Provide Great Sales Support in a Tough Economy with a Marketing Portal

In any economy, salespeople must be supported by the marketing department to succeed in their jobs. But in a recession, marketing departments are often the first to suffer reductions in staff. The survivors then have more duties and responsibilities heaped onto their plates, leaving them less and less time to respond to the pressing needs of salespeople.

Because times are tough, salespeople are under more pressure than ever to sell the goods and services for which they are responsible. At the same time, there are fewer and fewer people in marketing to serve them. Sales managers ask for more leads, more selling tools, more competitive analyses, more tradeshows, more email campaigns, more seminars – anything that can help their people close deals.

Unfortunately, many of these calls can go unanswered, and this is when a serious dilemma arises: how do you increase levels of sales support when you have decreased numbers of people to provide it, not to mention a leaner marketing budget?

One approach that is working for many marketing organizations in diverse industries is to implement a marketing portal using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. These SaaS-enabled portals offer a number of advantages over traditional internally-developed intranets or extranet sites:

• The initial investment is modest, and typically involves just a set-up fee. Thereafter, there is a predictable “pay-as-you-go” service fee – no surprises!
• Development time is eliminated
• Marketers have the ability to decide upon the functionality they need to produce results, and can include the features that will bring value to the organization.
• There are also no limits on the number or type of items that can reside in a SaaS system.
• Salespeople gain real time access to every piece of literature, every trade show booth, every product sample, and every marketing and sales-related asset they need to do their jobs.
• The middleman in the delivery chain is eliminated, thus speeding the process of putting the requested materials in the hands of salespeople and their customers when they need them.
• IT does not need to be involved in the installation, deployment, or maintenance of the system.

Some SaaS applications not only provide robust functionality, but are backed by comprehensive support and a service level guarantee. This eliminates a lot of worry from a marketer’s life.

SaaS solutions also deliver great ROI. One such solution typically produces business results that exceed the investment within two months. Another benefit is the SaaS provider’s customer care team, who become partners in success with marketers and their organizations.

Until recently, most organizations relied on marketing intranets and sales extranets. The problem was that their salespeople would often complain that the intranet site provided poor navigation, materials were outdated, the functionality was minimal, and there were inconsistencies in branding.

Today, especially in the B-to-B world, marketing portals have emerged as the principal means of sales support. They provide self-service resources for all of the company’s sales channels including direct teams, distributors, dealers, agents and reps, retailers, etc. Targeted content is also served to other audiences and marketing partners via the marketing portal.

Marketers see marketing portals not only as an excellent means to display and distribute an organization’s marketing and sales materials, but also as a new avenue to streamline internal communications and make their product rollouts more efficient. They also use their portals to collect input from the field.

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. The reality in these economic times is that new solutions are needed to tackle the problems faced by marketers with fewer resources. Marketers who are committed to providing more responsive, more compelling sales support in the face of decreased budgets and staff have a new lifeline. Thanks to new technology in the form of the SaaS Marketing portal, assistance is just a click away.

Scott Richardson ([email protected]) is the president/CEO of Longwood Software.