Leveraging Integrated Marketing to Drive Sales: Meeting Proceedings

OVERVIEW

Executives know that quality customer service is a key indicator for future success in sales. They are searching for ways to identify and cultivate high-performing sales representatives and to effectively utilize market research to improve branding and specific targeting. Integrated marketing is improving companies’ relationships with their customers and adapting marketing efforts to play a greater role in growth strategies.

At the May 2005 Global Benchmarking Council meeting, members and guests convened to discuss how companies are utilizing customer insights and targeted market research to transform marketing effectiveness. Discussion focused on actual company experiences with integrated marketing and ways that companies are employing new techniques to improve sales.

Vice presidents, directors and managers in sales force effectiveness, marketing and strategic communications, business systems, development and other benchmarking professionals interested in integrated marketing will benefit most from case studies of seven leading companies and summarized transcripts from the three facilitated roundtable discussions.

COMPANIES AND CASE STUDIES

A group of elite companies discussed the end-to-end marketing-to-sales process from Market Research to the close and back again through account management, cross-sell and up-sell.

Featured case studies included the following:

• Xerox discussed how it interviewed over two hundred marketing CEOs and executives to build a One-to-One Marketing Lab based on principles from Six Sigma in “Xerox’s One-to-One Marketing Strategy.”
• Hewlett Packard shared its strategy for managing market research and methods of assessing the functionality of existing research in “Market Research to Improve Customer Support and Sales.”
• Intuit revealed how its matrix of sales and service teams synchronizes its customer service strategy through best practices in sales force deployment, sales and service training and operational effectiveness in “Channel Optimization: Building a Customer-Centric Telesales Strategy.”
• Eli Lilly highlighted the challenges that pharmaceutical companies face when advertising to consumers. They addressed the importance of educating consumers and how to create a real-time budgeting strategy that allows companies to generate predictive marketing in “Integrated Marketing Strategies.”
• Teradata provided several case studies that show how well constructed CRM databases and knowledge management systems are integral to marketing development. They also shared key insights for successful event-based marketing and channel segmentation in “Customer Segmentation and Revenue Generation.”
• CenterPoint Energy shared its perspective on advertising in a government-regulated industry. They also provided strategies in how to mine a mature market for new sales opportunities while simultaneously balancing regulation constraints in “CenterPoint Energy’s Sales Process Improvement Strategy.”
• Longwoods International addressed the evolution of marketing analytics and how to utilize market research and multivariate data analysis to improve branding and ROI measurement and modeling in “The Evolution of Marketing Analytics.”

GBC members and guests utilized the above case studies to foster discussion in the following areas:

• Developing Talent to Create a Customer/Market-Focused Organization
• Channel Optimization and Sales Force Effectiveness
• The Changing Role of Market Research

METHODOLOGY

This report was compiled from notes taken during speaker presentations and in-depth roundtable discussions at the May 2005 Global Benchmarking Council meeting, “Leveraging Integrated Marketing to Drive Sales.

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