CRM - January 2009 - (Page BPS5)

Sponsored Content January 2009 5 Providing great sales support in a tough economy PROVIDE GREAT SALES SUPPORT, OR ELSE. Marketing Portals that Deliver What are the components of a marketing portal that delivers? Five capabilities are essential: 1. Combines electronic and physical assets into a “one-stop-shop.” A marketing portal that delivers is comprehensive, up-to-date and is “the place to go” for marketing/sales materials in any and all formats. 2. Delivers qualified leads plus the marketing/sales tools to use with the leads. Salespeople pick-up new leads and update lead status within the portal. In addition, leads are presented with the appropriate sales tools and sales approach. 3. Presents content based on each salesperson’s territory, role and focus. A marketing portal that delivers is partitioned into virtual sub-portals that present relevant information - and nothing more. Access control and security are enforced behind the scenes, supporting diverse sales channels and complex channel structures. 4. Integrates self-service search with active delivery of updates and alerts. The marketing portal is dynamic, and provides filters for both urgent communications and alerts (e.g., price changes) and for targeted materials that address customer-specific issues. 5. Promotes collaboration and dialogue. A marketing portal that delivers includes tools for idea exchange, discussions, and user-contributed content. In 2009, can you afford NOT to have a marketing portal that delivers? Scott Richardson is the President/CEO of Longwood Software Inc. (Maynard, MA), the developers and marketers of TagTeam®. Marketing professionals know that great support for their salespeople is a key deliverable in any economy. But when economic conditions worsen and fear of recession is rampant - certainly the case today - marketers experience even more pressure to deliver targeted, compelling support for their salespeople and sales channels. Salespeople demand more leads, more selling tools, more competitive analyses, more tradeshows, more email campaigns, more seminars - the list goes on. Unfortunately the marketing budget is a prime target for cost-cutting as the economic outlook dims - leaving marketing executives in a tough spot. Most B2B marketing departments face 2009 with more “must-accomplish” goals and fewer resources. It doesn’t matter what heroics were pulled off in 2008 - the executive team expects more rabbits from marketing’s smaller number of hats in 2009. In 1990 I faced a similar situation as a marketing manager when the CEO of the company informed me and my marketing colleagues of his “tough love” approach to generating revenue in a recession: “It’s simple,” he said. “You’ll either deliver great sales support to each and every channel, or your successors will.” SAAS FITS TODAY'S REALITY marketers pay only for the functionality they need to produce results. What’s more, they benefit from the expertise of the SAAS provider’s customer care team, who are partners in their success. YOUR MARKETING PORTAL: SALES NIRVANA OR WASTELAND? Marketing applications that use a software-as-a-service (SAAS) model can help marketers “deliver the goods” in the face of budget constraints. SAAS applications such as TagTeam provide robust functionality backed by comprehensive support and a service level guarantee - all for a modest setup fee and a pay-as-you go monthly service fee. This means a marketing department can configure a sales support solution for their specific needs in days, deploy it within a few weeks, and produce business results that exceed the investment within two months. With an SAAS application such as TagTeam from Longwood Software, Marketing portals have emerged as the principal means of sales support in the B2B world. Today’s marketing portals evolved from first-generation marketing intranets and sales extranets, and typically provide self-service resources for all of the company’s sales channels including direct teams, distributors, dealers, agents and reps, retailers, etc. A marketing portal also serves targeted content to audiences such as marketing partners, public relations teams, creative agencies, and industry influencers. Given the importance of sales support in a tough economy, marketing portals are a hot topic. Marketers want to update their previously-created intranets and/or extranets to deliver more information and tools that help their salespeople win business. For some, the situation is dire: their salespeople are complaining that the current marketing/sales intranet site is a wasteland of poor navigation, outdated materials and inconsistent presentation. Marketers also see portals as an avenue to streamline communication between marketing and sales, so both departments operate more efficiently. Ideally, the marketing portal is a “sales nirvana” where every salesperson finds the right information at the right time for each selling situation, and where every salesperson benefits from best practices and company-wide expertise. A MARKETING PORTAL THAT DELIVERS SAAS applications such as TagTeam are powerful, ready-to-use solutions which eliminate the delays, frustration and cost of internally-developed portals. Marketers have implemented TagTeam to transform outdated sales support web sites into marketing portals that deliver.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2009

CRM - January 2009 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point The Shots Heard ’Round the World 30,000-Foot Views Of the Cloud Stuffing the Ballot Box— With Complaints The Marketing Line for ’09 CRM on Twitter Technology Helps Insurance Weather the Storm Required Reading The Google-ization of CRM The Feedback Funnel Email: What’s Inside? Shake Your Moneymakers Lead Sweet Lead Incentives at the Speed of Lightpath Sales Contentment for Content Management A Worthwhile Excursion Into Call Recording Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - January 2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.