Software Terms:

 

Automated Sales Lead Generation:

Automated Lead Generation is the use of a computer program to search the Internet, to retrieve real-time information for the purpose of expanding the scope of a business, increasing sales revenues, and looking for potential new clients. Leads can consist of the names, titles, phone #'s, physical and email addresses of key individuals, corporations, institutions, and agencies. Lists can be built of these 'leads' and then filtered for targeted telephone, email , and direct mail marketing campaigns.

    Using search engines such as Google can be excellent sources of leads, but the manual process of individually clicking on each website and its links is extremely time consuming.

    However, lead generation software automate this entire process thereby providing many benefits to an organizations' marketing and sales departments

    Some of these are:

  • Acquiring the most current real-time information available at very low cost since companies update their websites frequently, as opposed to buying expensive lists that are outdated the moment of purchase due to the vendor's inability to verify every companies information possibly more than once or twice a year
  • Saving substantial man-hours in labor overhead conducting manual searches
  • Increased accuracy of information due to the elimination of redundant human data entry and subsequent errors occurring
  • Data can be automatically downloaded from the Web into text and comma delimited files, ready for filtering, and insertion into CRM databases to conduct marketing campaigns

    Example:

    Did you know Google only 'indexes' ONE percent of all information posted on the internet? This means when a person does a manual search via the Google search engine, the results posted come back from the 1% of available data on the Web.

    Automated lead generating software however also scours the other NINETY-NINE percent of ALL information available on the internet. Often this 99% is referred to as the 'deep' web.'

    Which search results would you rather utilize for your marketing efforts?

     

CRM:
CRM is the abbreviation for customer relationship management. It entails all aspects of interaction that a company has with its customer, whether it is sales or service-related. CRM is often thought of as a business strategy that enables businesses to:

Understand the customer
Retain customers through better customer experience
Attract new customer
Win new clients and contracts
Increase profitably
Decrease customer management costs

While the phrase customer relationship management is most commonly used to describe a business-customer relationship, CRM systems are used in the same way to manage business contacts, clients, contract wins and sales leads.

Customer relationship management solutions provide you with the customer business data to help you provide services or products that your customers want, provide better customer service, cross-sell and up sell more effectively, close deals, retain current customers and understand who the customer is.

 

Data Mining:
A process used by companies to turn raw data into useful information. By using software to look for patterns in large batches of data, businesses can learn more about their customers and develop more effective marketing strategies as well as increase sales and decrease costs. Data mining depends on effective data collection and warehousing as well as computer processing. Example:

Grocery stores are well-known users of data mining techniques. Many supermarkets offer free loyalty cards to customers that give them access to reduced prices not available to non-members. The cards make it easy for stores to track who is buying what, when they are buying it, and at what price. The stores can then use this data, after analyzing it, for multiple purposes, such as offering customers coupons that are targeted to their buying habits and deciding when to put items on sale and when to sell them at full price.

 

Business Intelligence:
 

Is a process for increasing the competitive advantage or performance of a business or organization by the intelligent use of available data in decision making. BI is a broad category of software applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help managers and staff make better business decisions. BI can include decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining.

Businesses or organizations are constantly faced with changing circumstances and challenges. Nothing remains static for long. Because of this changing environment, businesses and organizations need to be continually making decisions to adjust their actions to grow profitably or enhance the services they provide. BI can help here on two counts by utilizing the data held within the organization, trusting that it is reasonably clean and accurate:

•Establishing Early Warning Systems and Detection of Trends

•Finding relevant Patterns and Insights

Example:

Let’s say, you want to determine the profitability of a new product line in Q3 of 2013. You would need to pull manufacturing cost information from your enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, distribution and transportation costs from your supply chain management system, and finally, marketing campaign costs from your marketing software system. You would then need to compare this with revenue data from your accounting system. All this data would be extracted from these operational systems and then aggregated and organized into a data warehouse. Users would then run BI queries from the data warehouse, or more accurately, from data marts which are considered to be the access layer.

 

eCommerce:
 

E-commerce (electronic commerce or EC) is the buying and selling of goods and services on the Internet.

E-commerce can be divided into:
• E-tailing or "virtual storefronts" on Web sites with online catalogs, sometimes gathered into a "virtual mall"
• The gathering and use of demographic data through Web contacts
• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), the business-to-business exchange of data
• E-mail and fax and their use as media for reaching prospects and established customers (for example, with newsletters)
• Business-to-business buying and selling
• The security of business transactions

E-tailing or The Virtual Storefront and the Virtual Mall

As a place for direct retail shopping, with its 24-hour availability, a global reach, the ability to interact and provide custom information and ordering, and multimedia prospects, the Web is rapidly becoming a multibillion dollar source of revenue for the world's businesses. A number of businesses already report considerable success. As early as the middle of 1997, Dell Computers reported orders of a million dollars a day. By early 1999, projected e-commerce revenues for business were in the billions of dollars and the stocks of companies deemed most adept at e-commerce were skyrocketing. Although many so-called dotcom retailers disappeared in the economic shakeout of 2000, Web retailing at sites such as Amazon.com, CDNow.com, and CompudataOnline.com continues to grow.

Market Research

In early 1999, it was widely recognized that because of the interactive nature of the Internet, companies could gather data about prospects and customers in unprecedented amounts -through site registration, questionnaires, and as part of taking orders. The issue of whether data was being collected with the knowledge and permission of market subjects had been raised. (Microsoft referred to its policy of data collection as "profiling" and a proposed standard has been developed that allows Internet users to decide who can have what personal information.)

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

EDI is the exchange of business data using an understood data format. It predates today's Internet. EDI involves data exchange among parties that know each other well and make arrangements for one-to-one (or point-to-point) connection, usually dial-up. EDI is expected to be replaced by one or more standard XML formats, such as ebXML.

E-Mail, Fax, and Internet Telephony

E-commerce is also conducted through the more limited electronic forms of communication called e-mail, facsimile or fax, and the emerging use of telephone calls over the Internet. Most of this is business-to-business, with some companies attempting to use e-mail and fax for unsolicited ads (usually viewed as online junk mail or spam) to consumers and other business prospects. An increasing number of business Web sites offer e-mail newsletters for subscribers. A new trend is opt-in e-mail in which Web users voluntarily sign up to receive e-mail, usually sponsored or containing ads, about product categories or other subjects they are interested in.

Business-to-Business Buying and Selling

Thousands of companies that sell products to other companies have discovered that the Web provides not only a 24-hour-a-day showcase for their products but a quick way to reach the right people in a company for more information.

The Security of Business Transactions

Security includes authenticating business transactors, controlling access to resources such as Web pages for registered or selected users, encrypting communications, and, in general, ensuring the privacy and effectiveness of transactions. Among the most widely-used security technologies is the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which is built into both of the leading Web browsers.