Salesfusion Launches Spiffy New Marketing Automation Tool

Salesfusion on Tuesday launched version 12 of its marketing automation solution.

The company rebuilt Salesfusion 12 from the ground up to provide an architecture robust enough to support “the easiest-to-use, most modern campaign creation tools available to marketers today,” said Greg Vilines, Salesfusion’s VP of product and engineering.

It provides enterprise-grade power and features without the typical price tag, he told CRM Buyer.

Dated architecture was one of the challenges the company faced, said Cindy Zhou, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

“Rearchitecting enables Salesfusion to modernize their solution,” she told CRM Buyer.

The new Olympus modular automation framework, a key part of Salesfusion 12, processes campaigns and adds horsepower to handle increased workloads from traffic spikes.

Salesfusion 12 “was purpose-built for data-driven marketers who wish to build sophisticated marketing programs in a fraction of the time it previously took,” Vilines said.

Customers can try out Salesfusion 12 for two weeks for free, he noted.

Olympus’ Capabilities

Olympus leverages a scalable platform that dynamically adapts to shifts in workload volume, leveraging Amazon Web Services’ natural virtualization capabilities, Vilines said.

Other Olympus components:

• new data processing and indexing tools for inbound activity tracking, leveraging Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose and Elasticsearch; and
• high-speed Redshift data warehouses to power advanced analytics and core dashboards and reporting.

“With the increased collaboration between marketers and sales teams, the complexity of multiple campaigns running concurrently and the associated data collection increases,” noted Constellation’s Zhou. “This new automation framework should help customers with performance speed and processing.”

Salesfusion’s New Features

Salesfusion 12 has three new features:

• Page Builder – which has drag-and-drop builders that let marketers create landing pages and emails rapidly without needing specialized coding skills or third-party tools;
• Advanced Analytics, which offers custom dashboards as well as reports that allow data drilling, visualization and data storytelling; and
• Deeper CRM integration with Salesforce, Sugar, Sage, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Infor and Bullhorn.

PageBuilder has a WYSIWYG interface that lets users add images, videos and buttons. Users can build completely mobile-responsive pages that work across all devices.

PageBuilder leverages Salesfusion’s Form Builder and automated actions to streamline interactions with prospects and customers.

Salesfusion 12 includes the Advanced Analytics platform, a new business intelligence module that lets users leverage marketing data to monitor campaign performance and connect marketing activities to revenue.

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Advanced Analytics was released in August as an add-on module for a fee, but is now included in Salesfusion 12, Vilines said. Further, it has new features – opportunity, ROI and funnel reporting.

For CRM integration, Salesfusion 12 includes integration with custom objects in both Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce. It has deepened connectivity with Bullhorn, and it integrates with campaigns in Salesforce, Infor and Microsoft Dynamics.

“Additional integrations with CRM will be important in making Salesfusion attractive,” said Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research at Nucleus Research, “particularly with CRM vendors like Microsoft that don’t have marketing automation capabilities in their core product.”

Salesfusion has always rated high on usability,” she told CRM Buyer. “These advancements will likely make it more attractive, particularly for organizations where marketers wear several hats — in SMBs — or aren’t everyday users of the application.”

Salesfusion has customers in various industries, including technology, healthcare, finance and recruiting, Vilines said.

Future Plans for Salesfusion 12

Salesfusion will release new features continually over the next few months as part of the Salesfusion 12 launch, including the following:

• Account View — reshaping ABM efforts to facilitate better insights and account actions;
• Response Prospector, which will leverage machine learning and AI to find new leads and keep databases up to date; and
• An updated REST API, which will craft new ways to integrate directly to Salesfusion’s platform.

“Many of the marketing automation leaders are building AI capabilities into their solution,” Zhou noted.

In this respect, Salesfusion may have to work hard to catch up — companies such as Boomtrain, Abert and Blueshift already offer AI-powered marketing automation products.

Still, Salesfusion continuously improves its core infrastructure, Vilines emphasized, “to meet the ever-changing needs of marketers.”