What Aprimo Sells and What Customers Buy
Over the decade of exposure to the Aprimo platform, historically always as part of face-to-face conversations, I have re-iterated one of the early bits of fun. At one of their first Aprimo user conferences I stayed over in Indianapolis for an extra day and Bill Johnson - the then Head of Sales and an early investor (an I understand still current) - ask me to talk to his sales team.
For sure customers buy for MANY reasons and, as with any B2B sale, navigating our corporate organisation and sale process was complex. Not withstanding this I told them that what they sold me then - and to an extent still do - is box pictures with labels. Back then it look like this...and pretty today still does.
What I bought was not this but rather the packaged collection of Services and the rich and flexible data model that would enable us to quickly build, deploy and re-use the processes that marketers require to be able to work "nicely" with the other parts of the organisation - Finance, Sales, Customer Service, IT, Legal and Compliance that sometimes already have their platforms but which are, at best, a poor fit to the requirements and speed of execution required by marketer. At the time I was buying for the automation of campaign management and the future potential of marketing operations....what we bought look more like...in other works not just the boxes but the yellow arrows (the Services).
Back then in 2002 service orientated web architecture = you experience an enterprise application via your browser was barely understood outside university lecturing let alone in business. Today it is the the gold standard to which.
Why is this important. I'll pick three business reasons
- No software to install on a corporates desktops and laptops - just service = takes out a lot of cost and aggravation historically linked to enterprise IT enablers.
- The solution is a LOT more resilient and flexible; each campaign sets up its own unique service processes = if there is a bug in one campaign ALL the rest keep working. Also it added start, pause, stop to each campaign. This means each campaign and its results can be monitored in real time and, if needed, paused and the offer of copy tuned and restarted.
- Major version upgrade to access the improved functionality as it is released are accessible at a dramatically lower price point. Just the application on the server environment.
