A distributed sales force is now the norm for today’s businesses. There are a lot of advantages to this model besides a lower cost of sales. From a sales rep’s perspective, it means he or she is closer to prospects to build long and productive client relationships. The challenges however are to keep all your sales people on message and enable them to operate effectively–even though they are often not supported as they would be at the office. We all know that great sales people need to be continually qualifying new leads to maintain their sales effectiveness. This isn’t as easy as you might expect because of the velocity of change, both within the market as well as within the corporation.

Scott Santucci, a Forrester Research Senior Analyst, remarked that Marketsync equips a sales rep to be an “Army of One.” In a few keystrokes Marketsync connects reps with C-Level decision makers better than any alternative. Being able to send strong, high impact one-to-one messages from a browser anywhere, automating the follow-up, recording the details in Salesforce CRM and providing clear ROI metrics takes the mystery out of which programs work best. With Marketsync, sales reps have time to focus on selling, not on administrative tasks. You can ensure branding guidelines are met from one central location and never have to worry about version control.

See how you can empower your distributed sales force with Marketsync.

The “Mapping Marketing to the Transforming Buying Process,” report, which was sponsored by Genius.com, surveyed over 70 BtoB marketers to see how well marketers were keeping up with the changing influences and research patterns of buyers. What was interesting to me was that the report uncovered several opportunities for marketers to improve early stage engagement with prospects. One of the data points showed that: “93% of buyers said the solution provider they chose supplied ample content to navigate through each phase of the buying process; but only 50% of marketers said they are currently mapping content offers to the buyer’s information needs at different phases of the buying cycle”

Marketsync helps sales people contact key decisions makers early in the sales process to create the opportunity for timeliness of response during all phases of the sales cycle. Sales people can then track of all activities with the prospect, including who received what content and when, to ensure that they have ample information to help them make a decision. Our customers, like ExactTarget, have been able to consistently improve their response rates from prospects using Marketsync.

You can ensure that your sales and marketing teams are providing ample content during the entire buying cycle. Find out how by downloading a datasheet today.

Everyone works hard at identifying good leads for sales. But how do you know what is happening with those leads? In most companies, no one really knows what happens after a lead is sent to sales. Would it help to know what happened to each lead that was turned over to sales? Does it matter if there is a timely follow-up? How long does it take to convert a lead to a prospect? How many prospects become sales? How long does that take?

If you are in a competitive market you need to know all this and a whole lot more. And you need to know it ASAP–because things change. When you have 24×7 access to user-friendly dashboards that let you know at a glance sales activities, it’s a whole lot easier to facilitate continuous program refinement. Marketsync’s reporting capabilities do this for you.

By understanding what programs have the strongest influence on decision makers, you can use those elements in other programs. Track all activities and communication with each opportunity as well as how well each rep is performing. With Marketsync, you know what’s working and you can easily identify what’s not working to make sure your team is spending their time wisely (and profitably).

Check out what customers are saying about Marketsync.

The DemandGen Report recently posted an article on Sales 2.0, specifically on research presented at the Sales 2.0 East Conference held last month in Boston that companies deploying next generation sales automation tools are realizing higher lead conversion rates and shortened sales cycle times. I have no doubt about his because I see it every day. Working with Salesforce.com customers who are leveraging Sales 2.0 tools now to manage the sales pipeline, improve sales processes, and drive up bottom line results.

Marketsync, our Sales 2.0 integrated marketing communications platform, unifies email, direct mail, voice, print-on-demand, print, and fulfillment for breakthrough sales communications. It’s all about reaching targeted decisions makers earlier in the sales cycle to close deals faster.

A customer recently posted a review of Marketsync on the AppExchange:

“Marketsync breaks though the clutter! After persistently trying to get through to an enterprise decision maker for several weeks, Marketsync finally captured their attention. Looking forward to more success stories!”

I could not have said it better myself. He also rated Marketsync 5 out of 5 stars. See how you can break through the clutter and reach decision makers earlier in the sales process. Try it for yourself now!

Jeff Hayzlett, Chief Marketing Officer for Kodak and mega change agent, has just written a book that’s fast becoming a best seller. It’s entitled The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing?, now available on Amazon.com and your local book store. You may know him form his numerous appearances on TV, most recently on Celebrity Apprentice. Using his experience from helping businesses turn-around, he has written this practical book for business owners and leaders to move their companies into a growing and thriving company.

Jeff is also a growing fan of Marketsync because it helps sales reps using Salesforce.com to connect with decision makers faster and more effectively than they ever have before! This means better lead qualification and a shortened sales process. Try it today at no cost.

We had a recent opportunity to give a team of Sirius Decisions analysts a Marketsync demo. They liked what they saw! One comment I don’t mind sharing was, “When you have to reach a decision maker, Marketsync is most likely to connect you!” In that regard, we already knew that Marketsync is extremely valuable in establishing C-level connections early in the sales cycle, especially when sales prospecting. But, it is also becoming clear that there are other times in the sales process when a high-level connection is both valuable and essential. In these instances, Marketsync brings a creative and effective way to effectively open that path.

Today we announced that ExactTarget’s email marketing technology is now embedded within the Marketsync. What does this mean for our customers and those looking to boost sales prospecting? Users can send emails with ExactTarget’s rich deliverability, personalization, and sender reputation protection, even if they aren’t an ExactTarget customer. It also means increased sales productivity, and in today’s competitive markets that’s important.

Marketsync offers both integrated support for ExactTarget, designed for customers who already have an ExactTarget account, and now the embedded support for users who do not have a relationship with ExactTarget. Companies can find Marketsync Suite on the ExactTarget Extension Network.

One of our customers saw an interesting blog on Linkedin’s Friends of the Funnel group, the post was on Email as a form of Cold Calling and our customer said in the group discussion, “Oh my gosh we used to do that but now we much prefer warm calls!” As I thought about it she’s right, why make any kind of cold call when you can make a warm call?

With Marketsync Suite, companies can completely transform sales prospecting by sending accurate, high-impact messages that  connect with decision makers early in the sales cycle. Our solution sets up the warm call by touching the prospect multiple times using different communication channels before it prompts the sales rep to make the call.

Does it work?

Existing clients have been so successful with their Marketsync implementations that use of our service has increased 320% in the 9 months ending March 31st! (That’s huge!)  Why not try it for yourself? Get a FREE MarketSync trial.

It’s Friday and this has been a fantastic week.

I was listening to Jeff Hayzlett, Kodak CMO, and wanted to share an informative booklet called Social Media Tips, which can be downloaded from this link. It is particularity relevant for B2B companies. I might also suggest that you check out his recent book, The Mirror Test.

With that I wish you a good weekend!

Recently, I came across a research report by Suresh Vittal, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research,entitled “How Technology Supports Distributed Marketing Organizations.” The report outlines the three major challenges that most distributed marketing organizations face:

1. Centralizing content, workflow, and business rules.
2. Supporting campaign management and response capture and measurement at a corporate and local level.
3. Delivering personalized content in many different formats.

Vittal defines a distributed marketing organization as “any marketing group that manages communications across brands, regions, and channels.” I would also add to his definition both large and small marketing organizations that need to engage sales teams.

We see these three challenges with a lot of our customers and prospects.

Marketing is in charge of maintaining the brand and messaging. At the same time, field sales or regional offices need to respond to the demands of customers and prospects and often craft their own sales correspondence to get the job done. Field sales reps don’t have time to go sifting through loads of documents to figure out which has the most up-to-date messaging—nor do they care about logos or branding guidelines; this is the role of the marketing department. How do these two come together? Using Marketsync Suite, marketers keep all content in one place and manage version control. They get visibility into which pieces are being used the most and how often. Sales goes to one place without having to think about which is the correct version—and they can customize correspondence based on business rules set by marketing.

Another big challenge is tracking disparate regional campaigns because often each region is using a different technology and has a separate set of processes. This is where working in the cloud comes into play. No longer do companies need to invest in technology that makes operating in a distributed model costly. Marketsync leverages the cloud to makes it easy and cost-effective for both corporate and regional offices to use for launching personalized 1-to-1 campaigns and measured.

Finally, because regional sales efforts need to be flexible to adapt to specific needs, putting together one-off campaigns need to be easy and fast. Marketsync enables sales reps to customize marketing’s best work to suit their prospecting yet keep the branding and messaging. Sales can target campaigns to decision makers and get a much better response than a corporate-level campaign that doesn’t leverage the sales knowledge of that region.

Today we announced that for nine months ending March 31, 2010 Marketsync customer utilization rate has increased by more than 320% year-over-year, with more and more sales reps turning to the power of Marketync’s integrated sales correspondence. This is exciting news!

Companies invest heavily in CRM and Marketing Automation, which as more companies are realizing exacerbates a high cost bottleneck in their sales processes. Each lead delivered to sales needs to be individually qualified by a costly sales resource. Marketsync automation enables each rep to use high impact integrated marketing communications and it includes deep insight through metrics and powerful on-demand reports. Any Salesforce.com user that is serious about increasing sales productivity in today’s market must use Marketsync.

See how Marketsync has transformed and accelerated the sales process at Egencia.

ExactTarget, like a lot of smart companies, has a very intentional process it uses to identify leads. However they were quick to realize that while generating a lot of warm leads is a very good thing, once they were turned over to sales a natural bottleneck was created. At best these leads pointed sales reps to director-level evaluators—not someone in charge of making decisions. The big challenge in converting leads to sales was to get a response from and begin building a relationship with decisions makers.

Get Through to Decision Makers Earlier

The age-old sales prospecting problem is how to get through the clutter? ExactTarget’s sales reps use Marketsync to reach decision makers, and follow up on sales leads at precisely the right time. Because of this, they are able to consistently get through to C-level decisions makers. Response rates typically exceed 14% from decision makers!

Close Deals Faster

The result? Faster close rates. The company is seeing larger deal sizes too. Not only that but ExactTarget sales reps also have reduced the time they spent on administrative tasks by 80%—they’re focusing on selling, not on paperwork.

What could your sales reps accomplish with a tool that enables them to reach decision makers earlier in the sales cycle—and reduce time spent on non-selling, administrative tasks? Find out by getting a demo of Marketsync.

Our current business environment demands that marketing and sales work together to meet revenue objectives. The search for prospects with budget and need has become much more difficult and creates the requirement to build and work ever larger lead funnels.

Marketing’s challenge has been at least partially addressed by a wide variety of marketing automation solutions that allow the management of large pools of “suspects” and the ability to nurture them via integrated email campaigns driving traffic to well designed web content. Sophisticated analytics identify suspect behavior that signals the need for sales follow-up and through integration with CRM systems these prospects can be seamlessly passed on to sales.

Sales is then tasked with making contact with an expanding volume of pre-qualified prospects delivered by marketing as well as working their own sourced leads. However, today’s sales professionals are challenged by very low rates of contact via phone and email, especially when reaching out to the “C” level requiring multiple attempts at contact and a process for systematic follow-up. The good news: lots of leads. The bad news…unlike marketing, sales has few tools to effectively work the expanding size of their prospect funnels. This creates a very expensive and frustrating bottleneck in the sales process.

Many sales professionals have found that the Marketsync solution allows them to side step the low contact rates of phone and email and deliver content that gets through to the “C” level prospect. Marketsync also drives workflows within their CRM system that automates the prospect follow-up allowing them to work their expanding prospect funnels more efficiently and effectively.

Find out more about how Marketsync helps sales overcome the prospecting bottle neck by going here.

With the April 21, 2010 announcement from Salesforce.com about its deal to buy Jigsaw, a leading provider of business information and data services, Marketsync customers will be able to get more detailed information on companies targeted for prospecting. Jigsaw leverages what its customers know about each contact by using what is called “crowd-sourcing.” You can refer to a great blog post on Computerworld.com that gives more details about what the acquisition means to Salesforce.com users: Salesforce.com and Jigsaw: How the Pieces Fit.

While this is a good first step, there’s another hurdle that still needs to be overcome. You still need to reach those leads by cutting through the clutter. Having the right data about a prospect isn’t enough for effective prospecting. But what do most reps do once they have the name of a decision maker? Email the contact? Try to get through on the phone? Executive assistants are very skilled at fielding cold-calls and cold-call-emails are no more effective in the prospecting phase. Without a way to get through to those people and start a conversation those names are just data. Sales reps need a way to cut through the clutter and engage with the names in a Jigsaw database.

Contact data becomes more valuable when you can work those lists, reach C-level prospects earlier, and capture response rates of 14% or higher. With Marketsync and Jigsaw data, you can:

• Consistently engage with a higher percentage of your lead contacts.
• Connect with decision makers earlier in the sales cycle.
• Close deals faster.

See for yourself what I’m talking about by going to the customer section of our website.

Ignoring your email opt-out list?  Think again.  Many of your leads can be an outreach away from continuing the digital conversation they once had with you.

According to Tom Kulzer, CEO of AWeber, there are a number of reasons why customers and prospects opt-out of email lists:

1. You send too many—or too few—messages.  Recipients feel overwhelmed by the volume of communications in their Inbox.
2. They change their email address. Recipients change their address or use an alternative address for receiving messages.
3. Their email client distorts your message format. The content is not as effective and requires too much time to understand.

It is common for temporary circumstances to prompt people to Opt Out.  Often these can be converted into a qualified lead in the future.  Since there are a finite number of leads available to your company, it makes sense to capture and maintain every one that you possibly can.  Leading organizations have discovered there are effective ways to nurture these leads back.  They are mining what would otherwise be an ever increasing list of Opt Outs and use direct mail to re-engage opt out targets and drive them to opt back in.

Marketsync makes it easy for Salesforce.com users to send personalized, 1-to-1 communications that include any combination of emails, letters, packages, collateral, or print on demand materials—with just a few clicks.  With Marketsync Suite, you can:

• Send the best-crafted message using any combination of communication channels to any lead, contact, or user in Salesforce.com.
• Follow up at precisely the right time, every time, with automated tracking and instant notifications.
• Get real-time performance metrics that enable you to continually improve communications programs with prospects and customers.

On April 12, 2010, Michael Bauer, SVP Marketing & Sales, Phil Purdy, Sr. Account Exec., and myself attended Cloudforce Tour in Seattle. It was a great turnout. We had a chance to say hello to Jan O’Brien and Courtney House of Egencia (an Expedia Company). I was really jazzed by the Salesforce Chatter announcement because it really opens up a huge opportunity for us and all Salesforce.com users.  Chatter brings a very exciting and much need functionality to leverage networks within a secure framework. I predict it will prove to be a prime driver of collaboration and thought leadership throughout the workplace.

Chatter is a real infrastructure to enable an adaptive and learning corporate culture to grow and flourish, and now that developers can build on it the possibilities are endless. When I think about how Marketsync Suite makes Chatter developer solutions stronger, I see a Marketsync user posting a chatter status that he/she is about to send out a correspondence on behalf of a sales team. This gives sales reps a reminder and chance to opt someone out of the correspondence, and also a real-time status update about when it is sent out. And best of all, its a fast and effective way to enable all sales reps to lead with the most effective messaging at precisely the right time.

We are looking forward to seeing where Chatter will take enterprise collaboration.

Egencia (an Expedia Company) used to have a hard time managing marketing collateral for their sales teams. Since reps are distributed around the country, collateral was spread across multiple systems and no one could tell what sales actually sent out. This is nothing new. Many marketing organizations put so much time, effort, and money into creating marketing materials for sales but:

1. They can’t ensure that sales are using the right versions.
2. They can’t tell which pieces are the most useful.
3. They can’t tell which pieces they can retire to save on costs.

Maintaining Consistent Branding and Version Control of all Sales Collateral
In truth, many sales reps write their own stuff because they can’t find what they need from marketing. Marketing should focus on the collateral creation and management and sales should focus on selling. To do that, you need a central place to keep track of what’s new and current with all approved of messaging. Sales should be able to easily go there, see a quick summary, click on it, and send it out—no matter where they are, or the time of day.

Intelligence About Collateral Usage Now Drives Marketing Efforts
With point-and-click access to all marketing materials, Egencia sales people get what they need in a single location. Marketing also gets insights into how much a piece has been used, or not used. Not only can the marketing department focus their efforts on generating sales tools that are in demand, but they can also determine what they can cut to save costs.

Breaking news on the relationship between Marketsync and ExactTarget, the leading e-mail marketing company — press release to follow shortly –

• direcTouch is now a certified Extension to the ExactTarget e-mail marketing platform
• Marketsync is an official Extensions Network Partner of ExactTarget.

Check out our listing on the ExactTarget Extensions Network website.

We’re very excited about this announcement. Our integration with ExactTarget makes direcTouch an even better and more unique correspondence solution for Salesforce users. We’re the only solution that combines direct mail, email, and Salesforce workflows into an intelligent communications system and materially improves sales and marketing results.

Key benefits:

• 1,200+ users of ExactTarget’s existing Salesforce integration can add direct mail communications to their marketing programs.
• Individual salespeople can access approved ExactTarget emails and save time with a streamlined, sales-focused, no-training-required tool.
• direcTouch users can add ExactTarget e-mail communications to their portfolio of communications tools.

Watch this blog and the Marketsync website for more news about the addition of email to direcTouch.

Many prospective clients for the direcTouch correspondence solution have asked “Who writes the letters we should use?”

Here are three suggestions that have worked well for our customers, even those who may not have dedicated sales and marketing writers on-staff:

1. Talk to your best-performing reps. We have found that almost every standout salesperson has one or more ready-made e-mail and letter templates that they use to generate leads and close business. direcTouch enables you to share these templates across your entire sales force while controlling essential content and brand elements.
2. Work with a sales process consultant or tool vendor such as Marketsync partners Kadient or The TAS Group. A sales consultant’s stock-in-trade is their ability to help you develop communications that get results. When your process calls for putting toner to paper or pixels to screen, direcTouch can help you execute flawlessly every time.
3. Get a book of sales letter templates. Even though the examples in these books can be a little “hokey” from time to time, pre-written templates are a great starting point and source of ideas for your own letters. We’ve created an Amazon List of popular books to get you started.