Ed King
Founder & CEO – Openprise

Salesforce Dreamforce is one of the biggest software conferences in the world. In the run-up to this event, we unveil our special TechByte series featuring high-profile Dreamforce attendees and MarTech Champions. We spoke to Openprise CEO Ed King about CX and his expectations from Dreamfrorce.

MTS: What tops your agenda at Dreamforce 2017?
Ed King:Lead and account scoring! Today at Dreamforce, Openprise is announcing new lead and account scoring capabilities. The reality is that most companies today are just winging it when it comes to lead scoring–there’s no science to what gets scored and why. It’s all just gut-feel.

As a result, many sales teams don’t trust their scoring models and just ignore them, and many sales teams are failing to engage with leads at the right time—slowing sales cycles, reducing sales productivity, and ultimately, missing revenue opportunities. Today we’re providing sales and marketing professionals with a more powerful, flexible scoring capabilities to accurately model the unique buying behavior of any company’s prospects at every stage in the buyer’s journey.  Feel free to stop by booth 116 or 1537 to learn more about it.

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem, HubSpot

MTS: Tell us more about how Salesforce customers could leverage Openprise’s Data Marketplace and Data Mechanic for higher ROI?
Ed: Openprise Data Marketplace is a one-stop shop for 3rd party data to enrich your sales and marketing data. It includes all the business processes to ingest and manage that data from multiple providers built right in. Companies save time and money and eliminate complexity in accessing and integrating the data they need for successful campaigns.

Data Mechanic is our managed services offering for people who don’t have the resources to roll up their sleeves and invest hands-on time with our solution. We take care of absolutely everything using our best practices, so customers see results fast, and companies can focus on their other strategic initiatives.

The ROI of these solutions is huge, and comes from dozens of places, but it rolls up into better campaign performance, higher revenue and lower cost. When you can segment better, personalize better, score better and route better, you’re going to have real impact on the top line. On top of that, you’re going to save time and effort which affects the bottom line.  When you eliminate a lot of manual processes, you’re saving money.

There’s also the softer side in terms of morale and employee retention. We have a saying about manual processes, and that’s “nobody goes to college to do that stuff.” You eliminate those mind-numbing repetitive tasks, your employees are happier and they don’t leave as much.

MTS: What are the key challenges to data cleaning and unification of marketing data across cross-channel streams?
Ed: Companies are constantly adding more and more data sources and tying more systems together. That results in a huge data normalization problem that makes it difficult to do good attribution, lead scoring, and lead routing. Our latest research shows that companies that were most happy with their data providers are working with three or more data providers, which makes sense since no one data provider has everything a company needs, but each one of those has their own field values.  Openprise orchestrates the entire process to keep your database clean and standardized with your unique field values, not theirs.

We’re also seeing more and more companies doing more than just integrating their sales automation, marketing automation, and service solutions. They’re also integrating with their product user database to score leads based on user behavior in free trials and in freemium products. That adds another level of complexity that Openprise is managing for customers.

MTS: In the age of Customer Experience, how does Openprise enable customers to become transformational leaders?
Ed: Transformational leadership is about leaders and team members working together to identify needed change, creating a vision to guide the change through inspiration, and executing the change with a committed group of people. Openprise is enabling companies to become far more data-driven in their ability to identify and quantify the need for change, and in measuring the results of the changes the team is making.

Also read: Also Read: Dreamforce Techbytes with Joe Hyland, Chief Marketing Officer, ON24

MTS: What makes GDPR Compliance from Openprise a keenly followed product in MarTech? How are you helping companies onboard the GDPR Compliance?
Ed: The latest release of the Openprise Data Orchestration Platform now includes new capabilities for GDPR compliance. It provides visibility, control, and access management inside and outside of a company, without the added complexity of traditional compliance solutions. Specifically, Openprise can control the flow of EU data out of a company through fine-grained data filters and permission Roles.  Openprise also identifies leads and contacts that fall under GDPR, even if they’re missing a valid country field value.  It also maintains detailed reporting on all data processing activities inside Openprise and across third parties.

MTS: What marketing technologies are you looking forward to at Dreamforce 2017?
Ed: There’s been a lot of buzz about AI in the last year, and with many vendors there’s more smoke and mirrors than substance. I’m looking forward to seeing what companies are actually delivering at this event.

MTS: What sessions are you attending at Dreamforce 2017?
Ed: The keynotes! We’re Salesforce groupies here at Openprise. We can‘t wait to see what Marc Benioff has in store for us.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Ed.
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