Getting Your Data Into the (Work)Flow

In a fascinating move this week, Salesforce announced a new plug-in offering tight integration with Microsoft Outlook. This new capability, still in beta release, is offered free to Salesforce customers with its Enterprise plan or higher.

Why is this fascinating? First of all, Salesforce compete head-to-head with Microsoft in the CRM space, so this is arguably a shot across Microsoft’s bow on that front. But more importantly, it’s showing the growing importance of both applications and tight integration to data publishers.

One of the great weak spots of most CRMs has long been email integration. Getting email from one’s email client to the CRM has tended to be clunky and far from automatic. Getting salespeople to send email from the CRM tended not to be practical, and nobody wanted email messages spread across two systems.

This new integration from Salesforce doesn’t magically solve all these issues, but it’s a big step forward to making the user’s preferred systems and processes more powerful. And that’s exactly the mantra we’ve been preaching to the data industry for many years now. Get into the user’s work environment and get in deep. This is a great example of this principle at work. And even better, the many data publishers already leveraging the Salesforce platform can leverage it immediately and for free.

This brings up a larger discussion about data publishers becoming dependent on third-party platforms. Sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t. And part of that decision process involves an honest assessment about whether or not you can reasonably achieve deep embedment like this yourself.

Another useful point this new plug-in highlights: for all its issues and flaws, email isn’t going away anytime soon. And because it is arguably the most core workflow tool at most companies, it is arguably the most important place to seek to embed your data … provided your data makes sense in this context.

Google Disrupts the Insurance Business

Google’s recent entry into the insurance industry (not as an insurer or agent, but rather as a discovery and price comparison tool holds some useful insights for data publishers.

In brief, Google is working with a number of auto insurance companies in California (it has national expansion plans of course) to help online shoppers easily find policies and compare rates. While exact specifics were not disclosed, it appears that this venture has a lead generation model, where Google will be paid for referring leads, although some published reports suggest Google will receive a percentage of the actual insurance premium from sales it generates.

Google is reportedly working with 14 auto insurers in California, but few of them appear to be the household name national auto insurers, at least for now.

This initiative is unquestionably disruptive to the insurance industry, which may explain why those insurers with the least to lose seem to be the majority of the early participants. After all, participating in this venture not only means giving up lots of valuable data to Google (who some predict has designs on becoming an insurer itself), but it’s a potentially large new marketing expense. Most significantly of all, it further commoditizes auto insurance, as Google makes it even easier for consumers to buy strictly on price.

What’s intriguing from a data perspective is that Google has partnered with insurance companies, in large part to get the data it needs. Certainly Google needed to get rate data directly, but it also needed comparable policy data to make meaningful side-by-side comparisons. In short, Google couldn’t find what it needed on the open web. I’m hearing from an increasing number of data publishers that Google is licensing their data primarily because it can’t adequately structure content to deliver the user experience it wants.

Secondly, we’re seeing the hidebound and opaque insurance industry showing willingness to cough up real time pricing, to be used in an environment where consumers are encouraged to buy on price. That’s no small decision, and I think this is a harbinger of things to come, as companies come under increasing pressure to do the unthinkable: provide pricing transparency online. And that means that we could shortly be seeing more price comparison sites in vertical markets, and these are true data-driven opportunities.

Looking at all these pieces, what I see is that Google is forcing change in the whole area of vendor/product feature and price comparison. But Google doesn’t have the finely structured data it needs to push into these markets. It seems to me, that with the essential data in hand, and a respected and neutral market position, data publishers can follow Google’s lead and cause a little disruption of their own. 

Evolving From Tools to Hands

I recently learned about a company called LeadGenius that styles itself as an “end-to-end sales-acceleration solution.” What that means is that you tell LeadGenius about your market, and they take it from there: identifying leads from business databases, scoring them, sending promotional messages to them, right through to appointment setting – all duly reported to you in the CRM system of your choice. It’s obviously an appealing concept, and it may also suggest the next level for data publishers. Data publishers have built stronger and more profitable businesses by building tools around their data and injecting themselves into client workflow. But what’s next after that?

If LeadGenius represents where things are headed, the answer may be to not just fuel prospecting for our customers, but to do prospecting on their behalf. It’s not as wild a concept as it might sound. Indeed, many B2B media companies have pushed hard into a new business called “marketing services,” which can include just this.

Does it make sense? Well, talk to data publishers and you’ll quickly find that a key frustration is that they are providing much more sales intelligence to their customers than they know how to fully use. You’ll also hear endless horror stories about customers who squandered great leads or missed big opportunities. Perhaps sales prospecting (and we’re talking about developing live prospects with an expressed buying interest, not closing the sale) belongs with the organization that understands it best.

It is also worth considering the appeal of a service such as this in our app-driven world, where anything can be obtained with a few clicks. In a nod to this, LeadGenius offers its own API through which customer projects can be ordered and managed. Someone who offers to do the work tends to be more appealing than someone who wants to help you do the work yourself.

Of course, it’s speculative to discuss where things are heading based on the example of just one interesting company. But in our pay-per-click, cost-per-action world, is this really so difficult to imagine?

Is It App Time?

In a move that further signals the remarkable growth and increasing importance of mobile devices,
Google has announced changes to its search algorithms to prioritize apps.

Starting April 21, for all searches on mobile devices, Google will present search results that identify and prioritize mobile-friendly sites. That means those with mobile-friendly sites should rank higher in search results conducted from mobile devices. Further, if you wish, Google will also begin to index content on mobile apps that may not appear on your website. And to close the loop, Google will allow app developers to use mobile search results to guide users to either the website or the app (provided the app is installed on the mobile device, something Google will check), wherever you the content owner think they’ll have the best experience.

These are cool if not world-changing new features from Google, but they indicate clearly the rapid evolution of the mobile ecosystem, one where the quality of the displayed information is becoming nearly as important as the information itself. This means that mobile-friendly websites are important, but the future lies with apps that will become an increasingly seamless part of the search experience. Think about it. Google will now check (on Android devices) what apps you have installed, index the content of those apps, present this content in regular Google search results, and allow you to seamlessly view that content in the installed app.

If your website isn’t already mobile-friendly (and it should be just as a best practice), Google’s giving you a big incentive to do so by pushing you up in mobile search results.

And if you’re wondering about the value of apps for your products, consider how quickly they are moving from handy appendages to the mobile experience to becoming central to that experience. If your data makes sense on a mobile device (and it doesn’t always), it’s probably time to stop thinking and start coding!

Customer Privacy: Get Serious

You may have noticed the news last week that AT&T is rolling out new, ultra-fast residential Internet service in Kansas City. But along with that announcement came a novel pricing structure: the service is $70 per month, or $99 per month if you want your online activity to remain private. Leave aside the ethical and moral arguments for a moment and just look at the optics. There it is in black and white: AT&T will monitor your web searches and browsing activity in order to serve up tailored advertising unless you pay a hefty premium to avoid this. Unsurprisingly, the press uniformly reported this as a “privacy premium” or “no-spy fee.” You are left with a creepy feeling about AT&T, and this pricing approach certainly doesn’t work to burnish the company’s brand. Also, is a typical residential customer really worth $350 in advertising revenue? This feels more like a penalty fee than recovery of foregone revenue.

And what about the ethics and morality? Many will argue, plausibly, that this is no different from what Google, Facebook and many others do – offering you services where they monitor your activity in order to better target advertising. All AT&T is doing is giving you an (paid) opt-out opportunity.

The small but important differences I see are two: the AT&T service is paid, and AT&T is in a privileged position as the on-ramp for its customers. If you offer a paid service, the business model is explicit and understood by both parties. Trying to further monetize your customer is good business, but it’s also a delicate business because you risk killing the golden goose. And when you put yourself in the position of having access to sensitive customer data (even if you don’t think it’s all that sensitive), you are in a trust position. When trust is lost, it’s very hard to get it back.

The implications for B2B data publishers?  Paid subscription services come along with a customer expectation of privacy. After all, your subscribers are using your databases to check on competitors, look for acquisition candidates, plan business strategy and lots of other sensitive activity. Even the perception that you are peeking into their activities for anything other than system maintenance represents a huge breach of trust that can seriously damage your brand and your business. Consider, as just one example, the blowback Bloomberg experienced when its customers learned that Bloomberg editors could and did access their accounts.

Think hard about your own approach to customer privacy. Don’t fall into a common trap of thinking that because all this customer data is so accessible to you, it’s yours to use. It even filters down to everyday activities such as managing customer engagement. Contacting customers that haven’t logged in in 60 days is one thing; calling them up to discuss their recent queries probably crosses the line.

Privacy doesn’t get discussed much in the context of B2B data products in large part because it is an implicit customer expectation. But if pricing models such as this AT&T model proliferate, publishers that are serious about customer privacy will likely have a strong competitive advantage.