Sales Execs, CMOs Take Note: Former Salesforce CMO joins Radian6 Board to Advise on Strategy

Some may have missed an important event in the ongoing battle for social media monitoring and engagement platform leadership:  Late last month, Radian6 announced that Tien Tzuo, chief executive officer of Zuora, and former Chief Strategy Officer and CMO for salesforce.com had joined the Radian6 board of directors. I’ve decided to comment on this news because […] The post Sales Execs, CMOs Take Note: Former Salesforce CMO joins Radian6 Board to Advise on Strategy appeared first on VMR. Sales Execs, CMOs Take Note: Former Salesforce CMO joins Radian6 Board to Advise on Strategy was first posted on March 3, 2010 at 1:32 pm.©2015 "VMR". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at hugh@vmrcommunications.com

Some may have missed an important event in the ongoing battle for social media monitoring and engagement platform leadership:  Late last month, Radian6 announced that Tien Tzuo, chief executive officer of  Zuora , and former Chief Strategy Officer and CMO for salesforce.com had joined the Radian6 board of directors.

I’ve decided to comment on this news because I believe it signals a strategic adjustment in focus for Radian6 and a harbinger of increased market demand by sales executives for social media engagement technology that measures results from lead to close and interfaces seamlessly with CRM plaforms like salesforce.com.

Mr. Tzuo knows from experience that sales executives care about measurable sales results (that means dollars, pesos, Euros, Yen, etc…) more so than anyone else in an organization aside from the C-Suite. And they want a way to measure results in dollar terms. Now they want a way to see how social media engagement is increasing their sales from the time that first tweet is sent to the time their new customer signs on the dotted line.

If anyone has a good sense as to how to successfully attack that problem strategically, and within a SaaS framework, it would appear to be Mr. Tzuo.

A Stanford University and Cornell University alumnus, Tzuo joined Salesforce.com as employee 11 in 1999 and was one of the “original forces.” He held a variety of executive roles during his nine years there, eventually serving as its chief marketing officer and chief strategy officer. He personally oversaw the vision, direction and design of Salesforce’s award winning product line, helping to grow the firm into a multi-billion dollar company and one of the most successful Software-as-a-Service ( SaaS ) companies to date.

Not surprisingly, Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun is on cloud nine (no pun intended):

Says Tzuo:

Seriously, though, think of the Iphone of the sales and customer service world and that’s what you have with salesforce.com. It is now the leading enterprise cloud-computing company in the world for customer relationship management (CRM). Companies like Dell, the Wall Street Journal, NBC Universal , SprintNextel and others have all jumped on the Salesforce bandwagon.

But check out this quote from Sprint Nextel which appears on Salesforce’s website :

I think that this signals an important evolution in the  social media monitoring and engagement platform space. At least at the Enterprise level, Marketing, PR, Customer Service and the C-Suite are all on board with the fact that they can’t ignore the conversations that are occurring online. They need to AT LEAST listen using a platform like ScoutLabs or Radian6.

But sales execs have been relatively slow to pick up on the value of social media for lead generation and closing deals largely because of the difficulty in tracking ROI and lead to close ratios. I suspect, perhaps incorrectly, that LeBrun and co. recognize this fact and are expecting increased demand from sales-minded organizations that are now (1) demanding currency denominated ROI metrics across the board and (2) really want to bring their sales teams into the mix as well.

Again, I could be totally off the mark in my assessment regarding increased demand from sales executives in particular in 2010. I’d love some of my readers to tell me if they agree or disagree and why.

I just believe that bringing Mr. Tzuo “on board” (again, no pun intended) increases the odds that Radian6 will deliver the goods that will be most in demand by CMOs and sales executives:  a Monitoring, ROI Measurement and Engagement platform that will integrate seamlessly with a company’s CRM platform and that will be palatable to sales teams. A platform not only suited for marketing and customer service but also for sales.

I think this marks the beginning of a new chapter for enterprise class sales team adoption of social technologies.

And you? What do you think? Are there monitoring solutions out there that already do a good job of measuring social media engagement ROI? Which platforms work best for sales executives? Am I overestimating the significance of this move by Radian6? Reading more into it than necessary? I’d love to hear your comments.

And as always, I will be listening!

The post Sales Execs, CMOs Take Note: Former Salesforce CMO joins Radian6 Board to Advise on Strategy appeared first on VMR.

Sales Execs, CMOs Take Note: Former Salesforce CMO joins Radian6 Board to Advise on Strategy

VMR