Omniture, the web analytics and marketing optimisation firm, became part of Adobe last year. It's a move that has given the firm additional clout at a time when demand for its offerings is becoming more apparent, reckons the firm's founder Josh James.
“We've gone from being a smaller firm to being part of a bigger firm,” explains James. “We have a lot more brand awareness which is very helpful to our business. I was at a customer reception in Japan recently and we pulled in 150 people who were all CxO level people of very very large companies, all of whom were familiar with the Adobe brand. As Omniture we could have had the same event and attracted a fourth of the people. The Adobe name helps us to get in touch with the CxO.”
But the Omniture brand name lives on. “We are the online marketing suite of Adobe, the optimisation arm of Adobe. You'd can't do the optimisation without the analytics and that serves as a platform for a lot of extra growth,” explains James, adding that there are still distinct sales channels. “It's either an Adobe deal or an Omniture deal. But Adobe can be doing a deal with CreativeSuite and can pass leads on to us for an Omniture deal. In truth, Adobe drives more of Omniture business than we do of theirs.”
The decade of the CMO
So what are the drivers behind such deals? “This is the decade of the Chief Marketing Officer,” declares Josh James, CEO of Omniture, now a division of Adobe. “This has been a time period where technology has really changed certain roles within organisations. Technology changed the CFO role from one of accounting and control to that of strategy and analysis. The VP of sales has technology to understand what's going on with sales. Now we see that same change coming to the CMO. It's going from being a fluffy role to something that has quantifiable metrics behind the performance. It's no longer about intangibles and brand awareness but what the metrics are about. Where are the numbers that you can't argue with.
“The successful CMO needs to have a really good understanding of what goes on ahead of the sales performance. They need to know the number of deals that are going on. They need to understand the quality of the lead. The head of sales used to be able to blame the head of marketing for poor sales by citing poor leads, but if the CMO can measure the success and effectiveness of leads than that can't happen.”
That conjures up images of marketing and sales opening up a new field of conflict, doesn't it? “Maybe but that's the kind of conflicts that you want,” shrugs James. “As the CEO you everyone arguing about holding one another accountable. When you know that other people are checking, you pay more attention yourself. It also means that you can notice things more rapidly. If the close rates are dropping then the head of marketing might notice it and highlight it. So the head of sales goes in and finds that there's an upstart competitor our there who wins more deals but who wasn't on our radar.”
Generation gap
While most CRM firms today are pitching heavily their social media and social networking strategies, James argues that there will likely need to be a generational shift before everyone in marketing understands all the implications. “I think consumers get it, but businesses don't yet,” he suggests. “Everyone inside your marketing organisation needs to understand how this works. But if you have a bunch of CMOs who grew up in a world of brand promotion and TV advertising and not 'how many sales did I drive?' then that's not there. But the people who are managing the search spend today are the ones who are going to become CMOs.”
Similarly some companies in some sectors understand how the world is changing, but in the same sectors other firms remain ignorant. “You can find one company in the financial market which gets it, but then another which just doesn't,” says James. “Understanding really tends to start with having a really good employee who's been there 8 or 9 years and who bought our products. The bosses liked what they did and so they bought more. It can take years for that to happen. But those people move on to other companies and it happens again.”
So there's clearly still a lot of evangelising to be done. Is that the goal for the immediate future? “For the next twelve months the opportunity is about integration,” concludes James. “We've put a bunch of products in our Online Marketing Suite and now we're focused on integrating well inside Adobe. We want everything to work really effectively.
“The demand is certainly there. We don't really need to go out and create demand. We will get demand from the economic uptick and from people feeling a bit better about the economy. We will see demand through Adobe and we'll get demand through the maturity and education of the customers. People are saying that they're not going to buy now, but they intend to in the next twelve months. So the demand is there.”
