10 Fastest Growing Digital Marketing Companies 2016

A Pioneer in Customer Relationship Management: Soffront Software

The Silicon Review

“Customers want more from companies than just products – they want an experience.” – Robert Hunter IV

Marketing automation is the talk of the town these days. According to BBG&G, 63% of companies that are outgrowing their competitors have adopted Marketing Automation. It enables you to track qualified potential customers through multiple channels (email, website, social, Adwords, digital advertising, and blogging), increasing sales and optimizing ROI. Founded in 1992 by Manu Das, Soffront Softwarehas developed a fully automated CRM solution for marketing, sales and customer service that has won several industry awards.

The company is a pioneer in the CRM software industry and during the early 2000s, when the cloud was becoming popular; it introduced one of the first cloud CRM solutions. “We are among the few select solutions that provide a powerful CRM with full marketing automation as a part of the same solution. We are also uniquely positioned by our focus on Automation,” said Manu.“We offer automation that replaces manual tasks and helps businesses automate all marketing and sales related activities with real-time flow of information between marketing and sales – without losing important information,” he added.

Sales and marketing departments use the same database with automated workflows seamlessly handing over “sales ready” leads from marketing to sales. Sales get to see the full marketing history and qualifying criteria when they receive a lead. When leads are discarded by sales, those are automatically put back into the marketing funnel and marketing gets to see the entire sales communication.

Standing Tall Amongst Peers
Soffront’s differentiating factors that give it an edge over its competitors are as highlighted below:

Automation focus – It offers automation as the engine that drives its solution and unites a business by automating common activities and full visibility of data between the marketing and sales departments.

Best Value – The company offers one single solution for marketing and sales automation that includes lead capture forms, email and social marketing, marketing automation builder, lead scoring, sales and marketing workflows, sales prospecting tools, sales forecasting tools, advanced analytics, customization tools, and more with a small investment of $35-$49 per user per month.

User adoption – Intuitive design, Visio like automation builder, tabbed interface for multi-tasking, and drag and drop customization provides higher ROI of user’s time, which leads to highest user adoption.

Powerful Automation Solutions
In the digital marketing space, Soffront’s CRM offers powerful marketing and sales automation and they come with the following features:

Marketing Automation

Automatically capture leads from websites or social media pages.
Scan Business Cards to CRM from mobile phones.
Flag and/or Merge duplicate and create segments.
Design automated campaigns with triggers, actions and branching.
Run automated nurturing campaigns.
Run automated split test campaigns to determine the most effective messaging.
Customize your own newsletter or chose one of our many pre-built templates.
Track website visitors.
Automatically rank leads before handing over to sales.
Monitor campaign performance.
Manage your social media inside CRM.

Sales Automation

Review rank of each lead and all past marketing communications.
Define your unique sales process and automatically guide your sales team to the shortest path to convert leads.
Define multiple sales processes based on lead characteristics.
Focus only on the leads that are ranked higher on “sales readiness”.
Automate task creation and reminders in each stage of the sales process.
Forecast sales pipeline.
Follow automatically generated smart to-do lists every morning.
Define accurate relationships between different types of contacts.
Generate useful reports and matrix.

Key Clientele
The company serves a variety of industries and business sizes ranging from fortune 500 companies to mid-sized businesses including long term customers such as Boeing, Siemens, SAIC, Masshousing, Tangoe, General Electric, and Minnesota Secretary of State – as well as large number of small businesses using marketing and sales automation.

Clients Speak
“Soffront Online CRM saves me a lot of time. I work with multiple customer records simultaneously, review my pending activities and drill down to the details in one click. Prospecting is very efficient and it is easy to manage my pipeline. I capture leads from the website and snap business cards directly into the CRM. I use Soffront’s built-in email and social marketing to nurture and qualify my leads.” – Mark Porter, Owner, Express Employment Professionals

“To have email campaigns integrated in the same CRM is extremely beneficial. Our marketing manager shoots out campaigns regularly and the sales team can see which of their leads opened, bounced, etc. so that they can follow up and act on these. Everything is tracked in one place. This is awesome.” – Nagui Bihelek, CEO, Business Edge Coaching

“We are extremely pleased with Soffront CRM because it is designed for our Industry, very easy-to-use, provides complete visibility to the management and it has all of the features that we need to manage leads, opportunities, tasks and appointments and forecasting and customers.” – Greg Clark, Regional VP, Commercial Works

Geographies
Soffront serves the North American market from its US locations and the European and APAC markets from its India location.

Future Road Map
“We have an exciting roadmap ahead that includes deeper automation between marketing and sales, support of multiple channels for marketing and service, predictive analysis and scoring for marketing, and a better mobile experience,” said Manu.

Knowing the Leader

Manu Das, Founder, President and CEO Prior to founding Soffront, Manu worked at FMC Corporation where he worked with Stanford University on an Obstacle Detection and Avoidance project and jointly published papers on the subject. He then joined National Semiconductor as an AI and Vision Engineer for a “human less factory floor” project. Then Manu joined Olivetti Advanced Technology Center, Cupertino to lead various commercial AI product developments on Expert Systems, Natural Language understanding, and Neural networks. During his tenure at the Olivetti, Manu worked with Stanford, Caltech and several private AI companies on various joint projects. During late 80’s and early 90’s, while with Olivetti, he was responsible for developing an internal database project based on Lotus Notes technology to manage product development on a global scale. While working with this project, Manu realized the market need of a commercial product to manage product development and customer management, which lead to his departure from Olivetti and start Soffront during the early 90s.