real-time business rules

Working with SMS – A New Feature

In addition to email, BizConnector supports SMS (text) messaging – both outbound and inbound.

Outbound text messages, which are set up as rule actions and are sent when a rule fires, have an impact unlike emails. For example, they are more likely to be read immediately by their recipients and are useful when simple communication is required, such as confirming an appointment, and perhaps responding to a question.

Outbound and inbound text messages show up as related lists (after installation) in your Salesforce Lead and Contact pages.

sms_related_lists

In addition to message logs, rules can be defined which can fire on receipt of an SMS message.

sms_rule

Up till recently, rules based on inbound SMS messages were restricted to text messages from people who were already saved in your Salesforce Lead or Contact database.

But now that has changed! We are pleased to announce that inbound SMS messages can result in a new Lead or Contact record being created. And that rules can be written to fire when this happens.

This new feature now enables a type of application: For example, capturing new lead subscriptions – eg. when people send a specific text or number pattern to your SMS number.

I hope this gives you some ideas for applications or workflows that you can build using BizConnector. If you have questions or would like a demo, please contact us.

Videos to Help You Install BizConnector and Get Started

It has taken some time, but at last, here are some videos that you may find helpful. We’ll be adding videos to the list, so check back in when you need some help or inspiration.

Installing BizConnector
Getting Started with BizConnector
Building Your First BizConnector Rule (to Nurture Leads)
Testing a BizConnector Rule

Rules vs Campaigns – The BizConnector Approach

Campaigns as incorporated in Salesforce and other applications implement the traditional model, in which leads and contacts are explicitly added to a named campaign.

This enables these leads and contacts – called members in Salesforce – to be tracked and sent emails according to the strategy and objectives of a specific campaign.

So members have to be explicitly added to a campaign in order to be part of that campaign. And if there is more than one campaign, this has to be done separately for each campaign.

The BizConnector model is very different. Instead of incorporating the notion of campaigns in which you have to specifically add members to campaigns, BizConnector has rules which ‘discover’ leads naturally and automatically when they match rule conditions.

There is a natural conflict in Campaigns vs Rules. Without BizConnector, the campaign drives how you decide what to do about a lead. In BizConnector, rules take over this role, and rules are much more dynamic in nature.

So, simply by the match of rule conditions with the field values in a lead or contact, a rule can ‘fire’ on that lead or contact. In this way a relationship is created between the rule and a lead or contact – individually. This relationship is dynamic – it starts when the match is recognized and the rule fires, and it stops when the rule conditions no longer apply to the lead or contact or when the rule actions have run their course.

This dynamic behavior is much more in tune with the needs of the market today. Market conditions change daily, if not hourly or by the minute. This is surely true for your industry. BizConnector rules are sensitive to change – in (near) real time – record by individual record. It is this flexibility and dynamism that makes BizConnector rules achieve your marketing, lead nurturing, and workflow objectives.

Handling the Long Tail – Rules Working Together

BizConnector rules are autonomous. Ostensibly, they are not aware of each other.

But through rule actions that update fields, they can be made to work together in a seamless symbiosis!

Handling ‘the long tail’ is one example of how this can be implemented effortlessly in BizConnector. Let’s take a simple example:

Let’s say you have a web form on your site inviting people to learn more about a specific product or service.
And you have a rating system for leads – say hot, warm, and cool.
When anyone indicates their interest by submitting name and email address, you want to send a sequence of seven weekly emails.
You think the weekly frequency is appropriate for people who are interested in what you have to say.
You set up systems for those who respond quickly.
But what about those who don’t respond in the seven weeks?

Here’s the BizConnector solution:

In addition to the email content for the seven weekly emails, decide on email content that will be sent at a slower pace – for those leads who are not quick to respond.
Let’s say you will re-use some email templates, and create a few new ones as well.
The solution involves two rules – one for warm leads and one for cool leads. (Hot leads are those that responded within the first seven weeks.)
The warm rule will send seven weekly emails, and in the eighth week will update the Rating field to ‘cool’.
The cool rule will fire, and send ten monthly emails (note the slower pace…)
That’s all you need to do!

The effect of this is:

Everyone will start receiving the seven weekly emails.
But those who respond will only receive the weekly emails up to the point that they respond. They are not sent ‘irrelevant’ emails because of the ‘Check Before Send’ feature basic to the tool.
After the seventh week, those still on the drip will have their Rating field changed to ‘cool’.
This kicks off the cool rule, which starts sending the monthly emails.
You remain ‘top of mind’ for these non-responders.
Think of this as the ‘long tail’, about which plenty has been written – on the internet and elsewhere.

Now that was easy, wasn’t it?

What is a Business Rule?

The operation of BizConnector / Lead Follow-Up is based entirely on business rules. This means that one or more business rules have to be defined in order for the tool to function. The business rules in an account are evaluated and run – in real-time around the clock – by a Rule Engine.

What is a business rule?

The BizConnector definition of a business rule is broader than others available on the internet. For example, in Wikipedia we find ‘Business rules provide detailed guidance about how a strategy can be translated to action’.

We go further than this. Instead of a rule ‘providing guidance’, it executes actions if the rule conditions are met. BizConnector rules are actionable.

A BizConnector rule can be expressed as:
‘When this condition is met, execute this action’.

Or more generally:
‘When these conditions are met, execute these actions’.

A typical condition is the arrival of a new, matching record in the leads database.

A typical action is to schedule a sequence of emails to be sent to a prospect or customer (as in ‘drip marketing’).

Notice the use of the word ‘when’, rather than ‘if’. The time element is vital to the operation of the Rule Engine, which is running around the clock, watching for conditions to arise in order to attempt to ‘fire’. It is not invoked manually, and can be considered a ‘live agent’ operating in real time (or near real time).

A business rule can be thought of as an implementation of a strategy – ie. how the strategy can be translated into action. There is a direct alignment between the strategy and the rule.

The purpose of a rule is to cater to a specific scenario, or ‘use case’. For example, a new lead requesting a copy of a white paper on a web form may be a typical use case, and a rule could be written to fire when that new lead record is added. The rule can be considered to have a relationship with that lead for the period of time that, say, emails are being sent. When the last email has been sent, the relationship between the rule and the lead comes to an end.

Rules are autonomous, and have no explicit dependence on other rules. This makes rules easy to manage, because they can be created and deleted independently.

Sometimes there are implied dependencies, which can be used to great effect. For example, a group of rules can cater separately to ‘hot’, ‘warm’, or ‘cool’ prospects, where prospects can ‘switch over’ to another rule if and when their rating changes from one to another.

Well-designed business rules are powerful tools that can automate the tedious, repetitive tasks that would otherwise slip through the cracks. All the while doing this in strict accordance with the organization’s underlying strategies. They are powerful things, not to be underestimated.

A Little BizConnector History

At this juncture, with the start of a new year and the relaunch of this website, it may be useful to take a look at the history of BizConnector since its appearance in 2005, to relate it to its offshoot ‘Lead Follow-Up’ on Salesforce.com, and in a future post, to describe its expected evolution and roadmap.

BizConnector started off as ‘a web-based email communication tool that enables ‘contextual interaction’ with recipients, addressing the needs of companies seeking to cultivate their customers and grow their businesses by using the latest web technologies to manage marketing campaigns in an intelligent way’. Essentially, it was a mass-emailer with interactive ability – a trail-blazer in many ways.

The original BizConnector had a place for business rules, but it was the development of Lead Follow-Up – a marketing automation app on Salesforce AppExchange – that featured real-time business rules as its core architectural foundation. As the name implies, Lead Follow-Up was built – with a more restricted vision than the original BizConnector – to address the needs of marketers to nurture leads and prospects. Integrated deeply with Salesforce.com through the API, its basic modus operandi is to use events in Salesforce data to trigger ‘drip marketing’ campaigns and workflows. It was expanded to attach not only to Leads, but to Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, Tasks, Events, and Cases. And it incorporates features such as landing pages and a closed-loop feedback mechanism that makes it a powerful tool, despite its apparent simplicity.

BizConnector can now be described, at its core, as a (Near) Real-Time Business Rules Engine for small business. With the development of ‘channels’ that can be used for business rule triggers and actions, BizConnector now has the ability to connect with external systems and applications, be triggered by events outside Salesforce, and pull content from multiple sources. Channels are open-ended, and can be developed by third parties. And the forthcoming BizConnector API, to be announced, will provide a platform for new and exciting applications.

Please visit here again for more information about the BizConnector roadmap.