Like other Canadian higher education institutions, Algonquin College is facing the challenge of steeply declining student-aged populations across Canada. To help adjust to this demographic shift, Algonquin College hired OnPath Business Solutions to deploy Salesforce with Marketo to revamp its student recruitment process. After conducting due diligence to determine that Salesforce enables them to comply with Canadian data privacy laws and public sector regulations, Algonquin College rolled out a student recruitment solution on Salesforce.
Salesforce, in conjunction with Marketo, automates student lead capture via its website and social media channels, manages lead scoring and segmentation, executes targeted communications, and tracks conversion targets. Algonquin’s Advancement Division have also deployed Chatter as a digital communication hub, breaking down traditional communication silos and organizational structures, helping the team stay focused on sales. Within the first year of rollout, Algonquin College increased lead generation by 23% and reduced collateral fulfillment time by >50%.
"We knew that Salesforce delivered a superior out-of-the box solution that has been proven to work around the globe. We found that we did not just buy software-as-a-service, we bought a system that enabled us to improve our selling process, and have had tremendous success because of it."
– Doug Wotherspoon, Executive Director, Advancement
Algonquin College’s Corporate Training Department has also implemented Salesforce, using the platform to manage all aspects of their business, from sales and marketing to back-end administrative processes. When the team sets up a training course for a corporate client in Salesforce, the system provides the sales representative with the ability to determine the profitability of a contract at the time of sale, empowering staff to make real-time business decisions that drive bottom line results.
About OnPath
OnPath specializes in B2B Lead Generation and Appointment Setting programs for enterprise clients who sell complex products and services. OnPath has a NATO secure 9001 certified 150 seat Call Center Telemarketing facility. OnPath is also a certified consulting partner for Salesforce and an agency partner for Radian6. We support clients throughout the USA and Canada including Ottawa Ontario, Toronto and Montreal.
Date: Thursday November 29, 2012
Time: 8:30-10:30am / Price: Free
Country Inn & Suites Kanata
578 Terry Fox Drive / Ottawa, Ontario
Register Now: http://bit.ly/U26JqE
Whether it’s a struggle with broader user adoption or weak introduction of new features and processes, most organizations recognize that sub optimal Salesforce deployments are constraining their progress. It’s frustrating and the desired results are hard to see.
Top 10 Deployment and User Adoption Best Practices
Join us for breakfast and a complimentary Executive Briefing where highly experienced Salesforce practitioners will share the Best Practices they have learned through hundreds of deployments. During this session Senior Executives and Managers will learn the key factors that drive success and come away armed with the practical insight they need to help their organizations accelerate their deployments. You’ll learn:
1. Where to find "Big Bucket" ROI opportunities.
2. How successful companies organize resources.
3. Big mistakes that companies make and how to avoid them.
4. Cost effective training strategies that drive user adoption.
5. Practical configuration options that make a difference.
Plus many more tips...
Speakers
Dan Scheunert (President, OnPath). Dan has a BComm from Queen’s University and is a Chartered Accountant. Tim Rees (Business Solutions Analyst, Adobe Systems). Tim is a senior Salesforce specialist who helped deploy 20,000 global users.
Register Now: http://bit.ly/U26JqE
About OnPath
OnPath specializes in B2B Lead Generation and Appointment Setting programs for enterprise clients who sell complex products and services. OnPath has a NATO secure 9001 certified 150 seat Call Center Telemarketing facility. OnPath is also a certified consulting partner for Salesforce and an agency partner for Radian6. We support clients throughout the USA and Canada including Ottawa Ontario, Toronto and Montreal.
Check out our new app for #salesforce #cloudforce #enterprise #flexforce developed by our talented Salesforce MVP and Salesforce Developer, Nash Zgonjanin. This is the 3rd app he's developed. In September 2012, Nash will be a presenter at Dreamforce's Developer Track. Follow him on Twitter @NZgon and Linkedin.
Add To Campaigns (Multiple Campaign Picker)
Salesforce.com provides features for adding many people to a single campaign. Add To Campaigns app allows an organization to manage multiple, ongoing campaigns like newsletters, customer programs, annual events, and even holiday card lists. Some of the features include:
* Add a single contact or lead to multiple campaigns in just a few clicks.
* Leverage standard filter logic for selection of available campaigns.
* Mash up of Visual Force pages and jQuery Table sort functionality.
Manually adding a single person to multiple campaigns one by one is a pain, and contributes to poor adoption, and incomplete or unusable data. This app allows salesforce users to add a single contact or lead to multiple campaigns with as few clicks as possible.
Get The App Here
About OnPath
OnPath specializes in B2B Lead Generation and Appointment Setting programs for enterprise clients who sell complex products and services. OnPath has a NATO secure 9001 certified 150 seat Call Center Telemarketing facility. OnPath is also a certified consulting partner for Salesforce and Marketo Marketing Automation. Ask us today about our new FLEXFORCE credit system for Salesforce consulting work. We support clients in throughout the USA and Canada including Ottawa Ontario, Toronto and Montreal.
Are you a Revenue Marketing Rockstar? Over 2000 marketers are attending the Marketo ‘Revenue Rockstar’ Tour and will rock their way to marketing stardom.
Price: Free
Date: Tuesday October 11, 2011
Time: 2pm - 5pm (presentations); 5pm - 7pm (reception)
Location: Pantages Hotel, Toronto (directions)
Registration: http://bit.ly/mPQNeb
Join OnPath Business Solutions (Authorized Business Partner) and Marketo in Toronto and learn revenue-focused strategies and tactics designed to crank up top-line at your organization. Participants will hear from best-in-class marketers, sales professionals, corporate leaders and successful Marketo users who will shed light on everything from marketing automation, sales and marketing alignment, lead scoring, nurturing and marketing ROI. These B2B marketing and sales heavyweights will provide valuable insight into what it takes to increase ROI and become a revenue rock star.
Who should attend?
Marketing professionals looking to increase ROI from their marketing activities.
What's in it for me?
Excellent networking and thought leadership plus meet with two marketing experts, Eric Hollebone and Vera Reifenstein. Every attendee will also receive a bag of revenue rockin' goodies plus a chance to win a pair of Beats Headphones ($399.95 value).
About Marketo
Marketo's powerful yet easy-to-use marketing automation and sales effectiveness solutions transform how marketing and sales teams work together, to drive dramatically increased revenue performance and fuel business growth.
About OnPath
Founded in 1993, OnPath has become one of Canada’s largest CRM and Marketing Automation consulting partners. Eric Hollebone leads the CRM and marketing automation team and was one of the first certified partners for Marketo. Some of OnPath Marketo clients include Algonquin College, Solace Systems and Amazon Web Services.
Register for this event at the link below.
http://bit.ly/mPQNeb
After scouring the internet for about an hour trying to find a decent article on trends in Marketing Automation, I finally came across one published by Software Advice. It's about venture funding; which companies are getting the funding, for how long and for how much. Check out the article below.
By Lauren Carlson
CRM Market Analyst,
Software Advice
5/11/2011
I’ve talked to a lot of marketing automation vendorsin the last year, and the topic of venture capital comes up often. Some vendors are proudly announcing new rounds, while others are deriding the fundraising as reckless and unsustainable.
I’m not exactly a Silicon Valley insider, so I decided to dig a little deeper into the topic.
On one end of the spectrum, you’ve got Marketo, which has raised $58 million to-date and $35 million of that in the last twelve months. They position these venture rounds as validation of their momentum in the market. They say the capital will be well-spent on product development and building an enduring company. Time will tell, but they seem to be doing very well.
On the other end of the spectrum are a dozen or so vendors who claim to be struggling with the VC math. Why do you need that much money to build a software company? Does it really cost that much to acquire a new customer? Wouldn’t a more “organic” approach to corporate development make sense?
VCs invested over $396 million in marketing automation vendors since 1998.
Read more: http://www.marketingautomationsoftware.com/blog/marketing-automation-venture-funding-1051111/#ixzz1NYtxAy9g
OnPath, April’s feature sponsor of the Salesforce.com presentation at OCRI Zone5ive, is proud to introduce the keynote speaker will be Rob Baldassare (Vice President, Corporate Sales - Salesforce.com). Rob will explore how characteristics and techniques of social media have been adopted, adapted and exploited within CRM to help marketing professionals connect more effectively with their audiences.
As a marketer, your job is to communicate and engage with prospects and clients. This means keeping the message and medium relevant. If you’re able to capture, analyze, and use social profile information efficiently and effectively social media can be an invaluable tool in this effort. This is the promise of Social CRM. Register Here: http://ocri.ca/events/zone5ive-upcoming
Date:
Thursday April 14, 2011
Time:
11:45 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Registration/Lunch
12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. Presentation
Profile Sponsor:
OnPath Business Solutions
Speaker:
Rob Baldassare
Vice President, Corporate Sales | salesforce.com
Location:
The Marshes Golf Club, Garden Terrace – Map
320 Terry Fox Dr.
Ottawa, ON
Cost:
$40.00 – OCRI members (plus 13% HST)
$60.00 – Non-members (plus 13% HST)
$15.00 – Students (plus 13% HST)
Register Here:
http://ocri.ca/events/zone5ive-upcoming
Learn more about OnPath
http://www.onpath.com/crmvideo
Written by DG Report
Wednesday, 23 March 2011 08:49
By David M. Raab, Principal, Raab Associates
The following are some things to consider:
1. Scope of features
2. Integration capabilities
3. Usability
4. Training and support
5. Partner network
6. Thought leadership
7. Stability
It’s almost a cliché that today’s buyers can gather product information for themselves. No one has taken this to heart more than marketing automation vendors, which publish mountains of information on their own web sites and subsidize distribution of still more by third parties. But even the most complete information and insightful analysis can’t accurately predict the future. Since the future is when you’ll use any marketing automation system you buy today, that’s a problem.
Of course, all purchases are used in the future. But it’s not hard to predict what you’ll want in two years from an accounting system or even sales automation. Marketing is different. Many companies have too little experience with marketing automation to know how they’ll use it. And marketing itself is evolving at such a head spinning pace that no one knows what techniques will be essential tomorrow. What we do know is we’ll be very sad indeed if our shiny new marketing automation system can’t support them.
This future vagueness has concrete implications for selecting systems. The fundamental best practice for choosing any software is to define your requirements and find a system that meets them. In marketing automation, that means identifying the types of marketing programs you want to run and figuring out what you need to execute them. You can then build a features checklist and vendor evaluation scorecard and start mining the mountain of information on the web.
But defining your planned programs and their requirements isn’t enough. You also have to recognize that you’ll want other programs you haven’t yet imagined. Your selection requirements have to accommodate that as well. The following are some things to consider:
1. Scope of features. Even if you don’t plan to do something today, you may want it tomorrow. Systems that can do more things have a higher chance of doing the things you’ll want. It’s simple mathematics.
2. Integration capabilities. No matter how powerful your system is, somebody will invent something it can’t do. In fact, they’ve probably invented it already. You need to find a system that can easily integrate with whatever new product-medium-data-process-network comes along. This means looking under the hood at techie stuff like data structures and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). If you don’t know what to look for, get help from someone who does. Would you buy a house without a home inspection?
3. Usability. You can’t judge how easy it is to use a feature that doesn’t exist. But if the current features are hard to learn and use, then the new ones probably will be, too. Usability becomes increasingly important as you add more tasks – if each task is hard, you won’t have time for new ones. But be careful: a system that does simple things easily but can’t extend them will quickly become a problem. So look at how systems handle something complicated before you make a judgment.
4. Training and support. Like usability, this is about how easy the vendor makes it to do new things. Again, you don’t know exactly what you’ll need to trained to do, but you want a vendor that has demonstrated its willingness and ability to support its clients. This is a matter of company culture, which changes more slowly than anything.
5. Partner network. Partners are an important supplement to the vendor’s own resources for helping clients. They’re also knowledgeable buyers, so a strong partner network is an informed vote of confidence in the vendor’s future.
6. Thought leadership. Vendors with a clearer vision of the future have a better chance of adding features their clients will need. But I wouldn’t weigh this one too heavily: while the general direction of the industry is clear to everyone (more data, tighter targeting, cross-channel integration, buyer control), nobody can predict the precise details. So what you really want is a solid foundation that can support whatever you need to build on top.
7. Stability. This is often misinterpreted to mean you should buy only from a big company. Not at all. What you want is a company that can continue to support its clients and enhance its product. Resources to do this could come from high revenues, high profits on lower revenues or outside funding. It’s true that the marketing automation industry today has a large number of small competitors, and some consolidation is inevitable. But small players can survive if they pick the right niche and serve it well. Also bear in mind that a successful company may be acquired, which causes its own disruptions, and that today’s technologies let vendors add features without necessarily making a huge investment. So you’ll want to look at a combination of factors, including revenue, profits, funding, ownership and history of keeping up with the industry.
Nothing can guarantee the success of your marketing automation project – not even following my advice. But building these factors into your decision can tilt the odds in your favor. That’s enough to justify the effort.
David M. Raab is a consultant specializing in marketing technology selection and marketing analysis. His firm publishes the B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST), a detailed analysis of 18 industry vendors based on nearly 200 data points. For more information, see www.raabguide.com. Raab also blogs extensively on industry issues at Customer Experience Matrix.
Only 29 Minutes
Watch the On-Demand Video: http://bit.ly/hTmW62
If you’re thinking of, or in the midst of, deploying Salesforce.com then you need to watch this event. Two customers speak candidly about the challenges, the politics, the shortcomings, and the unknowns that made the deployment a challenge. Nobody told them this was going to happen. Sure the technology rocks. It’s user friendly and integrates well with other applications. But the real issues were never in the marketing materials.
Featuring: Darren Just (Director IT, Bridgewater Systems), Gary Fehr (Manager Corporate Training, Algonquin College), and Tim Rees (Senior CRM Consultant, OnPath Business Solutions Alumni).
Now, in a candid and open conversation, we reveal the personal journeys in deploying Salesforce.com. You will find out what the key challenges were during implementation and what these customers did to solve them. During this webinar you will also learn what it costs to get a system up and running, what it costs to maintain and whether or not there is a positive return on investment.
We disclose everything – the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s our hope that after this session you will know exactly what it takes to have a successful salesforce.com implementation.
Only 29 Minutes
Watch the On-Demand Video: http://bit.ly/hTmW62
Centralized Waiting List Technology Offers Easy One-point Access to Parents and Service Providers Looking for Child Care Options.
http://www.cccf-fcsge.ca/publications/Interactionca-June10-feature-en.htm
OTTAWA - Canadian Child Care Federation. June 10, 2010. Developed by Andrew Fleck Child Care Services - a multi-service family agency in Ottawa, Child Care Information (CCI) is a regional, bilingual, provincially funded and regionally-mandated information and referral service that started in 1982. Its main purpose is to provide information and guidance on all available child care options in Ottawa and to assist parents in making informed child care choices. The program works closely with the community in the development of needed support services, the provision of statistical reports, the coordination and management of a number of interesting projects with their own level of complexity.
The inception of the Centralized Waiting List(CWL) began as a pilot project in 2001 for the francophone child care community. Parents interested in finding a French speaking licensed child care centre and/or a child care provider through a licensed agency have had the capacity to register to the CWL with the potential of selecting a maximum of nine child care centres and one licensed home child care agency that services the entire city of Ottawa by using the one application.
CCI manages the CWL's information and provides accessibility to it while the individual child care service maintains full control of its waiting list. The CWL offers one point of access; reduces the number of calls for the parent; eliminates the arduous process of putting their child's name on multiple wait lists; informs parents of the child care options; facilitates the access of children with special needs by offering them an equal chance of obtaining a licensed child care space; provides support to licensed child care services in the management of their waiting list; and identifies child care needs within the community. Initially, a total of 33 French child care services were involved. Its success changed its status from a pilot project into an ongoing service. In 2006, this service expanded in order to include all English and bilingual services. This represented an increase of 211 child care services requiring maintenance of their wait lists. Quite the challenge was waiting!
Before expanding the service to all these child care services, it was imperative to choose the appropriate Customer Relationship Management System (CRM). A CRM system manages and processes the data in order for a company to record all activities with their different relationship types: clients/customers, suppliers, partners and employees.
OnPath Business Solutions offered a customized database that allowed CCI staff to participate in the customization process in order to meet their needs. This communication tool also permits CCI staff to record their many daily activities and to convey required tasks amongst them. On Path's methodology and implementation has been truly successful. More information about their services can be found at http://www.onpath.com/.
By 2010, the database has been populated by more than 350 licensed child care services which include 250 child care centres, 87 nursery schools and 16 home child care agencies. As for the Centralized Waiting List, an overall number of more than 30,900 families and 44,900 children with active and inactive child care requests are in the system. CCI employees are able to maintain this high-volume data collection with easy manipulation of the stored information that includes detailed data and history for each of these children, parents and services.
Parents have many ways of registering their child on the Centralized Waiting List. They have the option of completing a paper form; an electronic copy; a form with the assistance of an Information Counselor by coming in person to CCI's workplace; and the online application. The online application offered in both French and English at the following website:http://www.childcareinformation.ca/, has become the most popular way of registering, with its newest feature for parents to self-edit their own files by typing in their user name and password.
Dissemination of CWL clients' information is accessible to each child care centre and home child care agency through a web portal. This tool permits them to filter, sort out the data to suit their specific needs and to communicate information regarding their potential clients in order to assist CCI in maintaining current information.
CCI prides itself for keeping up with the latest developments in the child care field and with information technology to support the delivery of high quality client-based services. For more information: Lyne Tremblay at 613-248-3605 x278 ltremblay@afchildcare.on.ca or Dan Scheunert at 613-842-4160 dan.scheunert@onpath.com
Join us for a 29 minute webcast on Thursday May 13 at 2:00pm EST as our panelists bare all for the naked truth. Now in an open and candid conversation, three marketing technology experts Jep Castelein (Leadsloth.com), Ardath Albee (Marketinginteractions.com) and Tim Rees (OnPath.com) share what tools top marketers are using to better manage their campaigns in 2010.
Are marketing automation tools really the answer to every Marketer's need? Can traditional tools like CRM achieve the same goals without additional investment? Do you really need both? If I only have budget to invest in one tool - what should it be? Click here to register.
Our three admittedly biased panelists will debate these questions from very different vantage points and experiences. This webcast will be entertaining for those who want to learn the merits of both solutions in meeting the needs of the Marketer. It's our hope that after this session you will know exactly what tools are needed to best manage your campaigns and for the lowest possible cost.
Attendees will receive a complimentary Starbucks Card. Enter your mailing address and we'll send your card after the event. Starbucks, the Starbucks logo and the Starbucks Card design are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Starbucks U.S. Brands LLC. Starbucks is not a participating partner or sponsor in this offer.