Sales & Marketing: Fidelity System Feeds Sales

In a Market with few play- ers, Rubric Inc. is looking to instantiate itself in the marketing applications arena with the launch of Enterprise Marketing Automation, software that promises to enhance and quantify the marketing department's contribution to the bottom line.

The need for such an application is made clear considering that companies like Fidelity Investments are handed valuable consumer information regularly though investment calculator tools posted on their Web sites, and they do nothing with it. At least that's what Rubric CEO Anu Shukla found when she called on Fidelity. "It was pretty embarrassing; I used their own example against them," she says.

Shukla, however, is now working with Fidelity and a few other financial institutions like Mellon Bank and a major commercial bank on the West coast to automate and integrate the marketing departments of these institutions enterprisewide. With EMA, a bank can integrate customer prospects, sales forces, campaign channels and marketing vendors into an "extended enterprise." It enables Web marketing to be managed from a central tool, says Markus Duffin, worldwide director of enterprise marketing solutions for Cambridge Technology Partners, which has an equity stake in Rubric. It's a closed loop system that tracks consumer activity from the time they first interact with a company through sales and customer service. The result is that consumer interaction with a bank is monitored and prospects are fed into sales systems, where acquisition or rejection of products is tracked, as is any subsequent communication with the bank. All this information is then fed back into the marketing system to be used to develop or fine-tune campaigns. "You can not only start tracking what's happening to a customer after they go from a marketing prospect to an actual customer," says Duffin, "but also you can track the activity post sales; you can view customer behavior (across) the enterprise and use that behavior information to better target and market future promotions."

The other "revolutionary" aspect of the software, Duffin says, is that it tabulates return on marketing dollars. "The application is very focused on tracking the return on the campaign...being able to source the person, the channel, to actual dollars being spent so that marketing can have a view of what's been most effective and what hasn't." Thus, the marketing department can quantify its impact on the bottom line.

The application is written in Java and browser-based. Rubric charges $150,000 to $220,000 per server app. A regional bank is likely to need only one server application, says Duffin. A global bank might need four.

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