on their own systems. That eliminates or at least reduces the associated costs of hardware purchases and maintenance and of software and support. The initial setup cost for a SaaS application is also generally lower than it for equivalent enterprise software purchased via a site license.\r\nSometimes, the use of SaaS cloud software can also reduce the long-term costs of software licensing, though that depends on the pricing model for the individual SaaS offering and the enterprise’s usage patterns. In fact, it’s possible for SaaS to cost more than traditional software licenses. This is an area IT organizations should explore carefully.<br />SaaS also provides enterprises the flexibility inherent with cloud services: they can subscribe to a SaaS offering as needed rather than having to buy software licenses and install the software on a variety of computers. The savings can be substantial in the case of applications that require new hardware purchases to support the software.<br /><br /><br /><br />","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Who uses SaaS?</span></h1>\r\nIndustry analyst Forrester Research notes that SaaS adoption has so far been concentrated mostly in human resource management (HRM), customer relationship management (CRM), collaboration software (e.g., email), and procurement solutions, but is poised to widen. Today it’s possible to have a data warehouse in the cloud that you can access with business intelligence software running as a service and connect to your cloud-based ERP like NetSuite or Microsoft Dynamics.The dollar savings can run into the millions. And SaaS installations are often installed and working in a fraction of the time of on-premises deployments—some can be ready in hours. \r\nSales and marketing people are likely familiar with Salesforce.com, the leading SaaS CRM software, with millions of users across more than 100,000 customers. Sales is going SaaS too, with apps available to support sales in order management, compensation, quote production and configure, price, quoting, electronic signatures, contract management and more.\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Why SaaS? Benefits of software as a service</span></h1>\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Lower cost of entry</span>. With SaaS solution, you pay for what you need, without having to buy hardware to host your new applications. Instead of provisioning internal resources to install the software, the vendor provides APIs and performs much of the work to get their software working for you. The time to a working solution can drop from months in the traditional model to weeks, days or hours with the SaaS model. In some businesses, IT wants nothing to do with installing and running a sales app. In the case of funding software and its implementation, this can be a make-or-break issue for the sales and marketing budget, so the lower cost really makes the difference.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reduced time to benefit/rapid prototyping</span>. In the SaaS model, the software application is already installed and configured. Users can provision the server for the cloud and quickly have the application ready for use. This cuts the time to benefit and allows for rapid demonstrations and prototyping. With many SaaS companies offering free trials, this means a painless proof of concept and discovery phase to prove the benefit to the organization. </li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Pay as you go</span>. SaaS business software gives you the benefit of predictable costs both for the subscription and to some extent, the administration. Even as you scale, you can have a clear idea of what your costs will be. This allows for much more accurate budgeting, especially as compared to the costs of internal IT to manage upgrades and address issues for an owned instance.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">The SaaS vendor is responsible for upgrades, uptime and security</span>. Under the SaaS model, since the software is hosted by the vendor, they take on the responsibility for maintaining the software and upgrading it, ensuring that it is reliable and meeting agreed-upon service level agreements, and keeping the application and its data secure.&nbsp; While some IT people worry about Software as a Service security outside of the enterprise walls, the likely truth is that the vendor has a much higher level of security than the enterprise itself would provide. Many will have redundant instances in very secure data centers in multiple geographies.&nbsp; Also, the data is being automatically backed up by the vendor, providing additional security and peace of mind. Because of the data center hosting, you’re getting the added benefit of at least some disaster recovery. Lastly, the vendor manages these issues as part of their core competencies—let them.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Integration and scalability.</span> Most SaaS apps are designed to support some amount of customization for the way you do business. SaaS vendors create APIs to allow connections not only to internal applications like ERPs or CRMs but also to other SaaS providers. One of the terrific aspects of integration is that orders written in the field can be automatically sent to the ERP. Now a salesperson in the field can check inventory through the catalog, write the order in front of the customer for approval, send it and receive confirmation, all in minutes. And as you scale with a SaaS vendor, there’s no need to invest in server capacity and software licenses. </li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Work anywhere</span>. Since the software is hosted in the cloud and accessible over the internet, users can access it via mobile devices wherever they are connected. This includes checking customer order histories prior to a sales call, as well as having access to real time data and real time order taking with the customer.</li></ul>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">&nbsp;</p>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/SaaS__1_.png","alias":"saas-software-as-a-service"},"68":{"id":68,"title":"Human Capital Management","description":"Human capital management (HCM) is a business philosophy that emphasizes the enhancement of employees while viewing them as a quantifiable asset whose future value can be increased through investment.\r\nEmployees are perceived as assets that can be provided with clear performance expectations, against which they can be rated and rewarded based on their progress over time.\r\nHuman capital management involves providing employees with the tools and training needed to accomplish stated performance goals, as well as metrics for monitoring and assessing the progress made toward these goals. HCM is also typically a key component of a company’s comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.\r\nHuman capital management is crucial for business success as workforce trends and laws add more complexity to recruitment, retention, legislative compliance and employee management. In today's workplace, workforce management success requires that HR managers act proactively rather than reactively, and HCM helps them to do so by bringing HR functions together in one accessible place, such as an HCM software suite.","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is HCM software?</span>\r\nHCM (Human Capital Management) is a set of practices designed to help organizations manage, develop and acquire employees, and which regards employees as a business asset. HCM software focusses on both the administrative side of Human Resources (HR) and the strategic side of the business, helping organizations to maximize business value through its people. HCM software uses a series of applications to help automate and streamline HR processes. It is typically considered an enterprise software that is able to scale up or down depending on the size and the needs of the organization. It offers features such as time management and payroll as well as more advanced solutions such as performance management and employee engagement monitoring.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What are the main sides of HCM?</span>\r\n<ol><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Transactional:</span> Including processes such as payroll, absence management, time management, benefits management, and onboarding.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Transformational:</span> Including processes such as talent management (recruiting, learning, performance) and business intelligence (big data, employee data management, HR analytics, and workforce planning).</li></ol>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What are the benefits of HCM software?</span>\r\n<ul><li>Improved visibility over the workforce</li><li>Consolidated HR systems</li><li>Advanced analytics</li><li>Improved reporting</li><li>Attracting and retaining top talent</li><li>Lower HR costs</li><li>Automated manual processes</li><li>Increased employee satisfaction</li></ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Who uses HCM Software?</span>\r\nEvery company with a forward-looking HR strategy uses HCM software. Since companies invest in people (starting with their salaries), it makes sense for any organization to invest in Human Capital Management software.\r\nIn practical terms, there are five different categories of users:\r\n<ul><li>Employees</li><li>Managers</li><li>The HR department</li><li>The C-suite</li></ul>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Human_Capital_Management.png","alias":"human-capital-management"},"71":{"id":71,"title":"CRM - Customer Relationship Management","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Customer service</span> is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. The perception of success of such interactions is dependent on employees &quot;who can adjust themselves to the personality of the guest&quot;. Customer service concerns the priority an organization assigns to customer service relative to components such as product innovation and pricing. In this sense, an organization that values good customer service may spend more money in training employees than the average organization or may proactively interview customers for feedback.\r\nA <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">customer support</span> is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product. These services even may be done at customer's side where he/she uses the product or service. In this case it is called &quot;at home customer services&quot; or &quot;at home customer support.&quot;\r\nRegarding technology, products such as mobile phones, televisions, computers, software products or other electronic or mechanical goods, it is termed technical support. \r\nCustomer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales and service representative), or by automated means, such as kiosks, Internet sites, and apps.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM </span>(Customer Relationship Management) is an approach to manage a company's interaction with current and potential customers. It uses data analysis about customers' history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.\r\nOne important aspect of the CRM approach is the systems of CRM that compile data from a range of different communication channels, including a company's website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials and more recently, social media. Through the CRM approach and the systems used to facilitate it, businesses learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater to their needs.\r\nCRM helps users focus on their organization’s relationships with individual people including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers.\r\nWhen people talk about customer relationship management system, they might mean any of three things: \r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as Technology</span>: This is a technology product, often in the cloud, that teams use to record, report and analyse interactions between the company and users. This is also called a CRM system or solution.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Strategy</span>: This is a business’ philosophy about how relationships with customers and potential customers should be managed.&nbsp; </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Process</span>: Think of this as a system a business adopts to nurture and manage those relationships.</li></ul>\r\n<br /><br /><br />","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Why is CRM important?</span></h1>\r\nCRM management system enables a business to deepen its relationships with customers, service users, colleagues, partners and suppliers.\r\nForging good relationships and keeping track of prospects and customers is crucial for customer acquisition and retention, which is at the heart of a CRM’s function. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customizable dashboard that can tell you a customer’s previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more.\r\nGartner predicts that by 2021, CRM technology will be the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software. If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. For forward-thinking businesses, CRM is the framework for that strategy.\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the benefits of CRM?</span></h1>\r\nBy collecting and organising data about customer interactions, making it accessible and actionable for all, and facilitating analysis of that data, CRM offers many benefits and advantages.<br />The benefits and advantages of CRM include:\r\n<ul><li>Enhanced contact management</li><li>Cross-team collaboration</li><li>Heightened productivity</li><li>Empowered sales management</li><li>Accurate sales forecasting</li><li>Reliable reporting</li><li>Improved sales metrics</li><li>Increased customer satisfaction and retention</li><li>Boosted marketing ROI</li><li>Enriched products and services</li></ul>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the key features of most popular CRM software programs?</span></h1>\r\nWhile many CRM solutions differ in their specific value propositions — depending on your business size, priority function, or industry type — they usually share some core features. These, in fact, are the foundation of any top CRM software, without which you might end up using an inferior app or an over-rated address book. So, let’s discuss the key features you need to look for when figuring out the best CRM software for your business.\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Contact management</span>. The best CRM solutions aren’t just an address book that only organizes contact details. It manages customer data in a centralized place and gives you a 360-degree view of your customers. You should be able to organize customers’ personal information, demographics, interactions, and transactions in ways that are meaningful to your goals or processes. Moreover, a good contact management feature lets you personalize your outreach campaign. By collecting personal, social, and purchase data, it will help you to segment target audience groups in different ways.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reporting and dashboards</span>. These features of customer relationship management allow you to use analytics to interpret customer data. Reporting is very useful if you want to consolidate disparate data and churn out insights in different visualizations. This lets you make better decisions or proactively deal with market trends and customer behavioral patterns. The more visual widgets a CRM software has, the better you can present reports. Furthermore, a best customer relationship management software will generate real-time data, making reporting more accurate and timely. Reporting also keeps you tab on sales opportunities like upsell, resell, and cross-sell, especially when integrated with e-commerce platforms.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Lead management</span>. These features let you manage leads all the way to win-loss stage. They pave a clear path to conversion, so you can quickly assess how the business is performing. One of the main three legs that comprises the best client relationship management software (the other two being contact management and reporting), lead management unburdens the sales team from follow-ups, tracking, and repetitive tasks.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Deals and tasks</span>. Deals and tasks are closely associated with leads. Deals are leads at the negotiation stage, so it’s critical to keep a close eye on their associated tasks for a higher chance of conversion.<br />CRM software tools should also let you track both deals and tasks in their respective windows or across the sales stages. Whether you’re viewing a contact or analyzing the sales pipeline, you should be able to immediately check the deal’s tasks and details. Deals and tasks should also have user permissions to protect leaks of sensitive data. Similarly, alerts are critical to tasks so deadlines are met. Notifications are usually sent via email or prominently displayed on the user’s dashboard.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Campaign management</span>. Solid CRM software will integrate this feature to enable marketing processes from outreach concept to A/B testing to deployment and to post analysis. This will allow you to sort campaigns to target segments in your contacts and define deployment strategies. You will also be able to define metrics for various channels, then plow back the insights generated by post-campaign analytics into planning more campaigns.<br />Recurring outreach efforts can also be automated. For instance, you can set to instantly appropriate content to contacts based on their interest or send tiered autoresponders based on campaign feedback.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Email management</span>. By integrating with popular email clients like Gmail and Outlook, CRM solutions can capture email messages and sort important details that can be saved in contacts or synced with leads. They can also track activities like opened emails, forwarded emails, clicked links, and downloaded files. Emails can also be qualified for prospecting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Social media management. </span>Popular CRM systems feature an integrated social media management where you can view different social media pages from the CRM’s interface. This is a convenient way to post, reply on, and manage all your pages. Likewise, this feature gives you a better perspective on how customers are interacting with your brand. A glean of their likes and dislikes, interests, shares, and public conversations helps you to assess customer biases and preferences. Customers are also increasingly using social media to contact companies; hence, a good CRM should alert you for brand mentions.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Mobile access</span>. With more users accessing apps via mobile devices, many vendors have been prioritizing mobile-first platforms. Emergence Capital Partners study found over 300 mobile-first apps so far and CRM is definitely one their targets. Many CRM solutions have both Android and iOS apps. Mobile access works in two ways to be highly appreciated: accessing data and inputting data while on location. Field sales with the latest sales information on hand may be able to interest prospects better. Conversely, sales reps can quickly update deals across the pipeline even as they come off a client meeting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/CRM_-_Customer_Relationship_Management.png","alias":"crm-customer-relationship-management"},"146":{"id":146,"title":"ECM - Enterprise Content Management","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Enterprise content management (ECM)</span> extends the concept of content management by adding a time line for each content item and possibly enforcing processes for the creation, approval and distribution of them. Systems that implement ECM generally provide a secure repository for managed items, be they analog or digital, that indexes them. They also include one or more methods for importing content to bring new items under management and several presentation methods to make items available for use. The key feature of ECM that distinguishes it from &quot;simple&quot; content management is that an ECM is at least cognizant of the processes and procedures of the enterprise it is created for, and as such is particular to it. \r\nECM as an umbrella term covers enterprise document management system, Web content management, search, collaboration, records management, digital asset management (DAM), workflow management, capture and scanning. ECM is primarily aimed at managing the life-cycle of information from initial publication or creation all the way through archival and eventual disposal. ECM enterprise content management software is delivered in four ways:\r\n- on-premises software (installed on an organization's own network)\r\n- software as a service (SaaS) (Web access to information that is stored on a software manufacturer's system)\r\n- a hybrid composed of both on-premises and SaaS components\r\n- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) (which refers to online services that abstract the user from the details of infrastructure like physical computing resources, location, data partitioning, scaling, security, backup etc.)\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">ECM provides</span> a centralized platform where content can be held and disseminated in a manner that meets regulatory compliance requirements and risk management guidelines. An ECM achieves the latter two benefits by eliminating ad hoc processes that can expose an enterprise to regulatory compliance risks and other potential problems. Full-function enterprise content management solutions include features such as content taxonomies, auditing capabilities, check-in/check-out and other workflow controls and security mechanisms.\r\nAn <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">effective ECM </span>can streamline access and business processes, eliminate bottlenecks by reducing storage, as well as paper and mailing needs, optimize security, maintain integrity and minimize overhead. All of these can lead to increased productivity. The first step is to document all the types of content that the organization deals with, the business processes its part of and who handles the content. \r\nECM software can be used to identify duplicate and near-duplicate content, allowing the organization to keep a few copies of a particular piece of content instead of hundreds. The best ECM software extends the reach of traditional ECM capabilities into previously isolated applications and information silos, such as ERP, CRM, SCM and HCM, to take the shape of a content services platform. Information can now flow across the enterprise to the people and processes—when, where and in whatever context it is needed.\r\nTo understand more specific ways it could help your company, consider these <span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">three types of ECM</span> software solutions.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Web Content Management.</span> WCM puts control over the look and feel of a website in the hands of specific, key people. It’s used by organizations with relatively complex websites and strict brand guidelines, giving those key personnel the means to easily update, modify and publish content for the sites while adhering to the guidelines.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Collaborative Content Management.</span> CCM enables multiple people to access and modify a single document, such as a legal document. It’s ideal for organizations that must manage projects involving multiple stakeholders. CCM makes it easy to work together while keeping track of, and updating, the most-current version of the document.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Transactional Content Management.</span> This type of ECM document management is designed for organizations that repeatedly use varied types of content, including records, paper documents, and digital files. TCM solutions capture content from various channels, classify it, store it, create an automated workflow to ensure the right user receives the content at the right time, and even deletes documents when they’re no longer needed, all while working seamlessly with other apps and databases, ensuring all of that content is available throughout the company.<br /><br /><br />\r\n\r\n","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"> <span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">What is Enterprise Content Management (ECM)?</span></h1>\r\nEnterprise Content Management is the organization of structured and unstructured documents using technology and software that allows your organization to “work smarter, not harder.” As technology advanced and everything became digital, organizations needed a new way to store and access files, leading to the creation of ECM. \r\nECM document management system consists of four main points:\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Capture:</span> Capturing information from hardcopy documents or online forms and transferring it into the system</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Manage:</span> Managing the captured data in a structured format that allows quick and easy retrieval</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Storing:</span> Securely storing files in a central repository that can be accessed from multiple locations</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Delivery:</span> Implementation of business process workflows to automatically move documents from one step to the next</li></ul>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Five ways ECM software can benefit your organization</span></h1>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Basic file sharing and library services.</span> At its core, enterprise document management software begins with basic file sharing and library services managed within a networked repository. Individuals and groups with predefined access rights and permissions can access the repository and then create, read, update and delete files stored within it.\r\nMany ECM applications support Content Management Interoperability Services, an industry standard that allows different vendors' products to interoperate; this is an essential capability within large enterprises that maintain content management tools from multiple vendors.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Content governance, compliance and records management.</span> For many organizations, managing business documents or other content types is a critical use case for ECM. Companies subject to compliance or other industry regulations need document content management system software to capture, manage, archive and ultimately dispose of files after a predefined period.\r\nECM can ensure that only individuals with predefined permissions - determined by access controls - can update or view documents stored within a repository. An organization can thus manage document modification.\r\nIn addition, enterprise content management tools can log all actions, providing an organization with the capabilities to maintain an auditable record of all the changes to documents within the repository.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Business process management.</span> Companies also use ECM to establish workflows that span departments and geographies to support extended enterprise and inter-enterprise business processes.\r\nMost ECM software provides tools to help both technical and non-technical business users define business processes. Most applications provide audit controls to track each step of the process and analytic capabilities to help identify inefficiencies and streamline business procedures.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Content repositories linked to other enterprise applications.</span> Some companies use electronic content management software as a repository for documents created by other enterprise applications, including CRM, ERP, HR and financial systems. These enterprise systems can seamlessly access, view or modify content managed by the ECM.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Enabling mobile and remote workforces.</span> Content management tools often include functionality to allow remote workers to access content from mobile devices. This is an increasingly important feature for many companies.\r\nMobile capabilities also enable new kinds of data capture and presentation functionalities. By combining content management capabilities with other data, for example, a political canvasser can use a tablet to enter new information about a political donor without having to start from scratch, as some of that information is already stored in a content management system. \r\n\r\n","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/ECM_-_Enterprise_Content_Management.png","alias":"ecm-enterprise-content-management"},"265":{"id":265,"title":"Application Software","description":"Application software (app for short) is software designed to perform a group of coordinated functions, tasks, or activities for the benefit of the user. Examples of an application include a word processor, a spreadsheet, an accounting application, a web browser, an email client,a media player, a file viewer, an aeronautical flight simulator, a console game or a photo editor. The collective noun application software refers to all applications collectively. This contrasts with system software, which is mainly involved with running the computer.\r\nApplications may be bundled with the computer and its system software or published separately, and may be coded as proprietary, open-source or university projects. Apps built for mobile platforms are called mobile apps.\r\nIn information technology, an application (app), application program or software application is a computer program designed to help people perform an activity. An application thus differs from an operating system (which runs a computer), a utility (which performs maintenance or general-purpose chores), and a programming tool (with which computer programs are created). Depending on the activity for which it was designed, an application can manipulate text, numbers, audio, graphics, or a combination of these elements. Some application packages focus on a single task, such as word processing; others, called integrated software include several applications.\r\nUser-written software tailors systems to meet the user's specific needs. User-written software includes spreadsheet templates, word processor macros, scientific simulations, audio, graphics and animation scripts. Even email filters are a kind of user software. Users create this software themselves and often overlook how important it is.\r\nThe delineation between system software such as operating systems and application software is not exact, however, and is occasionally the object of controversy. For example, one of the key questions in the United States v. Microsoft Corp. antitrust trial was whether Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser was part of its Windows operating system or a separable piece of application software. As another example, the GNU/Linux naming controversy is, in part, due to disagreement about the relationship between the Linux kernel and the operating systems built over this kernel. In some types of embedded systems, the application software and the operating system software may be indistinguishable to the user, as in the case of software used to control a VCR, DVD player or microwave oven. The above definitions may exclude some applications that may exist on some computers in large organizations.","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What are the benefits of application software?</span>\r\n<ol><li>Give your representatives a chance to work from anyplace - when you utilize an online model, your laborers can sign on from anyplace on the planet and get the information they have to carry out their occupations.</li><li>No compelling reason to download and introduce any projects – when you introduce programming on a PC there is dependably the danger of inconsistency and harm to the framework. With electronic &amp; web site design services with programming, there are no such dangers, since you never really need to download and introduce anything on your neighborhood PC.</li><li>Utilizations a compensation as you go show – odds are your organization has bunches of programming applications it scarcely utilizes, however despite everything you need to pay for those projects. With electronic applications, you can utilize compensation as you go demonstrate and simply pay for the product you really utilize. What's more, obviously there is a lot of free yet proficient programming accessible too.</li><li>There is nothing to possess and keep up – when you purchase programming, you likewise need to purchase costly upkeep and bolster bundle, yet with programming as an administration, or SaaS, there are no such costs. There is nothing to possess, and you essentially utilize the program as you see fit.</li><li>Adaptability is the capacity to scale up rapidly is fundamental for little new companies. In the event that you arrive a lucrative new contract, you should have the capacity to scale your activities up rapidly to deal with the additional work and scale things down similarly as fast when the task has finished. Electronic programming gives you a chance to do only that.</li></ol>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Application_Software.png","alias":"application-software"},"285":{"id":285,"title":"Operations and Manufacturing Applications","description":" Manufacturing operations management (MOM) is a collection of systems for managing end-to-end manufacturing processes with a view to optimizing efficiency.\r\nThere are many types of MOM software, including production management, performance analysis, quality and compliance, and human-machine interface (HMI). Production management software provides real-time information about jobs and orders, labor and materials, machine status, and product shipments. Performance analysis software displays metrics at the machine, line, plant, and enterprise-level for situational or historical analysis. Quality and compliance software are used to promote compliance with standards and specifications for operational processes and procedures. HMI software is a form of manufacturing operations management (MOM) software that enables operators to manage industrial and process control machinery using a computer-based interface.\r\nAdvancements in technology and market demands are enabling new capabilities in MOM software platforms, gradually closing gaps in end-user needs.\r\n<ul><li>Collaboration Capabilities: Collaboration and workflow services support people-to-people, people-to-systems, and systems-to-systems interactions, enforcing procedures and rules while flexibly adapting to real-time situations with alternate workflows and processes.</li><li>Security Services: Future manufacturing platforms will leverage common security services that determine roles, responsibilities, authorities, and access across all systems and application functions while fitting into corporate IT security schemes.</li><li>Asset &amp; Production Model: Future manufacturing platforms will have a unified asset and production model that supports all of the interrelationships between physical production equipment, facilities, inventory/materials, and people, as well as production definitions such as the manufacturing bill of materials, productions orders, etc. This contrasts with older systems that either had subsets of these interrelationships across multiple databases or could not effectively deal with federating across multiple systems of record.</li><li>Operations Database &amp; Historians: Evolving from older systems that had separate historians and production databases that were difficult to correlate across, service-based platforms will have a unified operations database and historian. This will capture and aggregate all time-series and production event information surrounding everything involved in each product and production run with a full genealogy of components and materials, related performance information, and federation across other systems and devices of record.</li><li>Visualization and Mobility: Today, different MOM applications support different graphical user interfaces, Web interfaces, specific mobile applications, etc. The future manufacturing platform will provide common visualization and mobility for a consistent user interface experience across different form factors, supporting dedicated and mobile workers that are orchestrated by consistent workflows and procedures.</li><li>Smaller and Focused 'Apps': Today’s monolithic systems and applications have too many interdependencies of databases, operate inconsistently, and are not inherently integrated. Being able to take advantage of many of the common software platform services described above, modular apps will be significantly smaller, simpler, and focused. These apps will be much lighter weight in functionality, and, as a result, significantly easier and faster to develop.</li></ul>","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is a manufacturing operating system?</span>\r\nA Manufacturing Execution System manages manufacturing operations such as product production rules, bill of materials, recipe data (product definition), resource management, scheduling, work batching (JiT Just in Time manufacturing), production data/logs, production performance, and some analysis.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Operations_and_Manufacturing_Applications_1_.png","alias":"operations-and-manufacturing-applications"},"421":{"id":421,"title":"Digital Commerce Applications","description":"E-commerce is the activity of buying or selling products on online services or over the Internet. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.\r\nModern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web for at least one part of the transaction's life cycle although it may also use other technologies such as e-mail. Typical e-commerce transactions include the purchase of online books (such as Amazon) and music purchases (music download in the form of digital distribution such as iTunes Store), and to a less extent, customized/personalized online liquor store inventory services. There are three areas of e-commerce: online retailing, electric markets, and online auctions. E-commerce is supported by electronic business.\r\nE-commerce businesses may also employ some or all of the followings:\r\n<ul><li>Online shopping for retail sales direct to consumers via Web sites and mobile apps, and conversational commerce via live chat, chatbots, and voice assistants;</li><li>Providing or participating in online marketplaces, which process third-party business-to-consumer or consumer-to-consumer sales;</li><li>Business-to-business buying and selling;</li><li>Gathering and using demographic data through web contacts and social media;</li><li>Business-to-business (B2B) electronic data interchange;</li><li>Marketing to prospective and established customers by e-mail or fax (for example, with newsletters);</li><li>Engaging in pre-retail for launching new products and services;</li><li>Online financial exchanges for currency exchanges or trading purposes.</li></ul>","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">5 Reasons Why E-commerce Is So Important For Your Business</span>\r\nFrom startups to small businesses right through to huge brands, there are a huge number of companies that can benefit from their own e-commerce website, where they can sell their own products or services. In today's competitive and convenience-focused society, no longer do consumers want to venture to the high street in order to buy items, instead, consumers want to shop from their own homes, making e-commerce a flexible solution for both businesses and buyers.\r\nIf you’re still on the fence about launching an e-commerce store then look no further, here are the top 5 reasons e-commerce is so important for your business and just how you can benefit from moving online this year!\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Can Broaden Your Brand</span>\r\nE-commerce is an ideal way you can take your brand from a traditional brick and mortar store to an innovative, well-loved brand. By offering great products 24 hours a day along with online customer service, blogs and social media, no longer is your business one singular store, with an online presence your business can be the home of your products and the general home of your business, allowing you to fully expand your product ranges without having to worry about moving locations or worrying about not being able to expand your business.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">It’s More Convenient</span>\r\nAn online store is available all day, every day meaning your customers can visit your store at all times, no matter what their schedule might be. These days people don’t always have the time to physically go shopping, instead more and more people are choosing to shop online to find the items they want or need and if your business can offer this for your customers there’s no you shouldn't appeal to a wider range of customers all looking for a convenient and flexible experience.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Increase Your Reach</span>\r\nDue to the internet’s accessibility, millions of people across the world can view your website at any time, meaning that for those looking to expand their businesses and reach out to a larger audience, you have many more opportunities to do so. Compare the number of people you can reach through a website to the amount you can reach through a high street store or local advertising, there’s no reason you shouldn’t look at taking your business online if you’re looking to improve your reach.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Gives You Marketing Opportunities</span>\r\nYour website is one of the best marketing tools your business has, not only can the use of SEO when building your site lead to more chances of your business getting found in search engines, but a huge number of marketing techniques can also work alongside your website, including pay per click advertising, your social media marketing, and your email marketing, all of which can include links back to your website.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Scalable</span>\r\nAs your business grows it’s very likely you’ll want to grow your product range and your target audience, as well as develop your business for customer requirements and consumer demand. An e-commerce site lets you scale your business accordingly, allowing you to add more lines, add more payment options and even grow when you choose to ship to, without having to worry about changing your location or moving to larger premises as you might with a brick and mortar store.\r\nE-commerce offers the business a whole range of opportunities, from marketing opportunities to increase your products ranges to generating more sales and with an optimized and well-developed website, you can not only achieve these goals but also offer your customers around the clock, convenient service, that can boost your business.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Digital_Commerce_Applications.png","alias":"digital-commerce-applications"},"795":{"id":795,"title":"Marketing - software","description":"The departments of marketing companies use marketing software to market actively on various web channels via websites, email, social networks, and to automate daily tasks. The benefit here is this type of software allows you to personalize diverse marketing campaigns.\r\nThere are main types of marketing software such as advanced marketing automation, workflow automation, and marketing intelligence. The essential features of marketing software are: analytics, social media marketing, email marketing, team collaboration, phone call tracking, lead scoring and nurturing.\r\nMarketing solutions can be used by companies of all sizes and in all sectors, and they are most welcome in small-scale teams that wish to simplify the process of running challenging marketing campaigns.","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is marketing software?</span>\r\nMarketing software refers to tools that help businesses successfully execute campaigns, tap into their target markets and convert leads into sales. Companies, regardless of size, can benefit from marketing tools, allowing them to maximize their resources and get rid of repetitive tasks. They are also very useful in expanding businesses’ reach and allow companies to focus on more pressing matters.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Why Use Marketing Software?</span>\r\nWhy to use marketing software, you might ask. Whether you are looking for ways to better manage your marketing campaign, make the most out of your resources, or improve your lead nurturing process, having good marketing software is a great way to improve your operations. Here are some of the advantages of marketing software:\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reduces Tedious Tasks.</span> If we focus on the definition of marketing software, we should be able to conclude that it is meant to eliminate repetitive duties that take up a huge fraction of your daily routine. Tasks such as compiling your clients’ information, sending emails to your leads, and scheduling the posting of content can be time-consuming and while they are important, they leave you with little time to focus on tasks that demand your immediate, undivided attention. By utilizing content marketing systems, resource optimization programs, and other marketing software; you can eliminate the hassle of juggling everything manually, allowing you to delegate more important responsibilities to your staff.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Streamlines Marketing Efforts.</span> Marketing campaigns require the simultaneous use of multiple channels to communicate with your target audience.&nbsp; Marketing software solutions are designed to help you coordinate various programs in a single, easy-to-manage platform. This means you no longer have to jump from system to system to execute your campaign seamlessly. Most of these applications also offer a full suite of tools that let you manage content, nurture leads, and measure your campaign efforts accurately, promptly, and efficiently.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Improves Accountability.</span> When it comes to monitoring or analyzing lead conversions and marketing campaigns, accountability plays an important role. With the use of marketing software, you can eliminate the risk of human error and make sure you get all the statistics you need at a glance.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Makes Customer Management Easier.</span> Developing relationships with potential clients at each phase of the sales process is crucial to helping your business thrive. However, this is not as simple as convincing prospects to purchase products or keeping them posted on your offers. Attracting and retaining clientele are extensive processes wherein you must pinpoint the people who will most likely need your services, listen to their concerns, and respond to them on time every time they contact you. By using a CRM software or lead nurturing system, you can effortlessly schedule email campaigns, reply to leads promptly, build a better online presence, and keep tabs on current customers.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Document Progress Faster.</span> Tracking your leads, resources, content, and campaign success rates may sound easy at first, but it won’t be as simple when you are dealing with multiple campaigns, handling hundreds of customers, and creating an extensive amount of content all at the same time. Using marketing systems, your company can become more agile in its varied campaign initiatives. You can quickly create accurate progress reports that help you assess the effectiveness of your strategies and determine how to improve them in the future.</li></ul>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Marketing_software.png","alias":"marketing-software"},"818":{"id":818,"title":"Content Marketing","description":" Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. It is often used by businesses in order to:\r\n<ul><li>Attract attention and generate leads</li><li>Expand their customer base</li><li>Generate or increase online sales</li><li>Increase brand awareness or credibility</li><li>Engage an online community of users</li></ul>\r\nContent marketing attracts prospects and transforms prospects into customers by creating and sharing valuable free content. Content marketing helps companies create sustainable brand loyalty, provides valuable information to consumers, and creates a willingness to purchase products from the company in the future. This relatively new form of marketing does not involve direct sales. Instead, it builds trust and rapport with the audience.\r\nUnlike other forms of online marketing, content marketing relies on anticipating and meeting an existing customer need for information, as opposed to creating demand for a new need. As James O'Brien of Contently wrote on Mashable, &quot;The idea central to content marketing is that a brand must give something valuable to get something valuable in return. Instead of the commercial, be the show. Instead of the banner ad, be the feature story.&quot; Content marketing requires continuous delivery of large amounts of content, preferably within a content marketing strategy.\r\nWhen businesses pursue content marketing, the main focus should be the needs of the prospect or customer. Once a business has identified the customer's need, information can be presented in a variety of formats, including news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, email newsletters, case studies, podcasts, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, blogs, etc. Most of these formats belong to the digital channel.\r\nDigital content marketing is a management process that uses electronic channels to identify, forecast, and satisfy the content requirements of a particular audience. It must be consistently updated and added to in order to influence the behavior of customers.","materialsDescription":" What Types of Businesses Can Content Marketing Help?\r\nSmall and large businesses in virtually every industry use content marketing to their advantage. From major consumer brands and retail stores to tech companies and service-oriented businesses, content marketing can help you reach out to your target audience.\r\nBoth business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies have developed successful content marketing strategies. The techniques and goals vary between B2B and B2C companies, but that doesn’t make content marketing any less effective.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">How Can Content Marketing Benefit My Business?</span>\r\nThe beauty of content marketing is that it serves multiple purposes. Depending on your goals and the type of content you create, it could boost your brand in several different ways.\r\nFirst, content marketing can increase awareness of your brand, especially if the material you produce has an educational angle. As customers get to know your brand and the value that it provides through high-quality content, you can also increase customer loyalty. As you grow your brand’s base, you can also generate website traffic and drive sales.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Can Content Marketing Generate Leads for My Business?</span>\r\nWith the right strategy in place, you can use content marketing to generate a steady stream of new leads for your business. While most brands offer content like blog posts, articles, and videos free of charge, they also create high-level content, such as white papers, case studies, and eBooks to serve as lead magnets. Then they require readers to opt into a mailing list before gaining access to the high-level content.\r\nOnce you’ve gained permission to email interested customers, you can introduce your leads to your sales funnel. As your leads discover and engage with your other content marketing efforts, they may convert from potential to current customers.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What’s the Most Common Content Marketing Mistake?</span>\r\nFor most businesses, the biggest content marketing mistake is jumping in without a coherent strategy. Like any type of marketing, you need a plan to get the results you want from content marketing. Launching a blog and producing posts regularly may never help you achieve your objectives if you don’t know what you want to accomplish or how to get there.\r\nTo develop an effective content marketing strategy, you’ll need to understand who your target audience is, what kinds of content they want, and how your brand can offer the greatest value to your audience. Many businesses opt to create buyer personas so they can get to know their target audience and design content that’s sure to resonate.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What Type of Content Should My Business Create?</span>\r\nWhile the right content balance varies from business to business, most brands consider a few essential types. Blog posts and articles tend to top out around 1,000 words and usually help readers understand how and why to use your product or service. Case studies, white papers, and eBooks are substantially longer and typically feature original research related to your industry. Infographics and videos generally explain and illustrate concepts that you simply can’t convey via text. Depending on your brand’s goals, you might include one, two, or all types of content in your strategy.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">How Much Content Should My Business Produce?</span>\r\nJust as content type depends on your unique brand, so does content frequency. A lifestyle brand may benefit from developing and sharing short snippets of content daily, while others may get more value out of creating long-form content once a week or twice a month.\r\nNo matter what type of frequency works best for your business, however, strive for a consistent schedule. A regular schedule will boost your reliability and ensure that your audience anticipates your content.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Is Content Marketing the Same as Social Media Marketing?</span>\r\nThese two branches of marketing aren’t the same, but many businesses integrate their content marketing and social media marketing strategies. This synthesis helps brands ensure that they’re optimizing their marketing efforts.\r\nWhile content marketing encompasses written, graphic, and video material that can live on your company’s website or any number of other places online, social media marketing takes place strictly on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Many social media marketers build their editorial calendars around sharing links to content that their brands have created, as this practice can drive views and value.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">How Can You Measure the Results of Content Marketing?</span>\r\nWhen you invest in a content marketing strategy, it’s essential to track the results and determine your return on investment (ROI). As a general rule, your goals determine the metrics you’ll track as you assess results.\r\nFor example, if you want to increase brand awareness, you might track website traffic, bounce rate, or social shares. If you want to generate leads, you’ll track the number of leads, conversion rates, and an average time to close.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon-content-marketing.png","alias":"content-marketing"},"820":{"id":820,"title":"Marketing Automation","description":"Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks.\r\nMarketing departments, consultants and part-time marketing employees benefit by specifying criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes which are then interpreted, stored and executed by digital marketing software, which increases efficiency and reduces human error. Originally focused on email marketing automation, marketing automation now refers to a broad range of automation and analytic tools for marketing, especially inbound marketing. Marketing Automation platforms are used as a hosted or web-based solution, and no software installation is required by the customer.\r\nThe reason for using a marketing automation platform is to streamline sales and marketing organizations by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions.\r\nMarketing automation is a platform that marketers use to plan, coordinate, manage and measure all of their marketing campaigns, both online and offline. It is often used along with lifecycle marketing strategy to closely manage and nurture generated leads, aiming to convert leads into customers.\r\nMarketing automation is a type of software that allows companies to effectively target customers with automated marketing messages across channels including email, websites, social media and text messages to generate sales leads. The technology is a segment of customer relationship management, or CRM, and is typically used by marketing departments as a way to remove repetitive tasks from staff workflows and increase overall marketing efficiency.\r\nOften, a brand will use multiple marketing automation tools, referred to as the marketing technology or martech — stack. These automation platforms assist in lead generation via email marketing, chatbots hosted on social media or websites, and other channels such as short message service (SMS) text. Marketing automation tools extend the reach of marketing campaigns, creating inbound marketing, a term some vendors use to refer to the strategy of finding prospects for top- to mid-funnel via personalization of pitches derived through analytics tools, which segment customers into different groups for different approaches.\r\n<p class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Marketing automation features</span></p>\r\nDigital marketing automation software manages the online element of a marketing campaign, including data analytics that can create more precise personalization of content to individual customers to drive engagement and revenue.\r\nArtificial intelligence (AI) applications such as chatbots can help automate the delivery of that information or direct potential customers to webpages, online documents or forms that help create sales or gauge a potential customer's current or future interest in purchasing a company's goods or services. Marketing manager tools can also administer customer satisfaction and product usage surveys and then collect, measure and segment the response data.\r\nThe main features of marketing automation software typically include:\r\n<ul><li>Account-based marketing</li><li>Analytics for CRM</li><li>Campaign management</li><li>Inbound marketing</li><li>Lead management</li><li>Marketing ROI</li><li>Targeting and segmentation</li><li>Social marketing</li></ul>","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">Who should use marketing automation?</span></h1>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">The beauty of a marketing automation system is that it can help your business maximize on efforts that have already proven successful. Attracting new audiences through the use of effective marketing strategies is step one, but if you want to do more to nurture those people so that they become customers, marketing automation is a good bet.</p>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">How can marketing automation benefit my business?</span></h1>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">Marketing software solutions removes the hassle from your marketing strategy and allows you to streamline, automate and evaluate tasks and workflows. Your business will be able to scale its efforts and improve how you target customers.</p>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">What is marketing automation software?</span></h1>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">In essence, it’s a set of solutions that automates, streamlines and analyzes marketing-related workflows and engagement to get more leads and qualify them for sales. The idea is the more qualified leads you get the higher the conversion rate and the more revenue you generate. </p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">Marketing software programs differ from CRM in that the purpose of marketing automation software is to get top-of-funnel leads, while the latter nurtures middle- and bottom-of-funnel leads. In short, marketing automation qualifies leads to feed into the CRM sales funnel for nurturing prospects to conversion.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">Marketing automation plugs into a company's CRM system, which, typically, has its own native marketing automation cloud service (such as Salesforce Pardot and Oracle Eloqua). Eloqua will work with other CRM platforms that compete with Oracle's, and Marketo, an independent marketing automation platform, will work with Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft and other CRM systems. HubSpot also is a popular marketing automation platform that has its own CRM backbone.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">This becomes important when a company's marketing operations rely on a survey, email, social media or chatbot app for inbound lead-generation efforts that plug into Marketo or Eloqua, which, in turn, allows those marketing processes to continue regardless of which CRM the company uses. In effect, they act as middleware connecting the thousands of niche marketing automation tools and large CRM systems, where a company's customer data resides.</p>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">What are the types of marketing automation software?<br /></span></h1>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">CRM integrated</span>. Many CRM solutions today have multi-channel marketing tools to make lead generation a seamless experience from top-of-funnel to conversion. If not fully packaged, at least the marketing automation and CRM are modularized and have native integration.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Email marketing</span>. Marketing automation has its beginnings with email marketing software. Many mailers are established and have maintained their email marketing UI as their core functionality, but they now offer newer marketing automation features like lead scoring, landing page integration and analytics beyond the open-click metric.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Marketing automation.</span> This is the primary category featuring the standard tools, such as: forms, landing pages, lead scoring, lead database, reporting and analytics and pre-built or integrated email marketing and CRM functions.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Marketing analytics software</span>. They can be standalone apps or modules to a bigger marketing automation system. They lend more powerful analytics to the base system and cross over to the business intelligence category.<br />Social marketing. These are marketing software solutions with focus on social media functionalities such as Twitter and LinkedIn prospecting, brand mention tracking on Facebook and triggered posts on your pages based on your rules for keywords, hashtags or mentions.</p>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">What does marketing automation software do?</span></h1>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">Here are the main features of marketing automation technology, which you should look for when subscribing to one.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Lead scoring. </span>Allows you to automatically grade leads based on specific criteria you set, including demographics, prospect behaviors and historical interactions. You assign a weight to each criterion and the system aggregates them to calculate the prospect’s lead score. The lead scores can be segregated by range and automatically funneled to their respective workflows. </p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Lead database</span>. The lead database captures a qualified prospect’s details and other marketing activities like web visits, email clicks and downloads. This database funnels leads to your CRM sales pipeline and, once converted, into your main customer database. The lead database may also allow for segmentation to help you target groups.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Lead nurturing.</span> Generally runs workflows designed to filter or shortlist prospects, which include managing the processes in email marketing and other channels and capturing data that helps in further qualifying leads.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Email marketing.</span> Business email marketing software allows email drip campaigns and features newsletter and email templates or an editor that lets you design your layout with ease. It allows for mass emails to targeted lists with a tracking tool to view number of opens and click-throughs. It may also feature an advanced tool for triggered emails, which send the right response in real time to specific customer actions.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">CRM integration</span>. Once the leads are qualified at the top-of-funnel, they are sent to the sales team; hence, marketing automation software should have seamless CRM integration. The integration can be with a third-party solution or as an add-on to the marketing automation software.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Forms and landing pages.</span> A form is embedded on the landing page to collect lead data, where it is funneled into your database for lead scoring. The landing page can also include dynamic content, where images, texts and calls-to-action are customized to the lead based on profiling like geolocation, industry, job title, previous interactions with you, etc.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Progressive profiling.</span> This is a smart form that delivers the right fields to different leads. A web visitor is analyzed for key details (for example: IP address, source page, Y/N customer) and is led to a series of unique short forms to capture specific data. This feature may also require social credentials for deeper profiling.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Reporting &amp; analytics. </span>You can calculate an individual campaign’s cost and ROI and, generally, your marketing activities, by running analytics on key metrics that are sliced and diced in different ways that include open emails, downloads, lead volume, etc. In conjunction with CRM, you can associate these values against sales metrics like conversion rate, win-loss rate and total sales.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Mobile-optimized. </span>Mobile-optimized landing pages and emails help you target users who access the Internet from their smartphones or tablets. Mobile-optimized also means you can access the system and your data on the go.<br /><br /><br /><br /></p>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon-marketing-automation.png","alias":"marketing-automation"}},"branches":"Information Technology","companySizes":"101 to 500 Employees","companyUrl":"https://www.pandadoc.com/","countryCodes":[],"certifications":[],"isSeller":true,"isSupplier":true,"isVendor":true,"presenterCodeLng":"","seo":{"title":"PandaDoc","keywords":"","description":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">PandaDoc</span> empowers sales teams to create, send, track, and eSign beautiful proposals, quotes, and contracts. PandaDoc integrates with your CRM, saves your team time, and provides transparency into your sales performa","og:title":"PandaDoc","og:description":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">PandaDoc</span> empowers sales teams to create, send, track, and eSign beautiful proposals, quotes, and contracts. PandaDoc integrates with your CRM, saves your team time, and provides transparency into your sales performa","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/uploads/roi/company/pandadoc.png"},"eventUrl":"","vendorPartners":[],"supplierPartners":[],"vendoredProducts":[{"id":3710,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/pandadoc.png","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"PandaDoc","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"0.00","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":0,"alias":"pandadoc","companyTitle":"PandaDoc","companyTypes":["supplier","vendor"],"companyId":5897,"companyAlias":"pandadoc","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">PandaDoc </span>includes features to create, track and execute documents, as well as functionality for electronic signatures. It consists of features in the following categories: proposals, quotes, team management, content management, branding, tracking, workflow, productivity, etc. It integrates with several CRMs, as well as ERP, payment, cloud storage, and other systems.\r\n<p class=\"align-center\"><br /><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Close deals faster and look more professional </span></p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Create documents faster.</span> Quickly create stunning proposals, quotes, and contracts from pre-built templates, content from marketing, and customer data from your CRM.</li></ul>\r\n<br />\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Stand out from the crowd.</span> Create an experience with your customers that would rival any billion dollar company. Beautiful design themes, embedded media, and interactivity give every deal the opportunity to get noticed.</li></ul>\r\n<br />\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">A process that scales. </span>Confidently forecast revenue and improve your sales team’s performance with real-time metrics on the number of completed docs, proposal revenue generated, and time-to-close dashboards.</li></ul>\r\n<br />\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Seize the opportunities.</span> Accelerate your sales cycle by seeing which recipients are engaged and which deals are ready to close. Get real-time notification about every interaction with your documents.</li></ul>\r\n<br />\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Seamless integrations. </span>No more sending data with other people’s info, copy paste errors, and small mistakes that create big issues. Out of the box integrations with CRM to allow your team’s proposals to get out the door faster and eliminates manual data entry errors.</li></ul>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">Source: https://www.pandadoc.com/</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n\r\n","shortDescription":"PandaDoc is accelerating deals from propose to close. Empowering sales teams to simplify the process to generate, negotiate, and eSign proposals, quotes, and contracts. ","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":16,"sellingCount":17,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"PandaDoc","keywords":"","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">PandaDoc </span>includes features to create, track and execute documents, as well as functionality for electronic signatures. It consists of features in the following categories: proposals, quotes, team management, content mana","og:title":"PandaDoc","og:description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">PandaDoc </span>includes features to create, track and execute documents, as well as functionality for electronic signatures. It consists of features in the following categories: proposals, quotes, team management, content mana","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/pandadoc.png"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":3711,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":52,"title":"SaaS - software as a service","alias":"saas-software-as-a-service","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Software as a service (SaaS)</span> is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. It is sometimes referred to as &quot;on-demand software&quot;, and was formerly referred to as &quot;software plus services&quot; by Microsoft.\r\n SaaS services is typically accessed by users using a thin client, e.g. via a web browser. SaaS software solutions has become a common delivery model for many business applications, including office software, messaging software, payroll processing software, DBMS software, management software, CAD software, development software, gamification, virtualization, accounting, collaboration, customer relationship management (CRM), Management Information Systems (MIS), enterprise resource planning (ERP), invoicing, human resource management (HRM), talent acquisition, learning management systems, content management (CM), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and service desk management. SaaS has been incorporated into the strategy of nearly all leading enterprise software companies.\r\nSaaS applications are also known as <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Web-based software</span>, <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">on-demand software</span> and<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\"> hosted software</span>.\r\nThe term &quot;Software as a Service&quot; (SaaS) is considered to be part of the nomenclature of cloud computing, along with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Desktop as a Service (DaaS),managed software as a service (MSaaS), mobile backend as a service (MBaaS), and information technology management as a service (ITMaaS).\r\nBecause SaaS is based on cloud computing it saves organizations from installing and running applications on their own systems. That eliminates or at least reduces the associated costs of hardware purchases and maintenance and of software and support. The initial setup cost for a SaaS application is also generally lower than it for equivalent enterprise software purchased via a site license.\r\nSometimes, the use of SaaS cloud software can also reduce the long-term costs of software licensing, though that depends on the pricing model for the individual SaaS offering and the enterprise’s usage patterns. In fact, it’s possible for SaaS to cost more than traditional software licenses. This is an area IT organizations should explore carefully.<br />SaaS also provides enterprises the flexibility inherent with cloud services: they can subscribe to a SaaS offering as needed rather than having to buy software licenses and install the software on a variety of computers. The savings can be substantial in the case of applications that require new hardware purchases to support the software.<br /><br /><br /><br />","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Who uses SaaS?</span></h1>\r\nIndustry analyst Forrester Research notes that SaaS adoption has so far been concentrated mostly in human resource management (HRM), customer relationship management (CRM), collaboration software (e.g., email), and procurement solutions, but is poised to widen. Today it’s possible to have a data warehouse in the cloud that you can access with business intelligence software running as a service and connect to your cloud-based ERP like NetSuite or Microsoft Dynamics.The dollar savings can run into the millions. And SaaS installations are often installed and working in a fraction of the time of on-premises deployments—some can be ready in hours. \r\nSales and marketing people are likely familiar with Salesforce.com, the leading SaaS CRM software, with millions of users across more than 100,000 customers. Sales is going SaaS too, with apps available to support sales in order management, compensation, quote production and configure, price, quoting, electronic signatures, contract management and more.\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Why SaaS? Benefits of software as a service</span></h1>\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Lower cost of entry</span>. With SaaS solution, you pay for what you need, without having to buy hardware to host your new applications. Instead of provisioning internal resources to install the software, the vendor provides APIs and performs much of the work to get their software working for you. The time to a working solution can drop from months in the traditional model to weeks, days or hours with the SaaS model. In some businesses, IT wants nothing to do with installing and running a sales app. In the case of funding software and its implementation, this can be a make-or-break issue for the sales and marketing budget, so the lower cost really makes the difference.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reduced time to benefit/rapid prototyping</span>. In the SaaS model, the software application is already installed and configured. Users can provision the server for the cloud and quickly have the application ready for use. This cuts the time to benefit and allows for rapid demonstrations and prototyping. With many SaaS companies offering free trials, this means a painless proof of concept and discovery phase to prove the benefit to the organization. </li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Pay as you go</span>. SaaS business software gives you the benefit of predictable costs both for the subscription and to some extent, the administration. Even as you scale, you can have a clear idea of what your costs will be. This allows for much more accurate budgeting, especially as compared to the costs of internal IT to manage upgrades and address issues for an owned instance.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">The SaaS vendor is responsible for upgrades, uptime and security</span>. Under the SaaS model, since the software is hosted by the vendor, they take on the responsibility for maintaining the software and upgrading it, ensuring that it is reliable and meeting agreed-upon service level agreements, and keeping the application and its data secure.&nbsp; While some IT people worry about Software as a Service security outside of the enterprise walls, the likely truth is that the vendor has a much higher level of security than the enterprise itself would provide. Many will have redundant instances in very secure data centers in multiple geographies.&nbsp; Also, the data is being automatically backed up by the vendor, providing additional security and peace of mind. Because of the data center hosting, you’re getting the added benefit of at least some disaster recovery. Lastly, the vendor manages these issues as part of their core competencies—let them.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Integration and scalability.</span> Most SaaS apps are designed to support some amount of customization for the way you do business. SaaS vendors create APIs to allow connections not only to internal applications like ERPs or CRMs but also to other SaaS providers. One of the terrific aspects of integration is that orders written in the field can be automatically sent to the ERP. Now a salesperson in the field can check inventory through the catalog, write the order in front of the customer for approval, send it and receive confirmation, all in minutes. And as you scale with a SaaS vendor, there’s no need to invest in server capacity and software licenses. </li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Work anywhere</span>. Since the software is hosted in the cloud and accessible over the internet, users can access it via mobile devices wherever they are connected. This includes checking customer order histories prior to a sales call, as well as having access to real time data and real time order taking with the customer.</li></ul>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">&nbsp;</p>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/SaaS__1_.png"},{"id":421,"title":"Digital Commerce Applications","alias":"digital-commerce-applications","description":"E-commerce is the activity of buying or selling products on online services or over the Internet. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.\r\nModern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web for at least one part of the transaction's life cycle although it may also use other technologies such as e-mail. Typical e-commerce transactions include the purchase of online books (such as Amazon) and music purchases (music download in the form of digital distribution such as iTunes Store), and to a less extent, customized/personalized online liquor store inventory services. There are three areas of e-commerce: online retailing, electric markets, and online auctions. E-commerce is supported by electronic business.\r\nE-commerce businesses may also employ some or all of the followings:\r\n<ul><li>Online shopping for retail sales direct to consumers via Web sites and mobile apps, and conversational commerce via live chat, chatbots, and voice assistants;</li><li>Providing or participating in online marketplaces, which process third-party business-to-consumer or consumer-to-consumer sales;</li><li>Business-to-business buying and selling;</li><li>Gathering and using demographic data through web contacts and social media;</li><li>Business-to-business (B2B) electronic data interchange;</li><li>Marketing to prospective and established customers by e-mail or fax (for example, with newsletters);</li><li>Engaging in pre-retail for launching new products and services;</li><li>Online financial exchanges for currency exchanges or trading purposes.</li></ul>","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">5 Reasons Why E-commerce Is So Important For Your Business</span>\r\nFrom startups to small businesses right through to huge brands, there are a huge number of companies that can benefit from their own e-commerce website, where they can sell their own products or services. In today's competitive and convenience-focused society, no longer do consumers want to venture to the high street in order to buy items, instead, consumers want to shop from their own homes, making e-commerce a flexible solution for both businesses and buyers.\r\nIf you’re still on the fence about launching an e-commerce store then look no further, here are the top 5 reasons e-commerce is so important for your business and just how you can benefit from moving online this year!\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Can Broaden Your Brand</span>\r\nE-commerce is an ideal way you can take your brand from a traditional brick and mortar store to an innovative, well-loved brand. By offering great products 24 hours a day along with online customer service, blogs and social media, no longer is your business one singular store, with an online presence your business can be the home of your products and the general home of your business, allowing you to fully expand your product ranges without having to worry about moving locations or worrying about not being able to expand your business.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">It’s More Convenient</span>\r\nAn online store is available all day, every day meaning your customers can visit your store at all times, no matter what their schedule might be. These days people don’t always have the time to physically go shopping, instead more and more people are choosing to shop online to find the items they want or need and if your business can offer this for your customers there’s no you shouldn't appeal to a wider range of customers all looking for a convenient and flexible experience.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Increase Your Reach</span>\r\nDue to the internet’s accessibility, millions of people across the world can view your website at any time, meaning that for those looking to expand their businesses and reach out to a larger audience, you have many more opportunities to do so. Compare the number of people you can reach through a website to the amount you can reach through a high street store or local advertising, there’s no reason you shouldn’t look at taking your business online if you’re looking to improve your reach.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Gives You Marketing Opportunities</span>\r\nYour website is one of the best marketing tools your business has, not only can the use of SEO when building your site lead to more chances of your business getting found in search engines, but a huge number of marketing techniques can also work alongside your website, including pay per click advertising, your social media marketing, and your email marketing, all of which can include links back to your website.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Scalable</span>\r\nAs your business grows it’s very likely you’ll want to grow your product range and your target audience, as well as develop your business for customer requirements and consumer demand. An e-commerce site lets you scale your business accordingly, allowing you to add more lines, add more payment options and even grow when you choose to ship to, without having to worry about changing your location or moving to larger premises as you might with a brick and mortar store.\r\nE-commerce offers the business a whole range of opportunities, from marketing opportunities to increase your products ranges to generating more sales and with an optimized and well-developed website, you can not only achieve these goals but also offer your customers around the clock, convenient service, that can boost your business.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Digital_Commerce_Applications.png"},{"id":409,"title":"Content Collaboration","alias":"content-collaboration","description":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Content collaboration</span> software makes it easy for your users to securely create, access, share and manage business content.\r\nThe content collaboration platform (CCP) market covers a range of products and services that enable content productivity and collaboration. CCPs are aimed at individuals and teams, inside or outside an organization. Additionally, CCPs increasingly support lightweight content management and workflow use cases. <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Core user functionalities include: </span>\r\n<ul><li>Mobile access to content repositories.</li><li> File synchronization across devices and cloud repositories.</li><li>File sharing with people and applications, inside or outside an organization. </li><li>Team collaboration, with dedicated folders.</li><li>A content repository. This can be cloud based collaboration software or on-premises program, native to the CCP platform or based on other file servers or repositories.</li></ul>\r\nCommon <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">features </span>of collaboration software include messaging, audio and video conferencing, task management, document management, calendars, and time tracking.\r\nFrom employees and decision-makers to partners, vendors, regulators and customers, your users benefit from easy, secure access to valuable business content. Rather than keeping files locked up in silos, content collaboration software enables information to flow safely and freely within your organization and across your firewall to external contacts.\r\nSecuring those documents is the challenge. Unless your content collaboration software maintains the highest standards of performance, security, auditing and reliability, cross-enterprise document sharing may lead to inadvertent data leaks or malicious security breaches.","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\">Types of collaboration software tools</h1>\r\nGenerally, collaboration software can be divided into synchronous (or real-time) and asynchronous. Using synchronous software, teammates can work together at the same time, for example with apps that allow several users to edit the same document in real time. Asynchronous software enables users to work on the same task at different times.\r\nBased on their key features, collaboration software can be classified into:\r\n<p class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Communication software</span></p>\r\nTo solve communication problems, communication software offers chat and audio or video collaboration platform so people can communicate within teams without having to travel. As a result, communication software saves time, helps solve problems faster, and allows remote teams to connect, which otherwise would be difficult and time-consuming.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Key features include:</span>\r\n<ul><li>Chat and messaging to enable real-time text conversations using direct messages or group chats</li><li>Audio and video conferencing to let people make calls and hold meetings regardless of their location</li><li>Discussion threads to allow users to reply to one particular message in a group chat or channel without distracting other teammate</li><li>File sharing or file collaboration software to make it fast and easy to upload and send files</li></ul>\r\n<p class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Task management software</span></p>\r\nTask management is an important part of collaboration. Teams use task management software to prioritize and track tasks, which helps to keep track of deadlines. To make collaboration more transparent and effective, task management software often provides boards, timelines, and calendars.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Key features include:</span>\r\n<ul><li>Boards to create and manage tasks</li><li>Task assignment to appoint people to a task</li><li>Task prioritization to move tasks and set the project schedule</li><li>Planning and scheduling to create plans and meet deadlines using timelines and calendars</li><li>File management to attach and arrange file</li></ul>\r\n<p class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Document and content management software</span></p>\r\nDocument and content management software allows users to store, share, and work together on different files. Most of these tools track history of changes that different users make. Some collaboration apps and platforms also have features like chat and video conferencing, allowing users to collaborate on a document and communicate at the same time.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Key features include:</span>\r\n<ul><li>Document and content management to store and track documents and other files</li><li>Cooperative writing to let several people write content together</li><li>Synchronous editing to let several people edit the same document at the same time and see changes in real time</li><li> Ready-made templates to create documents faster</li></ul>\r\n<br /><br /><br />","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Content_Collaboration.png"},{"id":285,"title":"Operations and Manufacturing Applications","alias":"operations-and-manufacturing-applications","description":" Manufacturing operations management (MOM) is a collection of systems for managing end-to-end manufacturing processes with a view to optimizing efficiency.\r\nThere are many types of MOM software, including production management, performance analysis, quality and compliance, and human-machine interface (HMI). Production management software provides real-time information about jobs and orders, labor and materials, machine status, and product shipments. Performance analysis software displays metrics at the machine, line, plant, and enterprise-level for situational or historical analysis. Quality and compliance software are used to promote compliance with standards and specifications for operational processes and procedures. HMI software is a form of manufacturing operations management (MOM) software that enables operators to manage industrial and process control machinery using a computer-based interface.\r\nAdvancements in technology and market demands are enabling new capabilities in MOM software platforms, gradually closing gaps in end-user needs.\r\n<ul><li>Collaboration Capabilities: Collaboration and workflow services support people-to-people, people-to-systems, and systems-to-systems interactions, enforcing procedures and rules while flexibly adapting to real-time situations with alternate workflows and processes.</li><li>Security Services: Future manufacturing platforms will leverage common security services that determine roles, responsibilities, authorities, and access across all systems and application functions while fitting into corporate IT security schemes.</li><li>Asset &amp; Production Model: Future manufacturing platforms will have a unified asset and production model that supports all of the interrelationships between physical production equipment, facilities, inventory/materials, and people, as well as production definitions such as the manufacturing bill of materials, productions orders, etc. This contrasts with older systems that either had subsets of these interrelationships across multiple databases or could not effectively deal with federating across multiple systems of record.</li><li>Operations Database &amp; Historians: Evolving from older systems that had separate historians and production databases that were difficult to correlate across, service-based platforms will have a unified operations database and historian. This will capture and aggregate all time-series and production event information surrounding everything involved in each product and production run with a full genealogy of components and materials, related performance information, and federation across other systems and devices of record.</li><li>Visualization and Mobility: Today, different MOM applications support different graphical user interfaces, Web interfaces, specific mobile applications, etc. The future manufacturing platform will provide common visualization and mobility for a consistent user interface experience across different form factors, supporting dedicated and mobile workers that are orchestrated by consistent workflows and procedures.</li><li>Smaller and Focused 'Apps': Today’s monolithic systems and applications have too many interdependencies of databases, operate inconsistently, and are not inherently integrated. Being able to take advantage of many of the common software platform services described above, modular apps will be significantly smaller, simpler, and focused. These apps will be much lighter weight in functionality, and, as a result, significantly easier and faster to develop.</li></ul>","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is a manufacturing operating system?</span>\r\nA Manufacturing Execution System manages manufacturing operations such as product production rules, bill of materials, recipe data (product definition), resource management, scheduling, work batching (JiT Just in Time manufacturing), production data/logs, production performance, and some analysis.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Operations_and_Manufacturing_Applications_1_.png"},{"id":795,"title":"Marketing - software","alias":"marketing-software","description":"The departments of marketing companies use marketing software to market actively on various web channels via websites, email, social networks, and to automate daily tasks. The benefit here is this type of software allows you to personalize diverse marketing campaigns.\r\nThere are main types of marketing software such as advanced marketing automation, workflow automation, and marketing intelligence. The essential features of marketing software are: analytics, social media marketing, email marketing, team collaboration, phone call tracking, lead scoring and nurturing.\r\nMarketing solutions can be used by companies of all sizes and in all sectors, and they are most welcome in small-scale teams that wish to simplify the process of running challenging marketing campaigns.","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is marketing software?</span>\r\nMarketing software refers to tools that help businesses successfully execute campaigns, tap into their target markets and convert leads into sales. Companies, regardless of size, can benefit from marketing tools, allowing them to maximize their resources and get rid of repetitive tasks. They are also very useful in expanding businesses’ reach and allow companies to focus on more pressing matters.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Why Use Marketing Software?</span>\r\nWhy to use marketing software, you might ask. Whether you are looking for ways to better manage your marketing campaign, make the most out of your resources, or improve your lead nurturing process, having good marketing software is a great way to improve your operations. Here are some of the advantages of marketing software:\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reduces Tedious Tasks.</span> If we focus on the definition of marketing software, we should be able to conclude that it is meant to eliminate repetitive duties that take up a huge fraction of your daily routine. Tasks such as compiling your clients’ information, sending emails to your leads, and scheduling the posting of content can be time-consuming and while they are important, they leave you with little time to focus on tasks that demand your immediate, undivided attention. By utilizing content marketing systems, resource optimization programs, and other marketing software; you can eliminate the hassle of juggling everything manually, allowing you to delegate more important responsibilities to your staff.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Streamlines Marketing Efforts.</span> Marketing campaigns require the simultaneous use of multiple channels to communicate with your target audience.&nbsp; Marketing software solutions are designed to help you coordinate various programs in a single, easy-to-manage platform. This means you no longer have to jump from system to system to execute your campaign seamlessly. Most of these applications also offer a full suite of tools that let you manage content, nurture leads, and measure your campaign efforts accurately, promptly, and efficiently.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Improves Accountability.</span> When it comes to monitoring or analyzing lead conversions and marketing campaigns, accountability plays an important role. With the use of marketing software, you can eliminate the risk of human error and make sure you get all the statistics you need at a glance.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Makes Customer Management Easier.</span> Developing relationships with potential clients at each phase of the sales process is crucial to helping your business thrive. However, this is not as simple as convincing prospects to purchase products or keeping them posted on your offers. Attracting and retaining clientele are extensive processes wherein you must pinpoint the people who will most likely need your services, listen to their concerns, and respond to them on time every time they contact you. By using a CRM software or lead nurturing system, you can effortlessly schedule email campaigns, reply to leads promptly, build a better online presence, and keep tabs on current customers.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Document Progress Faster.</span> Tracking your leads, resources, content, and campaign success rates may sound easy at first, but it won’t be as simple when you are dealing with multiple campaigns, handling hundreds of customers, and creating an extensive amount of content all at the same time. Using marketing systems, your company can become more agile in its varied campaign initiatives. You can quickly create accurate progress reports that help you assess the effectiveness of your strategies and determine how to improve them in the future.</li></ul>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Marketing_software.png"},{"id":820,"title":"Marketing Automation","alias":"marketing-automation","description":"Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks.\r\nMarketing departments, consultants and part-time marketing employees benefit by specifying criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes which are then interpreted, stored and executed by digital marketing software, which increases efficiency and reduces human error. Originally focused on email marketing automation, marketing automation now refers to a broad range of automation and analytic tools for marketing, especially inbound marketing. Marketing Automation platforms are used as a hosted or web-based solution, and no software installation is required by the customer.\r\nThe reason for using a marketing automation platform is to streamline sales and marketing organizations by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions.\r\nMarketing automation is a platform that marketers use to plan, coordinate, manage and measure all of their marketing campaigns, both online and offline. It is often used along with lifecycle marketing strategy to closely manage and nurture generated leads, aiming to convert leads into customers.\r\nMarketing automation is a type of software that allows companies to effectively target customers with automated marketing messages across channels including email, websites, social media and text messages to generate sales leads. The technology is a segment of customer relationship management, or CRM, and is typically used by marketing departments as a way to remove repetitive tasks from staff workflows and increase overall marketing efficiency.\r\nOften, a brand will use multiple marketing automation tools, referred to as the marketing technology or martech — stack. These automation platforms assist in lead generation via email marketing, chatbots hosted on social media or websites, and other channels such as short message service (SMS) text. Marketing automation tools extend the reach of marketing campaigns, creating inbound marketing, a term some vendors use to refer to the strategy of finding prospects for top- to mid-funnel via personalization of pitches derived through analytics tools, which segment customers into different groups for different approaches.\r\n<p class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Marketing automation features</span></p>\r\nDigital marketing automation software manages the online element of a marketing campaign, including data analytics that can create more precise personalization of content to individual customers to drive engagement and revenue.\r\nArtificial intelligence (AI) applications such as chatbots can help automate the delivery of that information or direct potential customers to webpages, online documents or forms that help create sales or gauge a potential customer's current or future interest in purchasing a company's goods or services. Marketing manager tools can also administer customer satisfaction and product usage surveys and then collect, measure and segment the response data.\r\nThe main features of marketing automation software typically include:\r\n<ul><li>Account-based marketing</li><li>Analytics for CRM</li><li>Campaign management</li><li>Inbound marketing</li><li>Lead management</li><li>Marketing ROI</li><li>Targeting and segmentation</li><li>Social marketing</li></ul>","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">Who should use marketing automation?</span></h1>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">The beauty of a marketing automation system is that it can help your business maximize on efforts that have already proven successful. Attracting new audiences through the use of effective marketing strategies is step one, but if you want to do more to nurture those people so that they become customers, marketing automation is a good bet.</p>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">How can marketing automation benefit my business?</span></h1>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">Marketing software solutions removes the hassle from your marketing strategy and allows you to streamline, automate and evaluate tasks and workflows. Your business will be able to scale its efforts and improve how you target customers.</p>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">What is marketing automation software?</span></h1>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">In essence, it’s a set of solutions that automates, streamlines and analyzes marketing-related workflows and engagement to get more leads and qualify them for sales. The idea is the more qualified leads you get the higher the conversion rate and the more revenue you generate. </p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">Marketing software programs differ from CRM in that the purpose of marketing automation software is to get top-of-funnel leads, while the latter nurtures middle- and bottom-of-funnel leads. In short, marketing automation qualifies leads to feed into the CRM sales funnel for nurturing prospects to conversion.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">Marketing automation plugs into a company's CRM system, which, typically, has its own native marketing automation cloud service (such as Salesforce Pardot and Oracle Eloqua). Eloqua will work with other CRM platforms that compete with Oracle's, and Marketo, an independent marketing automation platform, will work with Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft and other CRM systems. HubSpot also is a popular marketing automation platform that has its own CRM backbone.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">This becomes important when a company's marketing operations rely on a survey, email, social media or chatbot app for inbound lead-generation efforts that plug into Marketo or Eloqua, which, in turn, allows those marketing processes to continue regardless of which CRM the company uses. In effect, they act as middleware connecting the thousands of niche marketing automation tools and large CRM systems, where a company's customer data resides.</p>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">What are the types of marketing automation software?<br /></span></h1>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">CRM integrated</span>. Many CRM solutions today have multi-channel marketing tools to make lead generation a seamless experience from top-of-funnel to conversion. If not fully packaged, at least the marketing automation and CRM are modularized and have native integration.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Email marketing</span>. Marketing automation has its beginnings with email marketing software. Many mailers are established and have maintained their email marketing UI as their core functionality, but they now offer newer marketing automation features like lead scoring, landing page integration and analytics beyond the open-click metric.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Marketing automation.</span> This is the primary category featuring the standard tools, such as: forms, landing pages, lead scoring, lead database, reporting and analytics and pre-built or integrated email marketing and CRM functions.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Marketing analytics software</span>. They can be standalone apps or modules to a bigger marketing automation system. They lend more powerful analytics to the base system and cross over to the business intelligence category.<br />Social marketing. These are marketing software solutions with focus on social media functionalities such as Twitter and LinkedIn prospecting, brand mention tracking on Facebook and triggered posts on your pages based on your rules for keywords, hashtags or mentions.</p>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">What does marketing automation software do?</span></h1>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">Here are the main features of marketing automation technology, which you should look for when subscribing to one.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Lead scoring. </span>Allows you to automatically grade leads based on specific criteria you set, including demographics, prospect behaviors and historical interactions. You assign a weight to each criterion and the system aggregates them to calculate the prospect’s lead score. The lead scores can be segregated by range and automatically funneled to their respective workflows. </p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Lead database</span>. The lead database captures a qualified prospect’s details and other marketing activities like web visits, email clicks and downloads. This database funnels leads to your CRM sales pipeline and, once converted, into your main customer database. The lead database may also allow for segmentation to help you target groups.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Lead nurturing.</span> Generally runs workflows designed to filter or shortlist prospects, which include managing the processes in email marketing and other channels and capturing data that helps in further qualifying leads.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Email marketing.</span> Business email marketing software allows email drip campaigns and features newsletter and email templates or an editor that lets you design your layout with ease. It allows for mass emails to targeted lists with a tracking tool to view number of opens and click-throughs. It may also feature an advanced tool for triggered emails, which send the right response in real time to specific customer actions.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">CRM integration</span>. Once the leads are qualified at the top-of-funnel, they are sent to the sales team; hence, marketing automation software should have seamless CRM integration. The integration can be with a third-party solution or as an add-on to the marketing automation software.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Forms and landing pages.</span> A form is embedded on the landing page to collect lead data, where it is funneled into your database for lead scoring. The landing page can also include dynamic content, where images, texts and calls-to-action are customized to the lead based on profiling like geolocation, industry, job title, previous interactions with you, etc.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Progressive profiling.</span> This is a smart form that delivers the right fields to different leads. A web visitor is analyzed for key details (for example: IP address, source page, Y/N customer) and is led to a series of unique short forms to capture specific data. This feature may also require social credentials for deeper profiling.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Reporting &amp; analytics. </span>You can calculate an individual campaign’s cost and ROI and, generally, your marketing activities, by running analytics on key metrics that are sliced and diced in different ways that include open emails, downloads, lead volume, etc. In conjunction with CRM, you can associate these values against sales metrics like conversion rate, win-loss rate and total sales.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Mobile-optimized. </span>Mobile-optimized landing pages and emails help you target users who access the Internet from their smartphones or tablets. Mobile-optimized also means you can access the system and your data on the go.<br /><br /><br /><br /></p>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon-marketing-automation.png"},{"id":818,"title":"Content Marketing","alias":"content-marketing","description":" Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. It is often used by businesses in order to:\r\n<ul><li>Attract attention and generate leads</li><li>Expand their customer base</li><li>Generate or increase online sales</li><li>Increase brand awareness or credibility</li><li>Engage an online community of users</li></ul>\r\nContent marketing attracts prospects and transforms prospects into customers by creating and sharing valuable free content. Content marketing helps companies create sustainable brand loyalty, provides valuable information to consumers, and creates a willingness to purchase products from the company in the future. This relatively new form of marketing does not involve direct sales. Instead, it builds trust and rapport with the audience.\r\nUnlike other forms of online marketing, content marketing relies on anticipating and meeting an existing customer need for information, as opposed to creating demand for a new need. As James O'Brien of Contently wrote on Mashable, &quot;The idea central to content marketing is that a brand must give something valuable to get something valuable in return. Instead of the commercial, be the show. Instead of the banner ad, be the feature story.&quot; Content marketing requires continuous delivery of large amounts of content, preferably within a content marketing strategy.\r\nWhen businesses pursue content marketing, the main focus should be the needs of the prospect or customer. Once a business has identified the customer's need, information can be presented in a variety of formats, including news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, email newsletters, case studies, podcasts, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, blogs, etc. Most of these formats belong to the digital channel.\r\nDigital content marketing is a management process that uses electronic channels to identify, forecast, and satisfy the content requirements of a particular audience. It must be consistently updated and added to in order to influence the behavior of customers.","materialsDescription":" What Types of Businesses Can Content Marketing Help?\r\nSmall and large businesses in virtually every industry use content marketing to their advantage. From major consumer brands and retail stores to tech companies and service-oriented businesses, content marketing can help you reach out to your target audience.\r\nBoth business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies have developed successful content marketing strategies. The techniques and goals vary between B2B and B2C companies, but that doesn’t make content marketing any less effective.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">How Can Content Marketing Benefit My Business?</span>\r\nThe beauty of content marketing is that it serves multiple purposes. Depending on your goals and the type of content you create, it could boost your brand in several different ways.\r\nFirst, content marketing can increase awareness of your brand, especially if the material you produce has an educational angle. As customers get to know your brand and the value that it provides through high-quality content, you can also increase customer loyalty. As you grow your brand’s base, you can also generate website traffic and drive sales.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Can Content Marketing Generate Leads for My Business?</span>\r\nWith the right strategy in place, you can use content marketing to generate a steady stream of new leads for your business. While most brands offer content like blog posts, articles, and videos free of charge, they also create high-level content, such as white papers, case studies, and eBooks to serve as lead magnets. Then they require readers to opt into a mailing list before gaining access to the high-level content.\r\nOnce you’ve gained permission to email interested customers, you can introduce your leads to your sales funnel. As your leads discover and engage with your other content marketing efforts, they may convert from potential to current customers.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What’s the Most Common Content Marketing Mistake?</span>\r\nFor most businesses, the biggest content marketing mistake is jumping in without a coherent strategy. Like any type of marketing, you need a plan to get the results you want from content marketing. Launching a blog and producing posts regularly may never help you achieve your objectives if you don’t know what you want to accomplish or how to get there.\r\nTo develop an effective content marketing strategy, you’ll need to understand who your target audience is, what kinds of content they want, and how your brand can offer the greatest value to your audience. Many businesses opt to create buyer personas so they can get to know their target audience and design content that’s sure to resonate.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What Type of Content Should My Business Create?</span>\r\nWhile the right content balance varies from business to business, most brands consider a few essential types. Blog posts and articles tend to top out around 1,000 words and usually help readers understand how and why to use your product or service. Case studies, white papers, and eBooks are substantially longer and typically feature original research related to your industry. Infographics and videos generally explain and illustrate concepts that you simply can’t convey via text. Depending on your brand’s goals, you might include one, two, or all types of content in your strategy.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">How Much Content Should My Business Produce?</span>\r\nJust as content type depends on your unique brand, so does content frequency. A lifestyle brand may benefit from developing and sharing short snippets of content daily, while others may get more value out of creating long-form content once a week or twice a month.\r\nNo matter what type of frequency works best for your business, however, strive for a consistent schedule. A regular schedule will boost your reliability and ensure that your audience anticipates your content.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Is Content Marketing the Same as Social Media Marketing?</span>\r\nThese two branches of marketing aren’t the same, but many businesses integrate their content marketing and social media marketing strategies. This synthesis helps brands ensure that they’re optimizing their marketing efforts.\r\nWhile content marketing encompasses written, graphic, and video material that can live on your company’s website or any number of other places online, social media marketing takes place strictly on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Many social media marketers build their editorial calendars around sharing links to content that their brands have created, as this practice can drive views and value.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">How Can You Measure the Results of Content Marketing?</span>\r\nWhen you invest in a content marketing strategy, it’s essential to track the results and determine your return on investment (ROI). As a general rule, your goals determine the metrics you’ll track as you assess results.\r\nFor example, if you want to increase brand awareness, you might track website traffic, bounce rate, or social shares. If you want to generate leads, you’ll track the number of leads, conversion rates, and an average time to close.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon-content-marketing.png"},{"id":71,"title":"CRM - Customer Relationship Management","alias":"crm-customer-relationship-management","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Customer service</span> is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. The perception of success of such interactions is dependent on employees &quot;who can adjust themselves to the personality of the guest&quot;. Customer service concerns the priority an organization assigns to customer service relative to components such as product innovation and pricing. In this sense, an organization that values good customer service may spend more money in training employees than the average organization or may proactively interview customers for feedback.\r\nA <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">customer support</span> is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product. These services even may be done at customer's side where he/she uses the product or service. In this case it is called &quot;at home customer services&quot; or &quot;at home customer support.&quot;\r\nRegarding technology, products such as mobile phones, televisions, computers, software products or other electronic or mechanical goods, it is termed technical support. \r\nCustomer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales and service representative), or by automated means, such as kiosks, Internet sites, and apps.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM </span>(Customer Relationship Management) is an approach to manage a company's interaction with current and potential customers. It uses data analysis about customers' history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.\r\nOne important aspect of the CRM approach is the systems of CRM that compile data from a range of different communication channels, including a company's website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials and more recently, social media. Through the CRM approach and the systems used to facilitate it, businesses learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater to their needs.\r\nCRM helps users focus on their organization’s relationships with individual people including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers.\r\nWhen people talk about customer relationship management system, they might mean any of three things: \r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as Technology</span>: This is a technology product, often in the cloud, that teams use to record, report and analyse interactions between the company and users. This is also called a CRM system or solution.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Strategy</span>: This is a business’ philosophy about how relationships with customers and potential customers should be managed.&nbsp; </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Process</span>: Think of this as a system a business adopts to nurture and manage those relationships.</li></ul>\r\n<br /><br /><br />","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Why is CRM important?</span></h1>\r\nCRM management system enables a business to deepen its relationships with customers, service users, colleagues, partners and suppliers.\r\nForging good relationships and keeping track of prospects and customers is crucial for customer acquisition and retention, which is at the heart of a CRM’s function. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customizable dashboard that can tell you a customer’s previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more.\r\nGartner predicts that by 2021, CRM technology will be the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software. If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. For forward-thinking businesses, CRM is the framework for that strategy.\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the benefits of CRM?</span></h1>\r\nBy collecting and organising data about customer interactions, making it accessible and actionable for all, and facilitating analysis of that data, CRM offers many benefits and advantages.<br />The benefits and advantages of CRM include:\r\n<ul><li>Enhanced contact management</li><li>Cross-team collaboration</li><li>Heightened productivity</li><li>Empowered sales management</li><li>Accurate sales forecasting</li><li>Reliable reporting</li><li>Improved sales metrics</li><li>Increased customer satisfaction and retention</li><li>Boosted marketing ROI</li><li>Enriched products and services</li></ul>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the key features of most popular CRM software programs?</span></h1>\r\nWhile many CRM solutions differ in their specific value propositions — depending on your business size, priority function, or industry type — they usually share some core features. These, in fact, are the foundation of any top CRM software, without which you might end up using an inferior app or an over-rated address book. So, let’s discuss the key features you need to look for when figuring out the best CRM software for your business.\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Contact management</span>. The best CRM solutions aren’t just an address book that only organizes contact details. It manages customer data in a centralized place and gives you a 360-degree view of your customers. You should be able to organize customers’ personal information, demographics, interactions, and transactions in ways that are meaningful to your goals or processes. Moreover, a good contact management feature lets you personalize your outreach campaign. By collecting personal, social, and purchase data, it will help you to segment target audience groups in different ways.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reporting and dashboards</span>. These features of customer relationship management allow you to use analytics to interpret customer data. Reporting is very useful if you want to consolidate disparate data and churn out insights in different visualizations. This lets you make better decisions or proactively deal with market trends and customer behavioral patterns. The more visual widgets a CRM software has, the better you can present reports. Furthermore, a best customer relationship management software will generate real-time data, making reporting more accurate and timely. Reporting also keeps you tab on sales opportunities like upsell, resell, and cross-sell, especially when integrated with e-commerce platforms.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Lead management</span>. These features let you manage leads all the way to win-loss stage. They pave a clear path to conversion, so you can quickly assess how the business is performing. One of the main three legs that comprises the best client relationship management software (the other two being contact management and reporting), lead management unburdens the sales team from follow-ups, tracking, and repetitive tasks.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Deals and tasks</span>. Deals and tasks are closely associated with leads. Deals are leads at the negotiation stage, so it’s critical to keep a close eye on their associated tasks for a higher chance of conversion.<br />CRM software tools should also let you track both deals and tasks in their respective windows or across the sales stages. Whether you’re viewing a contact or analyzing the sales pipeline, you should be able to immediately check the deal’s tasks and details. Deals and tasks should also have user permissions to protect leaks of sensitive data. Similarly, alerts are critical to tasks so deadlines are met. Notifications are usually sent via email or prominently displayed on the user’s dashboard.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Campaign management</span>. Solid CRM software will integrate this feature to enable marketing processes from outreach concept to A/B testing to deployment and to post analysis. This will allow you to sort campaigns to target segments in your contacts and define deployment strategies. You will also be able to define metrics for various channels, then plow back the insights generated by post-campaign analytics into planning more campaigns.<br />Recurring outreach efforts can also be automated. For instance, you can set to instantly appropriate content to contacts based on their interest or send tiered autoresponders based on campaign feedback.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Email management</span>. By integrating with popular email clients like Gmail and Outlook, CRM solutions can capture email messages and sort important details that can be saved in contacts or synced with leads. They can also track activities like opened emails, forwarded emails, clicked links, and downloaded files. Emails can also be qualified for prospecting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Social media management. </span>Popular CRM systems feature an integrated social media management where you can view different social media pages from the CRM’s interface. This is a convenient way to post, reply on, and manage all your pages. Likewise, this feature gives you a better perspective on how customers are interacting with your brand. A glean of their likes and dislikes, interests, shares, and public conversations helps you to assess customer biases and preferences. Customers are also increasingly using social media to contact companies; hence, a good CRM should alert you for brand mentions.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Mobile access</span>. With more users accessing apps via mobile devices, many vendors have been prioritizing mobile-first platforms. Emergence Capital Partners study found over 300 mobile-first apps so far and CRM is definitely one their targets. Many CRM solutions have both Android and iOS apps. Mobile access works in two ways to be highly appreciated: accessing data and inputting data while on location. Field sales with the latest sales information on hand may be able to interest prospects better. Conversely, sales reps can quickly update deals across the pipeline even as they come off a client meeting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/CRM_-_Customer_Relationship_Management.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]}],"suppliedProducts":[{"id":3710,"logoURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/pandadoc.png","logo":true,"scheme":false,"title":"PandaDoc","vendorVerified":0,"rating":"0.00","implementationsCount":0,"suppliersCount":0,"supplierPartnersCount":0,"alias":"pandadoc","companyTitle":"PandaDoc","companyTypes":["supplier","vendor"],"companyId":5897,"companyAlias":"pandadoc","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">PandaDoc </span>includes features to create, track and execute documents, as well as functionality for electronic signatures. It consists of features in the following categories: proposals, quotes, team management, content management, branding, tracking, workflow, productivity, etc. It integrates with several CRMs, as well as ERP, payment, cloud storage, and other systems.\r\n<p class=\"align-center\"><br /><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Close deals faster and look more professional </span></p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Create documents faster.</span> Quickly create stunning proposals, quotes, and contracts from pre-built templates, content from marketing, and customer data from your CRM.</li></ul>\r\n<br />\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Stand out from the crowd.</span> Create an experience with your customers that would rival any billion dollar company. Beautiful design themes, embedded media, and interactivity give every deal the opportunity to get noticed.</li></ul>\r\n<br />\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">A process that scales. </span>Confidently forecast revenue and improve your sales team’s performance with real-time metrics on the number of completed docs, proposal revenue generated, and time-to-close dashboards.</li></ul>\r\n<br />\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Seize the opportunities.</span> Accelerate your sales cycle by seeing which recipients are engaged and which deals are ready to close. Get real-time notification about every interaction with your documents.</li></ul>\r\n<br />\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Seamless integrations. </span>No more sending data with other people’s info, copy paste errors, and small mistakes that create big issues. Out of the box integrations with CRM to allow your team’s proposals to get out the door faster and eliminates manual data entry errors.</li></ul>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">Source: https://www.pandadoc.com/</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n\r\n","shortDescription":"PandaDoc is accelerating deals from propose to close. Empowering sales teams to simplify the process to generate, negotiate, and eSign proposals, quotes, and contracts. ","type":null,"isRoiCalculatorAvaliable":false,"isConfiguratorAvaliable":false,"bonus":100,"usingCount":16,"sellingCount":17,"discontinued":0,"rebateForPoc":0,"rebate":0,"seo":{"title":"PandaDoc","keywords":"","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">PandaDoc </span>includes features to create, track and execute documents, as well as functionality for electronic signatures. It consists of features in the following categories: proposals, quotes, team management, content mana","og:title":"PandaDoc","og:description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">PandaDoc </span>includes features to create, track and execute documents, as well as functionality for electronic signatures. It consists of features in the following categories: proposals, quotes, team management, content mana","og:image":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/pandadoc.png"},"eventUrl":"","translationId":3711,"dealDetails":null,"roi":null,"price":null,"bonusForReference":null,"templateData":[],"testingArea":"","categories":[{"id":52,"title":"SaaS - software as a service","alias":"saas-software-as-a-service","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Software as a service (SaaS)</span> is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. It is sometimes referred to as &quot;on-demand software&quot;, and was formerly referred to as &quot;software plus services&quot; by Microsoft.\r\n SaaS services is typically accessed by users using a thin client, e.g. via a web browser. SaaS software solutions has become a common delivery model for many business applications, including office software, messaging software, payroll processing software, DBMS software, management software, CAD software, development software, gamification, virtualization, accounting, collaboration, customer relationship management (CRM), Management Information Systems (MIS), enterprise resource planning (ERP), invoicing, human resource management (HRM), talent acquisition, learning management systems, content management (CM), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and service desk management. SaaS has been incorporated into the strategy of nearly all leading enterprise software companies.\r\nSaaS applications are also known as <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Web-based software</span>, <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">on-demand software</span> and<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\"> hosted software</span>.\r\nThe term &quot;Software as a Service&quot; (SaaS) is considered to be part of the nomenclature of cloud computing, along with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Desktop as a Service (DaaS),managed software as a service (MSaaS), mobile backend as a service (MBaaS), and information technology management as a service (ITMaaS).\r\nBecause SaaS is based on cloud computing it saves organizations from installing and running applications on their own systems. That eliminates or at least reduces the associated costs of hardware purchases and maintenance and of software and support. The initial setup cost for a SaaS application is also generally lower than it for equivalent enterprise software purchased via a site license.\r\nSometimes, the use of SaaS cloud software can also reduce the long-term costs of software licensing, though that depends on the pricing model for the individual SaaS offering and the enterprise’s usage patterns. In fact, it’s possible for SaaS to cost more than traditional software licenses. This is an area IT organizations should explore carefully.<br />SaaS also provides enterprises the flexibility inherent with cloud services: they can subscribe to a SaaS offering as needed rather than having to buy software licenses and install the software on a variety of computers. The savings can be substantial in the case of applications that require new hardware purchases to support the software.<br /><br /><br /><br />","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Who uses SaaS?</span></h1>\r\nIndustry analyst Forrester Research notes that SaaS adoption has so far been concentrated mostly in human resource management (HRM), customer relationship management (CRM), collaboration software (e.g., email), and procurement solutions, but is poised to widen. Today it’s possible to have a data warehouse in the cloud that you can access with business intelligence software running as a service and connect to your cloud-based ERP like NetSuite or Microsoft Dynamics.The dollar savings can run into the millions. And SaaS installations are often installed and working in a fraction of the time of on-premises deployments—some can be ready in hours. \r\nSales and marketing people are likely familiar with Salesforce.com, the leading SaaS CRM software, with millions of users across more than 100,000 customers. Sales is going SaaS too, with apps available to support sales in order management, compensation, quote production and configure, price, quoting, electronic signatures, contract management and more.\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Why SaaS? Benefits of software as a service</span></h1>\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Lower cost of entry</span>. With SaaS solution, you pay for what you need, without having to buy hardware to host your new applications. Instead of provisioning internal resources to install the software, the vendor provides APIs and performs much of the work to get their software working for you. The time to a working solution can drop from months in the traditional model to weeks, days or hours with the SaaS model. In some businesses, IT wants nothing to do with installing and running a sales app. In the case of funding software and its implementation, this can be a make-or-break issue for the sales and marketing budget, so the lower cost really makes the difference.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reduced time to benefit/rapid prototyping</span>. In the SaaS model, the software application is already installed and configured. Users can provision the server for the cloud and quickly have the application ready for use. This cuts the time to benefit and allows for rapid demonstrations and prototyping. With many SaaS companies offering free trials, this means a painless proof of concept and discovery phase to prove the benefit to the organization. </li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Pay as you go</span>. SaaS business software gives you the benefit of predictable costs both for the subscription and to some extent, the administration. Even as you scale, you can have a clear idea of what your costs will be. This allows for much more accurate budgeting, especially as compared to the costs of internal IT to manage upgrades and address issues for an owned instance.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">The SaaS vendor is responsible for upgrades, uptime and security</span>. Under the SaaS model, since the software is hosted by the vendor, they take on the responsibility for maintaining the software and upgrading it, ensuring that it is reliable and meeting agreed-upon service level agreements, and keeping the application and its data secure.&nbsp; While some IT people worry about Software as a Service security outside of the enterprise walls, the likely truth is that the vendor has a much higher level of security than the enterprise itself would provide. Many will have redundant instances in very secure data centers in multiple geographies.&nbsp; Also, the data is being automatically backed up by the vendor, providing additional security and peace of mind. Because of the data center hosting, you’re getting the added benefit of at least some disaster recovery. Lastly, the vendor manages these issues as part of their core competencies—let them.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Integration and scalability.</span> Most SaaS apps are designed to support some amount of customization for the way you do business. SaaS vendors create APIs to allow connections not only to internal applications like ERPs or CRMs but also to other SaaS providers. One of the terrific aspects of integration is that orders written in the field can be automatically sent to the ERP. Now a salesperson in the field can check inventory through the catalog, write the order in front of the customer for approval, send it and receive confirmation, all in minutes. And as you scale with a SaaS vendor, there’s no need to invest in server capacity and software licenses. </li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Work anywhere</span>. Since the software is hosted in the cloud and accessible over the internet, users can access it via mobile devices wherever they are connected. This includes checking customer order histories prior to a sales call, as well as having access to real time data and real time order taking with the customer.</li></ul>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">&nbsp;</p>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/SaaS__1_.png"},{"id":421,"title":"Digital Commerce Applications","alias":"digital-commerce-applications","description":"E-commerce is the activity of buying or selling products on online services or over the Internet. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.\r\nModern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web for at least one part of the transaction's life cycle although it may also use other technologies such as e-mail. Typical e-commerce transactions include the purchase of online books (such as Amazon) and music purchases (music download in the form of digital distribution such as iTunes Store), and to a less extent, customized/personalized online liquor store inventory services. There are three areas of e-commerce: online retailing, electric markets, and online auctions. E-commerce is supported by electronic business.\r\nE-commerce businesses may also employ some or all of the followings:\r\n<ul><li>Online shopping for retail sales direct to consumers via Web sites and mobile apps, and conversational commerce via live chat, chatbots, and voice assistants;</li><li>Providing or participating in online marketplaces, which process third-party business-to-consumer or consumer-to-consumer sales;</li><li>Business-to-business buying and selling;</li><li>Gathering and using demographic data through web contacts and social media;</li><li>Business-to-business (B2B) electronic data interchange;</li><li>Marketing to prospective and established customers by e-mail or fax (for example, with newsletters);</li><li>Engaging in pre-retail for launching new products and services;</li><li>Online financial exchanges for currency exchanges or trading purposes.</li></ul>","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">5 Reasons Why E-commerce Is So Important For Your Business</span>\r\nFrom startups to small businesses right through to huge brands, there are a huge number of companies that can benefit from their own e-commerce website, where they can sell their own products or services. In today's competitive and convenience-focused society, no longer do consumers want to venture to the high street in order to buy items, instead, consumers want to shop from their own homes, making e-commerce a flexible solution for both businesses and buyers.\r\nIf you’re still on the fence about launching an e-commerce store then look no further, here are the top 5 reasons e-commerce is so important for your business and just how you can benefit from moving online this year!\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Can Broaden Your Brand</span>\r\nE-commerce is an ideal way you can take your brand from a traditional brick and mortar store to an innovative, well-loved brand. By offering great products 24 hours a day along with online customer service, blogs and social media, no longer is your business one singular store, with an online presence your business can be the home of your products and the general home of your business, allowing you to fully expand your product ranges without having to worry about moving locations or worrying about not being able to expand your business.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">It’s More Convenient</span>\r\nAn online store is available all day, every day meaning your customers can visit your store at all times, no matter what their schedule might be. These days people don’t always have the time to physically go shopping, instead more and more people are choosing to shop online to find the items they want or need and if your business can offer this for your customers there’s no you shouldn't appeal to a wider range of customers all looking for a convenient and flexible experience.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Increase Your Reach</span>\r\nDue to the internet’s accessibility, millions of people across the world can view your website at any time, meaning that for those looking to expand their businesses and reach out to a larger audience, you have many more opportunities to do so. Compare the number of people you can reach through a website to the amount you can reach through a high street store or local advertising, there’s no reason you shouldn’t look at taking your business online if you’re looking to improve your reach.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Gives You Marketing Opportunities</span>\r\nYour website is one of the best marketing tools your business has, not only can the use of SEO when building your site lead to more chances of your business getting found in search engines, but a huge number of marketing techniques can also work alongside your website, including pay per click advertising, your social media marketing, and your email marketing, all of which can include links back to your website.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Scalable</span>\r\nAs your business grows it’s very likely you’ll want to grow your product range and your target audience, as well as develop your business for customer requirements and consumer demand. An e-commerce site lets you scale your business accordingly, allowing you to add more lines, add more payment options and even grow when you choose to ship to, without having to worry about changing your location or moving to larger premises as you might with a brick and mortar store.\r\nE-commerce offers the business a whole range of opportunities, from marketing opportunities to increase your products ranges to generating more sales and with an optimized and well-developed website, you can not only achieve these goals but also offer your customers around the clock, convenient service, that can boost your business.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Digital_Commerce_Applications.png"},{"id":409,"title":"Content Collaboration","alias":"content-collaboration","description":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Content collaboration</span> software makes it easy for your users to securely create, access, share and manage business content.\r\nThe content collaboration platform (CCP) market covers a range of products and services that enable content productivity and collaboration. CCPs are aimed at individuals and teams, inside or outside an organization. Additionally, CCPs increasingly support lightweight content management and workflow use cases. <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Core user functionalities include: </span>\r\n<ul><li>Mobile access to content repositories.</li><li> File synchronization across devices and cloud repositories.</li><li>File sharing with people and applications, inside or outside an organization. </li><li>Team collaboration, with dedicated folders.</li><li>A content repository. This can be cloud based collaboration software or on-premises program, native to the CCP platform or based on other file servers or repositories.</li></ul>\r\nCommon <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">features </span>of collaboration software include messaging, audio and video conferencing, task management, document management, calendars, and time tracking.\r\nFrom employees and decision-makers to partners, vendors, regulators and customers, your users benefit from easy, secure access to valuable business content. Rather than keeping files locked up in silos, content collaboration software enables information to flow safely and freely within your organization and across your firewall to external contacts.\r\nSecuring those documents is the challenge. Unless your content collaboration software maintains the highest standards of performance, security, auditing and reliability, cross-enterprise document sharing may lead to inadvertent data leaks or malicious security breaches.","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\">Types of collaboration software tools</h1>\r\nGenerally, collaboration software can be divided into synchronous (or real-time) and asynchronous. Using synchronous software, teammates can work together at the same time, for example with apps that allow several users to edit the same document in real time. Asynchronous software enables users to work on the same task at different times.\r\nBased on their key features, collaboration software can be classified into:\r\n<p class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Communication software</span></p>\r\nTo solve communication problems, communication software offers chat and audio or video collaboration platform so people can communicate within teams without having to travel. As a result, communication software saves time, helps solve problems faster, and allows remote teams to connect, which otherwise would be difficult and time-consuming.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Key features include:</span>\r\n<ul><li>Chat and messaging to enable real-time text conversations using direct messages or group chats</li><li>Audio and video conferencing to let people make calls and hold meetings regardless of their location</li><li>Discussion threads to allow users to reply to one particular message in a group chat or channel without distracting other teammate</li><li>File sharing or file collaboration software to make it fast and easy to upload and send files</li></ul>\r\n<p class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Task management software</span></p>\r\nTask management is an important part of collaboration. Teams use task management software to prioritize and track tasks, which helps to keep track of deadlines. To make collaboration more transparent and effective, task management software often provides boards, timelines, and calendars.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Key features include:</span>\r\n<ul><li>Boards to create and manage tasks</li><li>Task assignment to appoint people to a task</li><li>Task prioritization to move tasks and set the project schedule</li><li>Planning and scheduling to create plans and meet deadlines using timelines and calendars</li><li>File management to attach and arrange file</li></ul>\r\n<p class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Document and content management software</span></p>\r\nDocument and content management software allows users to store, share, and work together on different files. Most of these tools track history of changes that different users make. Some collaboration apps and platforms also have features like chat and video conferencing, allowing users to collaborate on a document and communicate at the same time.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Key features include:</span>\r\n<ul><li>Document and content management to store and track documents and other files</li><li>Cooperative writing to let several people write content together</li><li>Synchronous editing to let several people edit the same document at the same time and see changes in real time</li><li> Ready-made templates to create documents faster</li></ul>\r\n<br /><br /><br />","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Content_Collaboration.png"},{"id":285,"title":"Operations and Manufacturing Applications","alias":"operations-and-manufacturing-applications","description":" Manufacturing operations management (MOM) is a collection of systems for managing end-to-end manufacturing processes with a view to optimizing efficiency.\r\nThere are many types of MOM software, including production management, performance analysis, quality and compliance, and human-machine interface (HMI). Production management software provides real-time information about jobs and orders, labor and materials, machine status, and product shipments. Performance analysis software displays metrics at the machine, line, plant, and enterprise-level for situational or historical analysis. Quality and compliance software are used to promote compliance with standards and specifications for operational processes and procedures. HMI software is a form of manufacturing operations management (MOM) software that enables operators to manage industrial and process control machinery using a computer-based interface.\r\nAdvancements in technology and market demands are enabling new capabilities in MOM software platforms, gradually closing gaps in end-user needs.\r\n<ul><li>Collaboration Capabilities: Collaboration and workflow services support people-to-people, people-to-systems, and systems-to-systems interactions, enforcing procedures and rules while flexibly adapting to real-time situations with alternate workflows and processes.</li><li>Security Services: Future manufacturing platforms will leverage common security services that determine roles, responsibilities, authorities, and access across all systems and application functions while fitting into corporate IT security schemes.</li><li>Asset &amp; Production Model: Future manufacturing platforms will have a unified asset and production model that supports all of the interrelationships between physical production equipment, facilities, inventory/materials, and people, as well as production definitions such as the manufacturing bill of materials, productions orders, etc. This contrasts with older systems that either had subsets of these interrelationships across multiple databases or could not effectively deal with federating across multiple systems of record.</li><li>Operations Database &amp; Historians: Evolving from older systems that had separate historians and production databases that were difficult to correlate across, service-based platforms will have a unified operations database and historian. This will capture and aggregate all time-series and production event information surrounding everything involved in each product and production run with a full genealogy of components and materials, related performance information, and federation across other systems and devices of record.</li><li>Visualization and Mobility: Today, different MOM applications support different graphical user interfaces, Web interfaces, specific mobile applications, etc. The future manufacturing platform will provide common visualization and mobility for a consistent user interface experience across different form factors, supporting dedicated and mobile workers that are orchestrated by consistent workflows and procedures.</li><li>Smaller and Focused 'Apps': Today’s monolithic systems and applications have too many interdependencies of databases, operate inconsistently, and are not inherently integrated. Being able to take advantage of many of the common software platform services described above, modular apps will be significantly smaller, simpler, and focused. These apps will be much lighter weight in functionality, and, as a result, significantly easier and faster to develop.</li></ul>","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is a manufacturing operating system?</span>\r\nA Manufacturing Execution System manages manufacturing operations such as product production rules, bill of materials, recipe data (product definition), resource management, scheduling, work batching (JiT Just in Time manufacturing), production data/logs, production performance, and some analysis.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Operations_and_Manufacturing_Applications_1_.png"},{"id":795,"title":"Marketing - software","alias":"marketing-software","description":"The departments of marketing companies use marketing software to market actively on various web channels via websites, email, social networks, and to automate daily tasks. The benefit here is this type of software allows you to personalize diverse marketing campaigns.\r\nThere are main types of marketing software such as advanced marketing automation, workflow automation, and marketing intelligence. The essential features of marketing software are: analytics, social media marketing, email marketing, team collaboration, phone call tracking, lead scoring and nurturing.\r\nMarketing solutions can be used by companies of all sizes and in all sectors, and they are most welcome in small-scale teams that wish to simplify the process of running challenging marketing campaigns.","materialsDescription":" <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What is marketing software?</span>\r\nMarketing software refers to tools that help businesses successfully execute campaigns, tap into their target markets and convert leads into sales. Companies, regardless of size, can benefit from marketing tools, allowing them to maximize their resources and get rid of repetitive tasks. They are also very useful in expanding businesses’ reach and allow companies to focus on more pressing matters.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Why Use Marketing Software?</span>\r\nWhy to use marketing software, you might ask. Whether you are looking for ways to better manage your marketing campaign, make the most out of your resources, or improve your lead nurturing process, having good marketing software is a great way to improve your operations. Here are some of the advantages of marketing software:\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reduces Tedious Tasks.</span> If we focus on the definition of marketing software, we should be able to conclude that it is meant to eliminate repetitive duties that take up a huge fraction of your daily routine. Tasks such as compiling your clients’ information, sending emails to your leads, and scheduling the posting of content can be time-consuming and while they are important, they leave you with little time to focus on tasks that demand your immediate, undivided attention. By utilizing content marketing systems, resource optimization programs, and other marketing software; you can eliminate the hassle of juggling everything manually, allowing you to delegate more important responsibilities to your staff.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Streamlines Marketing Efforts.</span> Marketing campaigns require the simultaneous use of multiple channels to communicate with your target audience.&nbsp; Marketing software solutions are designed to help you coordinate various programs in a single, easy-to-manage platform. This means you no longer have to jump from system to system to execute your campaign seamlessly. Most of these applications also offer a full suite of tools that let you manage content, nurture leads, and measure your campaign efforts accurately, promptly, and efficiently.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Improves Accountability.</span> When it comes to monitoring or analyzing lead conversions and marketing campaigns, accountability plays an important role. With the use of marketing software, you can eliminate the risk of human error and make sure you get all the statistics you need at a glance.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Makes Customer Management Easier.</span> Developing relationships with potential clients at each phase of the sales process is crucial to helping your business thrive. However, this is not as simple as convincing prospects to purchase products or keeping them posted on your offers. Attracting and retaining clientele are extensive processes wherein you must pinpoint the people who will most likely need your services, listen to their concerns, and respond to them on time every time they contact you. By using a CRM software or lead nurturing system, you can effortlessly schedule email campaigns, reply to leads promptly, build a better online presence, and keep tabs on current customers.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Document Progress Faster.</span> Tracking your leads, resources, content, and campaign success rates may sound easy at first, but it won’t be as simple when you are dealing with multiple campaigns, handling hundreds of customers, and creating an extensive amount of content all at the same time. Using marketing systems, your company can become more agile in its varied campaign initiatives. You can quickly create accurate progress reports that help you assess the effectiveness of your strategies and determine how to improve them in the future.</li></ul>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon_Marketing_software.png"},{"id":820,"title":"Marketing Automation","alias":"marketing-automation","description":"Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks.\r\nMarketing departments, consultants and part-time marketing employees benefit by specifying criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes which are then interpreted, stored and executed by digital marketing software, which increases efficiency and reduces human error. Originally focused on email marketing automation, marketing automation now refers to a broad range of automation and analytic tools for marketing, especially inbound marketing. Marketing Automation platforms are used as a hosted or web-based solution, and no software installation is required by the customer.\r\nThe reason for using a marketing automation platform is to streamline sales and marketing organizations by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions.\r\nMarketing automation is a platform that marketers use to plan, coordinate, manage and measure all of their marketing campaigns, both online and offline. It is often used along with lifecycle marketing strategy to closely manage and nurture generated leads, aiming to convert leads into customers.\r\nMarketing automation is a type of software that allows companies to effectively target customers with automated marketing messages across channels including email, websites, social media and text messages to generate sales leads. The technology is a segment of customer relationship management, or CRM, and is typically used by marketing departments as a way to remove repetitive tasks from staff workflows and increase overall marketing efficiency.\r\nOften, a brand will use multiple marketing automation tools, referred to as the marketing technology or martech — stack. These automation platforms assist in lead generation via email marketing, chatbots hosted on social media or websites, and other channels such as short message service (SMS) text. Marketing automation tools extend the reach of marketing campaigns, creating inbound marketing, a term some vendors use to refer to the strategy of finding prospects for top- to mid-funnel via personalization of pitches derived through analytics tools, which segment customers into different groups for different approaches.\r\n<p class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Marketing automation features</span></p>\r\nDigital marketing automation software manages the online element of a marketing campaign, including data analytics that can create more precise personalization of content to individual customers to drive engagement and revenue.\r\nArtificial intelligence (AI) applications such as chatbots can help automate the delivery of that information or direct potential customers to webpages, online documents or forms that help create sales or gauge a potential customer's current or future interest in purchasing a company's goods or services. Marketing manager tools can also administer customer satisfaction and product usage surveys and then collect, measure and segment the response data.\r\nThe main features of marketing automation software typically include:\r\n<ul><li>Account-based marketing</li><li>Analytics for CRM</li><li>Campaign management</li><li>Inbound marketing</li><li>Lead management</li><li>Marketing ROI</li><li>Targeting and segmentation</li><li>Social marketing</li></ul>","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">Who should use marketing automation?</span></h1>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">The beauty of a marketing automation system is that it can help your business maximize on efforts that have already proven successful. Attracting new audiences through the use of effective marketing strategies is step one, but if you want to do more to nurture those people so that they become customers, marketing automation is a good bet.</p>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">How can marketing automation benefit my business?</span></h1>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">Marketing software solutions removes the hassle from your marketing strategy and allows you to streamline, automate and evaluate tasks and workflows. Your business will be able to scale its efforts and improve how you target customers.</p>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">What is marketing automation software?</span></h1>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">In essence, it’s a set of solutions that automates, streamlines and analyzes marketing-related workflows and engagement to get more leads and qualify them for sales. The idea is the more qualified leads you get the higher the conversion rate and the more revenue you generate. </p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">Marketing software programs differ from CRM in that the purpose of marketing automation software is to get top-of-funnel leads, while the latter nurtures middle- and bottom-of-funnel leads. In short, marketing automation qualifies leads to feed into the CRM sales funnel for nurturing prospects to conversion.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">Marketing automation plugs into a company's CRM system, which, typically, has its own native marketing automation cloud service (such as Salesforce Pardot and Oracle Eloqua). Eloqua will work with other CRM platforms that compete with Oracle's, and Marketo, an independent marketing automation platform, will work with Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft and other CRM systems. HubSpot also is a popular marketing automation platform that has its own CRM backbone.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">This becomes important when a company's marketing operations rely on a survey, email, social media or chatbot app for inbound lead-generation efforts that plug into Marketo or Eloqua, which, in turn, allows those marketing processes to continue regardless of which CRM the company uses. In effect, they act as middleware connecting the thousands of niche marketing automation tools and large CRM systems, where a company's customer data resides.</p>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">What are the types of marketing automation software?<br /></span></h1>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">CRM integrated</span>. Many CRM solutions today have multi-channel marketing tools to make lead generation a seamless experience from top-of-funnel to conversion. If not fully packaged, at least the marketing automation and CRM are modularized and have native integration.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Email marketing</span>. Marketing automation has its beginnings with email marketing software. Many mailers are established and have maintained their email marketing UI as their core functionality, but they now offer newer marketing automation features like lead scoring, landing page integration and analytics beyond the open-click metric.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Marketing automation.</span> This is the primary category featuring the standard tools, such as: forms, landing pages, lead scoring, lead database, reporting and analytics and pre-built or integrated email marketing and CRM functions.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Marketing analytics software</span>. They can be standalone apps or modules to a bigger marketing automation system. They lend more powerful analytics to the base system and cross over to the business intelligence category.<br />Social marketing. These are marketing software solutions with focus on social media functionalities such as Twitter and LinkedIn prospecting, brand mention tracking on Facebook and triggered posts on your pages based on your rules for keywords, hashtags or mentions.</p>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal; \">What does marketing automation software do?</span></h1>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\">Here are the main features of marketing automation technology, which you should look for when subscribing to one.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Lead scoring. </span>Allows you to automatically grade leads based on specific criteria you set, including demographics, prospect behaviors and historical interactions. You assign a weight to each criterion and the system aggregates them to calculate the prospect’s lead score. The lead scores can be segregated by range and automatically funneled to their respective workflows. </p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Lead database</span>. The lead database captures a qualified prospect’s details and other marketing activities like web visits, email clicks and downloads. This database funnels leads to your CRM sales pipeline and, once converted, into your main customer database. The lead database may also allow for segmentation to help you target groups.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Lead nurturing.</span> Generally runs workflows designed to filter or shortlist prospects, which include managing the processes in email marketing and other channels and capturing data that helps in further qualifying leads.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Email marketing.</span> Business email marketing software allows email drip campaigns and features newsletter and email templates or an editor that lets you design your layout with ease. It allows for mass emails to targeted lists with a tracking tool to view number of opens and click-throughs. It may also feature an advanced tool for triggered emails, which send the right response in real time to specific customer actions.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">CRM integration</span>. Once the leads are qualified at the top-of-funnel, they are sent to the sales team; hence, marketing automation software should have seamless CRM integration. The integration can be with a third-party solution or as an add-on to the marketing automation software.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Forms and landing pages.</span> A form is embedded on the landing page to collect lead data, where it is funneled into your database for lead scoring. The landing page can also include dynamic content, where images, texts and calls-to-action are customized to the lead based on profiling like geolocation, industry, job title, previous interactions with you, etc.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Progressive profiling.</span> This is a smart form that delivers the right fields to different leads. A web visitor is analyzed for key details (for example: IP address, source page, Y/N customer) and is led to a series of unique short forms to capture specific data. This feature may also require social credentials for deeper profiling.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Reporting &amp; analytics. </span>You can calculate an individual campaign’s cost and ROI and, generally, your marketing activities, by running analytics on key metrics that are sliced and diced in different ways that include open emails, downloads, lead volume, etc. In conjunction with CRM, you can associate these values against sales metrics like conversion rate, win-loss rate and total sales.</p>\r\n<p class=\"align-left\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; \">Mobile-optimized. </span>Mobile-optimized landing pages and emails help you target users who access the Internet from their smartphones or tablets. Mobile-optimized also means you can access the system and your data on the go.<br /><br /><br /><br /></p>","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon-marketing-automation.png"},{"id":818,"title":"Content Marketing","alias":"content-marketing","description":" Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. It is often used by businesses in order to:\r\n<ul><li>Attract attention and generate leads</li><li>Expand their customer base</li><li>Generate or increase online sales</li><li>Increase brand awareness or credibility</li><li>Engage an online community of users</li></ul>\r\nContent marketing attracts prospects and transforms prospects into customers by creating and sharing valuable free content. Content marketing helps companies create sustainable brand loyalty, provides valuable information to consumers, and creates a willingness to purchase products from the company in the future. This relatively new form of marketing does not involve direct sales. Instead, it builds trust and rapport with the audience.\r\nUnlike other forms of online marketing, content marketing relies on anticipating and meeting an existing customer need for information, as opposed to creating demand for a new need. As James O'Brien of Contently wrote on Mashable, &quot;The idea central to content marketing is that a brand must give something valuable to get something valuable in return. Instead of the commercial, be the show. Instead of the banner ad, be the feature story.&quot; Content marketing requires continuous delivery of large amounts of content, preferably within a content marketing strategy.\r\nWhen businesses pursue content marketing, the main focus should be the needs of the prospect or customer. Once a business has identified the customer's need, information can be presented in a variety of formats, including news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, email newsletters, case studies, podcasts, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, blogs, etc. Most of these formats belong to the digital channel.\r\nDigital content marketing is a management process that uses electronic channels to identify, forecast, and satisfy the content requirements of a particular audience. It must be consistently updated and added to in order to influence the behavior of customers.","materialsDescription":" What Types of Businesses Can Content Marketing Help?\r\nSmall and large businesses in virtually every industry use content marketing to their advantage. From major consumer brands and retail stores to tech companies and service-oriented businesses, content marketing can help you reach out to your target audience.\r\nBoth business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies have developed successful content marketing strategies. The techniques and goals vary between B2B and B2C companies, but that doesn’t make content marketing any less effective.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">How Can Content Marketing Benefit My Business?</span>\r\nThe beauty of content marketing is that it serves multiple purposes. Depending on your goals and the type of content you create, it could boost your brand in several different ways.\r\nFirst, content marketing can increase awareness of your brand, especially if the material you produce has an educational angle. As customers get to know your brand and the value that it provides through high-quality content, you can also increase customer loyalty. As you grow your brand’s base, you can also generate website traffic and drive sales.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Can Content Marketing Generate Leads for My Business?</span>\r\nWith the right strategy in place, you can use content marketing to generate a steady stream of new leads for your business. While most brands offer content like blog posts, articles, and videos free of charge, they also create high-level content, such as white papers, case studies, and eBooks to serve as lead magnets. Then they require readers to opt into a mailing list before gaining access to the high-level content.\r\nOnce you’ve gained permission to email interested customers, you can introduce your leads to your sales funnel. As your leads discover and engage with your other content marketing efforts, they may convert from potential to current customers.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What’s the Most Common Content Marketing Mistake?</span>\r\nFor most businesses, the biggest content marketing mistake is jumping in without a coherent strategy. Like any type of marketing, you need a plan to get the results you want from content marketing. Launching a blog and producing posts regularly may never help you achieve your objectives if you don’t know what you want to accomplish or how to get there.\r\nTo develop an effective content marketing strategy, you’ll need to understand who your target audience is, what kinds of content they want, and how your brand can offer the greatest value to your audience. Many businesses opt to create buyer personas so they can get to know their target audience and design content that’s sure to resonate.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">What Type of Content Should My Business Create?</span>\r\nWhile the right content balance varies from business to business, most brands consider a few essential types. Blog posts and articles tend to top out around 1,000 words and usually help readers understand how and why to use your product or service. Case studies, white papers, and eBooks are substantially longer and typically feature original research related to your industry. Infographics and videos generally explain and illustrate concepts that you simply can’t convey via text. Depending on your brand’s goals, you might include one, two, or all types of content in your strategy.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">How Much Content Should My Business Produce?</span>\r\nJust as content type depends on your unique brand, so does content frequency. A lifestyle brand may benefit from developing and sharing short snippets of content daily, while others may get more value out of creating long-form content once a week or twice a month.\r\nNo matter what type of frequency works best for your business, however, strive for a consistent schedule. A regular schedule will boost your reliability and ensure that your audience anticipates your content.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Is Content Marketing the Same as Social Media Marketing?</span>\r\nThese two branches of marketing aren’t the same, but many businesses integrate their content marketing and social media marketing strategies. This synthesis helps brands ensure that they’re optimizing their marketing efforts.\r\nWhile content marketing encompasses written, graphic, and video material that can live on your company’s website or any number of other places online, social media marketing takes place strictly on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Many social media marketers build their editorial calendars around sharing links to content that their brands have created, as this practice can drive views and value.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">How Can You Measure the Results of Content Marketing?</span>\r\nWhen you invest in a content marketing strategy, it’s essential to track the results and determine your return on investment (ROI). As a general rule, your goals determine the metrics you’ll track as you assess results.\r\nFor example, if you want to increase brand awareness, you might track website traffic, bounce rate, or social shares. If you want to generate leads, you’ll track the number of leads, conversion rates, and an average time to close.","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/icon-content-marketing.png"},{"id":71,"title":"CRM - Customer Relationship Management","alias":"crm-customer-relationship-management","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Customer service</span> is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. The perception of success of such interactions is dependent on employees &quot;who can adjust themselves to the personality of the guest&quot;. Customer service concerns the priority an organization assigns to customer service relative to components such as product innovation and pricing. In this sense, an organization that values good customer service may spend more money in training employees than the average organization or may proactively interview customers for feedback.\r\nA <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">customer support</span> is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, trouble shooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product. These services even may be done at customer's side where he/she uses the product or service. In this case it is called &quot;at home customer services&quot; or &quot;at home customer support.&quot;\r\nRegarding technology, products such as mobile phones, televisions, computers, software products or other electronic or mechanical goods, it is termed technical support. \r\nCustomer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales and service representative), or by automated means, such as kiosks, Internet sites, and apps.\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM </span>(Customer Relationship Management) is an approach to manage a company's interaction with current and potential customers. It uses data analysis about customers' history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.\r\nOne important aspect of the CRM approach is the systems of CRM that compile data from a range of different communication channels, including a company's website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials and more recently, social media. Through the CRM approach and the systems used to facilitate it, businesses learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater to their needs.\r\nCRM helps users focus on their organization’s relationships with individual people including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers.\r\nWhen people talk about customer relationship management system, they might mean any of three things: \r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as Technology</span>: This is a technology product, often in the cloud, that teams use to record, report and analyse interactions between the company and users. This is also called a CRM system or solution.</li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Strategy</span>: This is a business’ philosophy about how relationships with customers and potential customers should be managed.&nbsp; </li><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CRM as a Process</span>: Think of this as a system a business adopts to nurture and manage those relationships.</li></ul>\r\n<br /><br /><br />","materialsDescription":"<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">Why is CRM important?</span></h1>\r\nCRM management system enables a business to deepen its relationships with customers, service users, colleagues, partners and suppliers.\r\nForging good relationships and keeping track of prospects and customers is crucial for customer acquisition and retention, which is at the heart of a CRM’s function. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customizable dashboard that can tell you a customer’s previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more.\r\nGartner predicts that by 2021, CRM technology will be the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software. If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. For forward-thinking businesses, CRM is the framework for that strategy.\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the benefits of CRM?</span></h1>\r\nBy collecting and organising data about customer interactions, making it accessible and actionable for all, and facilitating analysis of that data, CRM offers many benefits and advantages.<br />The benefits and advantages of CRM include:\r\n<ul><li>Enhanced contact management</li><li>Cross-team collaboration</li><li>Heightened productivity</li><li>Empowered sales management</li><li>Accurate sales forecasting</li><li>Reliable reporting</li><li>Improved sales metrics</li><li>Increased customer satisfaction and retention</li><li>Boosted marketing ROI</li><li>Enriched products and services</li></ul>\r\n<h1 class=\"align-center\"><span style=\"font-weight: normal;\">What are the key features of most popular CRM software programs?</span></h1>\r\nWhile many CRM solutions differ in their specific value propositions — depending on your business size, priority function, or industry type — they usually share some core features. These, in fact, are the foundation of any top CRM software, without which you might end up using an inferior app or an over-rated address book. So, let’s discuss the key features you need to look for when figuring out the best CRM software for your business.\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Contact management</span>. The best CRM solutions aren’t just an address book that only organizes contact details. It manages customer data in a centralized place and gives you a 360-degree view of your customers. You should be able to organize customers’ personal information, demographics, interactions, and transactions in ways that are meaningful to your goals or processes. Moreover, a good contact management feature lets you personalize your outreach campaign. By collecting personal, social, and purchase data, it will help you to segment target audience groups in different ways.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Reporting and dashboards</span>. These features of customer relationship management allow you to use analytics to interpret customer data. Reporting is very useful if you want to consolidate disparate data and churn out insights in different visualizations. This lets you make better decisions or proactively deal with market trends and customer behavioral patterns. The more visual widgets a CRM software has, the better you can present reports. Furthermore, a best customer relationship management software will generate real-time data, making reporting more accurate and timely. Reporting also keeps you tab on sales opportunities like upsell, resell, and cross-sell, especially when integrated with e-commerce platforms.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Lead management</span>. These features let you manage leads all the way to win-loss stage. They pave a clear path to conversion, so you can quickly assess how the business is performing. One of the main three legs that comprises the best client relationship management software (the other two being contact management and reporting), lead management unburdens the sales team from follow-ups, tracking, and repetitive tasks.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Deals and tasks</span>. Deals and tasks are closely associated with leads. Deals are leads at the negotiation stage, so it’s critical to keep a close eye on their associated tasks for a higher chance of conversion.<br />CRM software tools should also let you track both deals and tasks in their respective windows or across the sales stages. Whether you’re viewing a contact or analyzing the sales pipeline, you should be able to immediately check the deal’s tasks and details. Deals and tasks should also have user permissions to protect leaks of sensitive data. Similarly, alerts are critical to tasks so deadlines are met. Notifications are usually sent via email or prominently displayed on the user’s dashboard.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Campaign management</span>. Solid CRM software will integrate this feature to enable marketing processes from outreach concept to A/B testing to deployment and to post analysis. This will allow you to sort campaigns to target segments in your contacts and define deployment strategies. You will also be able to define metrics for various channels, then plow back the insights generated by post-campaign analytics into planning more campaigns.<br />Recurring outreach efforts can also be automated. For instance, you can set to instantly appropriate content to contacts based on their interest or send tiered autoresponders based on campaign feedback.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Email management</span>. By integrating with popular email clients like Gmail and Outlook, CRM solutions can capture email messages and sort important details that can be saved in contacts or synced with leads. They can also track activities like opened emails, forwarded emails, clicked links, and downloaded files. Emails can also be qualified for prospecting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Social media management. </span>Popular CRM systems feature an integrated social media management where you can view different social media pages from the CRM’s interface. This is a convenient way to post, reply on, and manage all your pages. Likewise, this feature gives you a better perspective on how customers are interacting with your brand. A glean of their likes and dislikes, interests, shares, and public conversations helps you to assess customer biases and preferences. Customers are also increasingly using social media to contact companies; hence, a good CRM should alert you for brand mentions.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n<ul><li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Mobile access</span>. With more users accessing apps via mobile devices, many vendors have been prioritizing mobile-first platforms. Emergence Capital Partners study found over 300 mobile-first apps so far and CRM is definitely one their targets. Many CRM solutions have both Android and iOS apps. Mobile access works in two ways to be highly appreciated: accessing data and inputting data while on location. Field sales with the latest sales information on hand may be able to interest prospects better. Conversely, sales reps can quickly update deals across the pipeline even as they come off a client meeting.</li></ul>\r\n\r\n","iconURL":"https://old.roi4cio.com/fileadmin/user_upload/CRM_-_Customer_Relationship_Management.png"}],"characteristics":[],"concurentProducts":[],"jobRoles":[],"organizationalFeatures":[],"complementaryCategories":[],"solutions":[],"materials":[],"useCases":[],"best_practices":[],"values":[],"implementations":[]}],"partnershipProgramme":null}},"aliases":{},"links":{},"meta":{},"loading":false,"error":null},"implementations":{"implementationsByAlias":{},"aliases":{},"links":{},"meta":{},"loading":false,"error":null},"agreements":{"agreementById":{},"ids":{},"links":{},"meta":{},"loading":false,"error":null},"comparison":{"loading":false,"error":false,"templatesById":{},"comparisonByTemplateId":{},"products":[],"selectedTemplateId":null},"presentation":{"type":null,"company":{},"products":[],"partners":[],"formData":{},"dataLoading":false,"dataError":false,"loading":false,"error":false},"catalogsGlobal":{"subMenuItemTitle":""}}