Cisco’s Smart White Paper Marketing
February 8th, 2008, 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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February 9th, 2008 at 9:19 am
Michael,
I have recently branched out working to set up companies using the tools and processes you described in this blog. There are many programs that impliment these types of processes and YES, THEY WORK!!!
The programs I work with track video campaigns, e-mails, website visits, blogs, white papers, basically any activity that is touched by a customer, client, or any person in the database. The tracking tells me when the object is delivered, opened, read, how long they were engaged, if they performed another activity, if they forward it, once they forward it, how they forward it to. One of the progrmas is an automatic e-mail and task scheduler that sends out automatic e-mails based on the feedback being sent or even automatic voicemails. These programs produce results and are such a time saver as well as increase in productivity.
Let me know if you would like more information.
Michelle Evinger, President
GetKreativ, LLC
February 9th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Hey Michelle;
Please do share your details here.
Mike
February 10th, 2008 at 9:00 am
I used to work with Microsoft and we had a similar process in place but instead of the sales people making the contact it was often the consultants.
Imagine Michelle downloads a whitepaper on why MSsql is better than ABCsql. The next week the consultant has installed the product and has a demo up and running - say a tool for HR. Client is happy to give a tool a try and they give it to HR.
Next week try and take it away from HR.
February 12th, 2008 at 4:55 am
Super information like this, Mike, is truly piles of gold.
Jim McMullen
February 12th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
I would have to concur with Jim.
February 20th, 2008 at 4:23 am
Michelle Evinger, tell us about that software please