Cisco’s Smart White Paper Marketing
By Michael StelznerMarketing information is sales gold. However, often a disconnect exists between sales and marketing.
For example, if someone reads a white paper, especially a big prospect, how does sales know this event has occurred.
Cisco has recently implemented a very interesting program. According to the January edition of Target Marketing magazine, “at Cisco, a dramatic shift is underway within the organization as it ventures into the a new world of web strategy, challenging its traditional tactics.”
Cisco introduced a marketing to sales linkage program. Here’s what they are doing:
According to Target Marketing,:
If someone downloads a white paper off Cisco.com or views one of our broadcasts and registers—and we know the name of that individual—that individual tracks back to our global CRM tools, then brings up an alert with the salesperson who follows that particular account, notifying them that you are a new contact or an existing contact within their account that had some kind of meaningful activity with marketing,” explains Alex Landucci, manager of integrated marketing communications, global demand generation.
Because these activities are registered inside of Cisco’s CRM system, it gives Cisco salepeople a “reason to call” someone on their watch list.
Seems like a brilliant idea to me.
If you have experienced a program similar to this I would love to hear from you. Do they work well? Are you finding a disconnect between marketing and sales when it comes to leads?
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