For the past couple of years, I worked with a lead generation company who built prospect lists for companies both large and small, and then conducted cold calls on their behalf. (It was essentially an outsourced inside sales team.) The goal was to setup an appointment with a qualified lead and sales would take it from there. The most common question we received during the cold call was, “Can you send me something?”
When we started working with new customers, we held an on-boarding session to learn about their product offerings and review what they had for marketing materials. We found a majority of customers did not have updated marketing content available. In most cases, we were asked to point prospects to the company website for additional information but had no way to know if they actually followed through.
It made me think back to my days of being a Product Manager for Microsoft Dynamics GP. We had an amazing team who collaborated to build fact sheets, brochures, videos and more! When the content was ready, we would post the content on PartnerSource and communicate to partners where to go to find the latest and greatest materials. Success!
It was not until I worked for a partner organization that I understood the frustrations around downloading corporate content, consuming it and then trying to figure out how to not only distribute this information internally with sales but then also get it out to prospects and existing customers in a personalized and meaningful way. At the time we had industry focused landing pages on our website. We would customize the content per industry and then upload the generic corporate content as supporting material. However, we really didn’t have a lot of visibility into who was viewing the content and what was working.
So, a few years later we started Sky Blue Technology and developed a software solution which enables companies both large and small to easily package up content into experiences or portals and share with prospects and existing customers. The Marketing team can create an entire library of pre-packaged content and share with the Sales team. Then when asked the question, “Can you send me something?” ... all they need to do is access the library, pick the right industry-based experience or portal and share via email. This helps simplify communications by providing both prospects and existing customers everything they need in location without having to search on their own. Additionally, both sales and marketing have the ability to monitor real-time analytics through a dashboard to determine what content is working and then follow-up based on engagement.
You can find out more about Sky Blue Technology by visiting www.onskyblue.com. Sign up for a free 14-day trial and start building your custom portals today!
