CentricCRM, a vendor of open source Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Content Management, and Enterprise 2.0 technologies, and LoopFuse, an enterprise-grade open source solution for demand generation and closed-loop marketing, have integrated their software to provide users with the ability to track customers across digital channels, score sales leads, and measure ROI on corporate marketing initiatives.

 

LoopFuse was launched by two former JBoss and Red Hat (News - Alert) developers in Spring 2007. The company has an open source solution that allows organizations to track customer activity on Web sites and via e-mails, score sales leads based on detailed data about customer behavior, and integrate marketing processes with major CRM solutions, including CentricCRM.

 

This, company officials say, enables LoopFuse to “provide the capability to score prospects for the sales team and measure ROI within marketing and sales activities.”

 

The integration of LoopFuse with CentricCRM is intended to allow corporate marketing departments to consolidate customer relationship history with online activity. For example the type of customer, role, buying behavior, and the type and frequency of contact with the organization, can be linked with behavioral activity in the sales process including marketing e-mails opened, links clicked, Web site pages accessed, and products viewed.

 

By joining up marketing and sales criteria and scoring each aspect, a cumulative score can be given which marks the sales potential of each contact. Sales representatives can prioritize their time and efforts on those customers and prospects that will provide the greatest return. Once promising prospects have been identified, they can be placed into a typical CRM-based workflow including pipeline management, quoting, and customer care.

 

Updated versions of both CentricCRM and LoopFuse that will deliver the integration will be available for download from the companies’ websites within 45 days.

 

Last month, CentricCRM released a preview version of its new Centric Team Elements suite, which officials are billing as bringing Enterprise 2.0 capabilities to businesses.

 

Enterprise 2.0 describes “the business use of social networking and Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds,” Centric officials say, adding that Centric Team Elements also includes project management, issue tracking, document repositories and discussion forums.

 

Centric Team Elements is described by company officials as an open source, Java-based Enterprise 2.0 product tying together discussions, wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, issue tracking and trouble-ticketing, project management, document management, and federated search in a single, unified application running on a relational database.

 

Like Centric CRM (News - Alert), the company’s open source CRM program, Team Elements is enterprise class and offers scalability, role-based permissions and secure access as well as all of the benefits of unstructured collaboration. Externally, Centric Team Elements can be deployed as a customer-facing, community-management system which can support a company’s efforts to generate viral marketing within its community of stakeholders.