Mashups in Action: Connecting the Sales and Marketing Dots

A friend recently said I was the 'king of repurposing'. I am not entirely sure if he was referring to my blog about reuse as an important step in the Mashup lifecyle, or if he was was referring to my life-long quest to teach others how to reuse content (like this blog) whereever and whenever possible. Regardless, it reminded me to write this Mashup in Action blog.

As you might know, we have written a number of blogs about Mashups in Action over the last few years. A few of my favorites case studies include Thomson Reuters (part 1 and part 2), The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and Accival.

But this Mashup In Action is special. It's MINE.

Like every good marketer, I want to help my sales guys find, nurture, and ultimately close deals. We use many media channels to do that and we have great metrics on the early parts of the process until the moment we hand the prospective customer over to the sale folks. Why? Because then we are focused on their problems, and our proposal to address them. We (sales and marketing collectively) often miss subsequent interactions our prospective buyer has with the marketing channels that got them interested in the first place.

I've seen this same disconnect occur in every organization I have ever worked for. So my mashup addresses this quintessential marketing-and-sales problem: matching prospects in the sales pipeline to their subsequent interactions with our marketing channels. Afterall, if you've got a deal in the pipeline, wouldn't you want to know that your prospective customer just visited your company's website? And what they looked at? And for how long?

Here's a recording of my Marketing-and-Sales Mashup given by JackBe's Deepak Alur on stage at the Web 2.0 Expo a few weeks back:



This mashup gives my sales folks some great intelligence on their sales prospects. It helps them understand what parts of the corporate website that individuals in the prospect company visited, what features/modules/functions they may have liked/disliked, and perhaps even what medium (video, print, blog, etc.) was the 'stickiest'. Equally important, it helps us marketing folks understand the real influence we are having (or not having) on sales prospects.

I know this kind of problem isn't universal. It is less prevalent in organizations that used highly-integrated all-in-solutions (like Eloqua, perhaps). But there always seems to be one more source of information you want to connect to the prospective customer. 'Just one more thing' is always on the lips of a good sales rep.

I love a good hypothetical demonstration as much as the next guy but nothing can match a real-world applications like these. Oh, and because of this, my sales guys love me. Now that is priceless.