To help marketers execute campaigns that generate highly-qualified sales opportunities and accelerate deal cycles, Oracle has announced Oracle Fusion Marketing.

Part of Oracle Advertising and CX, Fusion Marketing enables marketers to easily create campaigns that span traditional marketing and advertising channels, and is the first marketing automation solution that is engineered to bypass the entire lead qualification and conversion process. Fusion Marketing uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically score leads at the account level, predict when consumers are ready to talk to a salesperson, and generate a qualified sales opportunity in any CRM system.

CRM has become the system that both sellers and marketers love to hate, due to disconnected workflows, too much manual administration, and siloed data often preventing sales and marketing teams from working with each other to engage customers and drive revenue. Because of this, the experience for most salespeople is that their CRM system doesn’t help them sell—and this disconnect between sales and marketing teams is a growing challenge as the B2B buying process becomes more complex. Customers and prospects are now interacting with organisations across an increasingly broad range of digital channels, buyer expectations are growing, and the need to access information at any time means much of the purchasing decision is now made before a salesperson is engaged.

“It is time for our industry to think differently about marketing and sales automation so that we can transform CRM into a system that actually works for both the marketer and the salesperson,” said Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president and general manager, Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience. “This is not about forecasts and rollups or a reporting tool to see how the sales force is performing, but instead about turning CRM into a system that helps sellers sell. A huge part of that change is bringing marketing and sales teams together and eliminating the low-value, time-consuming tasks that distract from building customer relationships and closing deals. That’s why we have invested so much time engineering a system that will help marketers fully automate lead generation and qualification and get highly qualified leads to the sales team faster.”

Fusion Marketing simplifies and accelerates the creation and execution of marketing campaigns by automating the end-to-end process of lead generation and qualification. With Fusion Marketing, any marketer can easily build and run campaigns with consistent messages across advertising and email channels, all in a matter of minutes. This helps marketers improve the performance of campaigns by increasing the output of highly qualified sales opportunities.

Fusion Marketing guides the marketer through the entire campaign creation and execution process, including:

• Building a Target Audience of Known Contacts: Marketers can select a product or service that is the focus of the campaign, and then select a list of known contacts from any CRM system.
• Expanding Your Audience: From that audience, Fusion Marketing will automatically generate a highly targeted audience profile for use in online advertising to target people who are potentially relevant to your campaign—but unknown to your contact database.
• Identifying the Best Customer References: Based on the focus of the campaign and specific industry of each customer, Fusion Marketing recommends the best reference stories to promote in the campaign.
• Simplifying Campaign Configuration: Fusion Marketing provides a single user interface to assign all of the campaign assets required to run your campaign across email, website landing pages, and advertising channels. Previously, companies had to rely on multiple systems to do this.
• Launching the Campaign: The marketer can easily set up advertising budget, start, and end dates and launch their campaign.
• Monitoring Results: A prebuilt dashboard that provides marketers with real time visibility into campaign performance.

After campaigns have launched, Fusion Marketing automates the generation and qualification of leads:

• Personalised Campaign Microsites: Emails and ads take people to an automatically generated “microsite” landing page for each campaign, which includes customer references personalised to match the industry and interest of the customer.
• AI-powered Lead Qualification: Fusion Marketing monitors engagement across all campaign channels including emails, online ads, and microsite visits. Because interest at the company level is what matters, Fusion Marketing will qualify account level interest by aggregating engagement from people at the same company. This AI algorithm automatically generates qualified opportunities for salespeople when it detects sufficient engagement.
• Deliver Qualified Opportunities to Any CRM System: When identified, qualified opportunities are delivered to any CRM system.

“Customer experience is so critical to customer acquisition and lifetime value that sellers can no longer afford to optimise customer touchpoints independently. The new challenge is to provide seamless continuity across the entire front office, which requires an infrastructure based on connected clouds,” said Gerry Murray, research director, IDC. “Fusion Marketing builds on Oracle’s engineering history and is a good fit for those looking for a suite of pre-integrated experience capabilities that sits on top of a complete cloud stack.”

“I see it every day: customers are looking for business solutions that drive true value and let human beings do what they do best,” said Samia Tarraf, North American Oracle Business Group Lead, Accenture. “With Fusion Marketing, Oracle has put their focus squarely on the customer, allowing marketers and sellers to quickly generate highly-qualified sales opportunities and close more deals. We have partnered with Oracle for over 30 years, bringing unparalleled innovation, industry and technology acumen to our joint clients, enabling them to sustain and grow in uncertain times. We continue the tradition and look forward to creating bold, unique market-leading opportunities across the enterprise.”

Part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, Oracle Advertising and CX connects data across advertising, marketing, sales, and service to make every customer interaction matter. Going beyond traditional CRM, Oracle Advertising and CX helps business leaders create, manage, serve, and nurture lasting customer relationships.