New rules of Marketing & PR @ the Nasscom India Leadership Forum

Just heard David Meerman Scott’s session (http://bit.ly/bODSso) at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum on the new rules of Marketing & PR. David makes some very good points on how the content you are producing should be in a language your buyers understand. I especially liked the part where he spoke about how employees should be allowed to communicate through mediums they are used to (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). One big takeaway for me from the session was about Electronic gateways. I never thought that electronic gateways (asking for Email ids, etc) are such show stoppers and impact bloggers from participating in discussions. I am going to go back and try not putting up electronic gateways for our upcoming campaigns and see how that goes.

Marketing is evolving rapidly with the advent of these new mediums and while traditional mediums cannot be ignored, organizations are going to have to think out of the box to achieve effective results from these new mediums. Speakers like David open your eyes to some blatant mistakes we make and some of the new rules we need to keep in mind while executing our Marketing strategies.

What do you think are the new rules of Marketing?

Hari Raghunathan
Head Marketing, QEDbaton

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/salesleads

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hariraghunathan

How can Inside Sales support Account Management teams? (Part 2)

Continuing from my last post, I feel that Inside Sales can assist Account Management teams in the following ways

1. Inside Sales can help Account Managers in preparing account maps of their key accounts with regards to organization structures, decision making dynamics within these accounts, current technology environment and vendor landscape present within the accounts.

2. Inside Sales can act as a coordinator between Account Manager and Marketing, so as to drive the relevant campaigns within the key account with a perspective of creating maximum visibility, awareness amongst all the relevant stake holders and establishing warm touch points with these people even before the Account Manager has met them in person.

3. Once the Inside Sales team has aligned well with the Account Manager, they can definitely help the Account Manager in penetrating deeper within these organizations by engaging in preliminary discussions with relevant stake holders, setting up meetings for the Account Manager & managing the Account Managers calendar better.

4. Inside Sales can play an important role in maintaining a high quality of hygiene in the account management CRM and take that load away from the Account Manager, so he spends his time more productively.

5. Keeping track of sponsor movements within the organization, profiling every relevant stake holder- critical information which the Account Manager can leverage well, are again areas where inside sales can most definitely play a big role in.

The key element here of course is winning the trust of the Account Manager. The Account Manager needs to see inside sales as a support engine which he can leverage to his advantage. Once he has established a level of faith in the inside sales engine, he can gradually involve them deeper and deeper in his account management plan.

Apart from making Account Managers focus on their core competency, this also ensures that organizations retain the relationships that are built by Account Management teams.

Milind Katti

COO, QEDbaton