Innovate: Sqware Peg's Measure of Marketing Wins

SQWARE PEG WAS FOUNDED in 2003 by Shawn Stilwell. In June this year, his company acquired a marketing and public relations firm, MarketingFX, whose principal consultant is William Scully-Power.

With the acquisition came a set of marketing skills, clients and, more importantly, a new business model, agency On-Demand. The agency provides the expertise for businesses to get the most out of their marketing in the Salesforce.com software platform.

Salesforce.com is an innovative web-based customer relationship management service. Unlike conventional software, which must be installed at business premises, Salesforce.com delivers its software over the internet and can be accessed through a standard web browser. Businesses subscribe rather than purchase. (See “All in the delivery”, page 46.)

Similarly, Sqware Peg agency On-Demand provides Salesforce.com subscribers with campaign and measurement services. The service is facilitated by a “marketing success manager” whose role is to run and measure customers’marketing campaigns using Salesforce.com.

According to Scully-Power, agency On-Demand provides additional leads and marketing automation services, such as search-engine marketing, direct marketing, public relations and event management.

This way, it deals with the biggest challenge in marketing: consistently measuring return on investment across a number of campaigns and channels. Scully-Power credits its success to its ability to let customers see what happens inside a marketing campaign while it is occurring.

“When a customer goes from zero to full visibility, they are not switching us off,” he says. Marketing managers are better able to justify budgets when they have greater visibility.

“We use Salesforce.com as a differentiator. What used to be exported and lost in translation is now run within the one platform and compiled with a number of services to provide an integrated result.”

Stilwell was the first developer to build a text-messaging application for Salesforce.com’s third-party development platform, AppExchange. The SMS application has a number of important companies using its products.

Vodafone, NRMA and Commonwealth Bank are marquee clients of agency On-Demand.

For Sqware Peg, being the most experienced partner for Salesforce.com in the Asia-Pacific region has its advantages, especially when Salesforce.com announced its l000th customer in the region. Stilwell expects good growth as users become more familiar with its functions.

“Most customers are yet to derive all the value they can from the platform,” he says. Stilwell believes he can take the business model to any platform based on internet standards. “If it’s a web service, we can deliver our subscription. Our technology is based on common standards-based protocols — for us to migrate from Saleseforce.com to Microsoft or any other platform is not hard.”

FOAD FADAGHI - BRW MAGAZINE