ExactTarget Connections 09: Success By Design
More to come this week on ExactTarget, but today’s opening of Connections ‘09 was an incredible event. Being a prior employee of this incredible organization, I’ve participated in previous events and each year the ExactTarget team seems to out do the year before.
I spent the morning down in the vendor and partners conference center. There were some familiar companies as well as some new ones. Joel Book pointed out the folks at Digital Evolution Group, who have actually integrated a print on demand system with ExactTarget.
Here’s a quick tour of the vendors and partners:
Scott Dorsey called 2009 a break-out year… the company has grown to 525 employees, with the majority of growth in the service side of the business. That’s great news for customers, who continue to demand different levels of service… from help yourself to totally outsourced email programs. Rather than going public in 2008, the company decided that the climate on Wall Street was a bit too jumpy so they took another $70 million in investment.
This follows ExactTarget’s mission statement:
To inspire and enable every organization to harness the power of one-to-one marketing technologies to achieve phenomenal business results.
The investment is paying off… they are now sending 2 billion emails a month on behalf of their customers, adding over 1 million records added per day, and exceeding 100 terabytes of data. If you don’t think that’s remarkable, that’s 5 times the library of congress and growing every day! As well, they’re opening up their international relationships with co-founder Peter McCormick leading the charge in the UK.
ExactTarget and integrations continue to exceed expectations, with formalized integrations with Google, Webtrends, Omniture, CoreMetrics and Microsoft Dynamics. Some big news were new partnerships announced with e-commerce company ATG, product review company BazaarVoice, Oracle and SAP.
Scott McCorkle, COO of ExactTarget, let everyone know that integrations only start with ExactTarget, though, and he said that the company has opened itself up to third party integrations – recognizing that ExactTarget simply can’t keep pace with their partners and the demands for new features. And the features are coming…. feedback has produced over 6,500 feature requests with over 100 already released into the application.
It appears that November will bring a ground-breaking release for ExactTarget. They’re going to support international time zones (did you know there are 40?!), implement social media integration, productize and release their customer portal 3sixty, rolling out tracking of dynamic content areas, live content (that can expire), and a plethora of other features. ExactTarget’s clients are sending messages in virtually every format and language – and the company is working to get out in front of the demands.
The day was capped off with an incredible speech from Malcolm Gladwell regarding his book, Outliers. In all honesty, I got more out of his speech than reading the book. Gladwell is a great public speaker who I hope to see again. He’s witty and has the same great story-telling that he has in his writing.
Gladwell’s message is that success is created, it doesn’t just happen. It’s not luck. It takes tons of hard work. Some in social media have criticized Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule… that it takes 10,000 hours to make an expert. Social media hasn’t been around 10,000 hours – but communication, marketing, and different mediums have been. There are plenty of marketing experts who are now social media experts. Their 10,000 hours leads back to direct marketing, database marketing, telemarketing, etc. These are simply new mediums.
No doubt that ExactTarget’s success has not come by chance! I know many of their employees and their aggressive pursuit of continuous improvement and customer support is remarkable. It’s success by design.
