Putting the Sales Enablement Pieces Together
Sales enablement is the delivery of the right information to the right person in the right format to assist in moving sales opportunities forward. Sounds pretty simple, right? It isn’t. Assembling the right sales message is a complex process in a large distributed marketing organization — especially in regulated industries. Four or five distinct processes and roles are involved, and without clear planning and a smooth process built on a technology platform designed to streamline the process, it can seem nearly impossible. Marketing creates the information. Management (legal, compliance, HR) reviews it. Marketing publishes it (through a sales portal, Read More
Marketing is Dead
Marketing is dead. Before rejecting the idea, think again. The truth is that only a tiny fraction of a marketer’s time is actually spent on marketing – that is, on creating demand for a product or service, shaping the brand, and supporting sales. How is that possible? Just look at the number of communications channels a marketer has to manage in today’s multi-channel world – and add to each communications channel the necessity for planning and budgeting, delivering or implementing, tracking and reporting on each one. Add managing the process of distributing marketing and sales support materials in an indirect Read More
Using Distributed Marketing Technology to End the Battle Between Sales and Marketing
How many times have you heard comments like this from sales people? Marketing never gives us the right information we need to close the deal. We have to spend hours and hours creating our own customized content to sell effectively. It takes too long to find the right information and get permission to customize it for our prospects. Chances are you’ve heard those complaints just about as often as you’ve heard the opposite coming from the corporate marketing department. Sales never uses the approved materials and the brand is compromised because of inconsistent messages. We have to spend hours and Read More
Distributed Marketing Automation Buyer’s Checklist
Buyers searching for the best distributed marketing platform to solve the marketing automation problems that are unique to a multi-channel distributed marketing environment come at the problem from different starting points. So, while there is no “one size fits all” solution that will work for every company, there are a few items to add to every buyer’s checklist. The top four boxes to check when considering a distributed marketing platform are: Centralized, Rules-Based Compliance + Local Customization, Personalization Closed-loop Marketing Analytics “WOW” Factor: What Can You Do AFTER Purchasing That You CAN’T Do Now? Industry-Specific Integration, Performance The first two items on Read More
Drawing a Distributed Marketing Strategic Roadmap
Recently, there has been a lot of talk about two topics: The increasing complexity of sales organizations. How sales costs are outpacing revenue growth. In highly regulated industries like insurance, health care, pharmaceutical, and financial services, where distributed marketing channels are the norm, it’s even more important to look at ways to resolve these issues – and increasingly, companies are looking to technology to deliver increased productivity across the sales organization. Technology was once viewed as having only a tactical role in sales enablement, but companies that take a more strategic view of marketing automation have a better chance of Read More
Connecting the Distributed Marketing Dots to Drive Revenue
Research giant IDC says that 80% of the content that marketing generates isn’t used by the sales team – and the percentage is even higher in complex distributed marketing and multi-channel environments. In addition, customers tell researchers at Forrester that sales reps aren’t prepared for their initial meeting 50% of the time. Last, but hardly least, sales people surveyed by Gartner say that marketing leaves them guessing about what customers want to know at least 50% of the time. Clearly, there’s a massive disconnect going on within many distributed marketing organizations, or the primary technology research firms wouldn’t each be Read More
Looking Ahead for Life Insurance Marketing
The 2011 Life Insurance Conference sponsored by LIMRA , LOMA, SOA, and ACLI was one of the most positive events we’ve been to in a long time. One of the best things about the conference was the way industry leaders talked about where the industry will be in 10 years. Here are some take-away points we picked up at the conference from visionaries who are really focused on the future – instead of the “survival mode” that we were dealing with just a year or so ago. Where will the life insurance be in 10 years? Steve Callahan – Robert Read More
5 Compliance Best Practices
Whether you work in insurance, health care, education, or retail, there are compliance issues that you have to deal with in your day-to-day marketing activities. If you work in a large, distributed marketing organization, with multiple communications channels, and many links in the marketing and sales chain, the process of making sure that every message delivered in every media complies with brand, corporate and regulatory standards can seem daunting. But it doesn’t have to be. A well-designed distributed marketing automation solution can streamline and automate many of the compliance headaches that we all face. Here’s a list of five best Read More
Don’t Gamble with Marketing ROI
Insurance is one of the most complex distributed marketing challenges, largely due to the regulatory environment and multi-layered sales channel. At the annual Life Insurance Conference in Las Vegas this week, members of several insurance trade organizations are gathering to talk their industry’s future under the theme, “All in for Life Insurance”. That title is particularly appropriate given the sales environment as business come out of the recession amid a rapidly changing sales environment. And, of course, it’s also appropriate given the location for the conference: in the heart of the Las Vegas strip, at Caesar’s Palace. Hundreds of attendees Read More
Every Market Is a Buyer’s Market
Industry analyst and pundit David Coursey calls this The Age of Google, and says that the Internet has transformed every market into a buyer’s market, with empowered consumers who can (and do) compare prices and offers from vendors around the globe, and then publish and share their own product reviews and experiences (good or bad) with your company. Technology, he points out, has turned the one-way marketing messages of years past into an interactive conversation that happens in a host of communications channels that didn’t exist just a few years ago. “Among younger consumers – those under 40 – even Read More
