Common Sense IT

Part 3: Four Steps to ensuring marketing and brand consistency across sales and channel partners

Market In-House

One of the first steps this company took to resolve this, when overhauling their Internet technology, was to make sure that they had the right tools for real-time updating. Not only could marketing change their Internet and Intranet/Sales Portal on the fly, enabling them to post materials directly to the website, but a tiered administrative system held content in an unpublished queue until a manager approved it. This gave marketing people a direct buy-in to seeing their materials disseminated.

The company surveyed its sales personnel about what they wanted and thought they needed to be more successful. The result was a sales portal and partner extranet that looked like a major news channel. The format capitalized on sites like CNN that their sales people and partners were already reading.  Headlines, subheads and dynamic materials were used to convey the urgency and value of the resources on the site. Stories were changed out on a daily and weekly basis, while links to the most important sales tools were on the front page.

The bottom line is give people information in a way that it will be read and appreciated.  This is much different than the sites that list content for people to search through like a file listing.  The way that content is packaged is very much a part of what has an information or sales portal be effective.

What are your experiences?  What sort of sales portals do you have?  How did you gain user adoption?  share your success stories by posting a comment!

Part 2: Four Steps to ensuring marketing and brand consistency across sales and channel partners

Expose the Existing Culture

When one of our customers set out to launch a new product, they discovered that before they could move forward, they had to address the culture among their sales people regarding the marketing department’s use of technology.  Marketing was frustrated by the technology they had in place because its form did not follow function. An example of this was the company’s web site. Its content was rarely updated because it took weeks to get any changes made. As a result, marketing personnel had long ago stopped feeling any ownership of the site and instead, had created workarounds to get new marketing materials to sales.

Sales people got their marketing information as email attachments and were on their own to keep it organized and up to date. Those with good contacts in the marketing department got better information than peers without any contacts. This bred isolation and a dangerous independence in which sales people showed prospects marketing materials that were out of date or even that they’d designed themselves. Periodically, marketing came across logos that sales people had designed and other materials that would have never passed their muster.

What have you seen?  What's your experience with the technology you deal with?  Does it support your ability to get your job done?  Do you have trust in your IT department, or are you always waiting, and experiencing bottlenecks when it comes to getting the technology applications that you need?

Part 1: Four Steps to ensuring marketing and brand consistency across sales and channel partners

Marketing operations is the “final frontier” for the explosion in business process efficiencies driven by technology, according to an article that quotes AMR research.  That article was published in 2003, and here we are in 2005 with the same state of affairs -- it might as well have been posted this month.  What is it that isn't communicating or being understood?  Post a comment, let's take a look.   

Internet technology is one of the most powerful tools for ensuring brand consistency, however, beyond CRM, companies seldom prioritize information technology as mission critical for marketing and sales. This may be due to the fast pace of marketing and sales and its individual nature, which make it difficult for marketing and sales organizations to fully take advantage of.

Ensuring brand consistency across all marketing and sales channels isn’t just about logo placement or font type. Branding encompasses all the conversations that describe your product and company. This includes reaching target audiences with the messages that communicate distinctly to them, and coordinating across product lines and sales channels to ensure that these messages, including look and feel, are presented in a manner consistent with the brand.

In today’s reality, achieving this level of marketing effectiveness means employing technology to connect, communicate, collaborate, and entertain whatever audience you are targeting. Two groups with the biggest impact on how you reach these audiences are your sales department and channel partners who directly promote your brand. Inaccurate marketing materials can lead to misunderstanding of a product or line but more commonly it just means missed sales.

But don’t despair, getting on track is not impossible. In a series of posts, we are going to explore the four steps that can help your company align its branding and ensure marketing consistentency.

1. Expose the existing culture – Determine whether your sales people suffer from your technology or are empowered by it.
2. Market in-house – Use the power of your marketing department to enroll and empower your sales and channel partners on the effectiveness of the messages.
3. Create trust –Give sales the tools they need and offer incentives to use them.
4. Automate redundant processes

I invite you to play with these ideas, and provide your own thinking and insights -- have the ideas make sense -- common sense!