Zimbra is a software company whose

Zimbra is a software company whose flagship product is its Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS), an open source messaging and communications software package, that relies heavily on Ajax to provide a variety of business functions. Purchased by Yahoo in 2007, the company now has accumulated 50 million paid mailboxes. In addition to e-mail, ZCS combines contact lists, a shared calendar, instant messaging, hosted documents, search, and VoIP into one package, and can be used from any mobile Web browser.
As an open source software company, Zimbra uses viral marketing models, word-of-mouth marketing, and open standards to grow its business. Customers are as free to criticize Zimbra and ZCS as they are to praise the company and its flagship offering. For the most part, this strategy has proven very successful for the company thus far.
Zimbra makes sales via its Web site and offers both free and commercial versions. Zimbra’s business model hinges on driving large numbers of visitors to its Web site, allowing them to try the most basic version of the software for free, and then persuading them to purchase one of its more full-featured commercial versions. Zimbra has over 200,000 visitors to its Web site each week.
Zimbra’s sales process begins when one of these 200,000 weekly visitors downloads a 60-day trial version. Salespeople try to identify which people using the trial version are most likely to upgrade to one of its commercial versions and then contact them via e-mail and telephone to try to close the sale. To make this work, Zimbra’s sales team needs to be able to weed out the interested buyers from its huge volume of Web visitors. As Greg Armanini, Zimbra’s director of marketing, pointed out, the sales team will be overwhelmed with a large number of unqualified leads unless sales and marketing automation tools are able to focus sales reps only on the leads that will generate revenue.
Zimbra uses its Web site to track visitor activity and tie it to sales lead information in its Salesforce.com customer relationship management (CRM) system. Identifying sales prospects that visit the Web site regularly and alerting sales reps when those prospects are visiting the site helps the sales team select which prospects to contact by telephone and when to call them.
Zimbra initially used marketing automation software from Eloqua, which had a large number of features but was too complicated for both marketing and sales staff to use. For example, the Eloqua system required salespeople to code conditional logic for any data field containing data they wanted to collect. Though doable, this task was a poor use of Zimbra’s sales staff time. Eloqua only worked with the Microsoft Internet Explorer Web browser, while two-thirds of Zimbra’s sales department used Mozilla Firefox. And Eloqua was expensive. Zimbra could only afford its entry-level package, which provided access to only five salespeople and one marketing person.
Zimbra did not need many of Eloqua’s features, but it did need a more streamlined solution that focused on the core areas of its marketing strategy: lead generation, e-mail marketing, and Web analytics. The new marketing automation system had to be easy to install and maintain. Many available options required several well-trained administrators, and Zimbra could not afford to allocate even one employee for this purpose.
After examining several software products, Zimbrachoose OneView, an on-demand marketing automation solution from LoopFuse, a Georgia-based software company that specializes in sales and marketing automation. OneView was more highly targeted than the Eloqua software. Not only that, but much of OneView consists of automated processes that allowed Zimbra to quickly implement the solution and to maintain it without dedicating someone to the task full-time. The core functions of OneView include Web site visitor tracking, automated marketing program communication, customer activity alerts, and CRM integration.
Zimbra was also pleased with LoopFuse’s convenient pricing options, including its “unlimited seating” and “pay-per-use” options, which allowed Zimbra to pay for only the services it needed for as many users as it required. Because of these options, Zimbra was able to deploy LoopFuse across almost its entire 30-person sales force.
Other benefits of OneView include easy integration with Salesforce.com, Zimbra’s preferred CRM solution, simplified reporting processes, and the ability to manage a larger number of leads thanks to having more salespeople and time to devote to demand generation. OneView works with multiple Web browsers, including Firefox. The old solution offered so many ways to handle and organize data that generating data reports could take a long time. With OneView’s simplified reporting processes, the sales staff can generate reports in a fraction of the time.
Has OneView improved Zimbra’s bottom line? OneView reduced the amount of time Zimbra spent using and maintaining its marketing