Oracle on Tuesday used its 2019 Openworld conference in San Francisco to introduce ways for B2B firms to bring sales and marketing data together, as well as tools to personalize and customer experiences based on a variety of contextual data.
Among the updates announced as part of its customer event this week, the business software giant said it was going to offer an integration between its marketing automation applications and Oracle DataFox. Acquired last year, Datafox brought Oracle an artificial intelligence (AI) data engine designed to continuously extract company-level data and signals to help companies see where they can grow.
The Oracle Datafox integration will mean B2B firms can have a richer view of accounts, which will help them rank and prioritize opportunities, said Rob Tarkoff, Oracle’s executive vice-president and general manager, CX Cloud.
“CX applications will no longer be trapped by data that sits in different silos,” Tarkoff said during a keynote session, which was livestreamed from Oracle Openworld. “HR will send data to sales to update them about the sales performance of reps you care about. Marketing, sales and service data will be connected to financials.”
Tarkoff said Oracle Datafox draws upon real-time firmographics and other data from public and private companies, securing more than 50,000 digital pieces of information every 30 minutes. “That means millions of company profiles being tracked and updated in the context of your applications,” he said. “You’ll be able to answer questions like, ‘What new messages do we need to change or alter to deliver exactly what that account needs?”
An updated version of Oracle CX Unity, meanwhile, will bring together online, offline, and third-party customer data sources to provide a more holistic view of customer activity such as web site visits, customer service visits and their engagement with online ads. Machine learning algorithms will assess the data within Oracle CX Unity to identify sales opportunities, boost customer satisfaction and grow their lifetime value.
Rather than point to other firms providing products and services to IT departments, Tarkoff used car dealerships as an example of B2B selling where Oracle’s products provide value.
“When (customers) shop for a car, they already have perfect information about the vehicle, so they expect the dealer to be a trusted advisor with more than basic information about the product,” he said.
Salvatore Ancoretti, head of customer marketing at Ferrari, agreed. Given the high-end nature of its cars — which in some cases would be equivalent to the average B2B big ticket item — knowledge of a customer allows the firm to provide a tailored experience, he said in a fireside chat with Tarkoff. It also means a consistent message from both a manufacturer like Ferrari and its dealers.
“We need to share information, to be able to recognize that customer, because our customers are moving more and more and more,” Ancoretti said. “They’ll buy today in Los Angeles and tomorrow in Rome. We need to be able to approach them the same way.”
Oracle also made a slew of updates to its enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and HR tools. Oracle Openworld 2019 wraps up on Thursday.
