Sales Enablement and Marketing Automation Blog

Fision Feature: The Digital Jukebox That Powers Our Company Culture – Part 2 of 2: The Schedule

This is the second (and more fun) part of our Music for Culture Feature that we are sharing in celebration of our participation of this year’s Social Madness Contest (vote for us!). To see how to setup a collaborative streaming jukebox perfect for office music, check out Part 1.

THE SCHEDULE

We quickly learned that just having a wicked set-up and letting everybody play music is potentially distracting, counterproductive, and totally defeats the purpose. In response, we devised a strict schedule of different collaborative playlists for each day to guide our listening. We highly suggest you try it out or listen along and let us know if you have suggestions for more list ideas.

The main source (discussed in Part 1), needs to create the collaborative playlists in Spotify and invite all of the DJs (coworkers) to subscribe to it… or you can just subscribe to ours by clicking the link below. Don’t screw them up with crappy music!

MONDAY: 5 Minute Playlists

One of our favorite features on Spotify is the Related Artists button. If you click an artist, then click Related Artists, it will give you a list of similar or influential artists. We use this feature to make 10 song playlists under 5 minutes.

How to make a 5 Minute Playlists:

Published June 13, 2013

Fision Feature: The Digital Jukebox That Powers Our Company Culture – Part 1 of 2: The Setup

Posted in Fision News

How to create a structured, collaborative and totally awesome inter-office juke box

In celebration of Social Madness (vote for us!), the team at Fision is giving a little inside look at what we love most about working here. One component that fuels our company culture, especially the creative department, is music. We’d like to provide you with stats that say music is directly linked to productivity, but we know when our development team is in the depths of a code tunnel, driving bass from your neighbor doesn’t help. To make everybody happy, we’ve created a collaborative digital jukebox system that makes every day an ideal musical sharing work groove, without being distracting or disruptive.

Today, we’ll share our time tested set-up and follow up tomorrow with the our magical musical schedule.

The Set Up continue reading »

Published June 11, 2013

Filling the Marketing and Sales Gap Left by Marketo

Posted in Brand Management, Digital Asset Management, Distributed Marketing Automation, Marketing Asset Management, Marketing Automation, Personalized Marketing, Sales Enablement

Marketo is frequently regarded as one of the best and easiest to use marketing automation solutions, enabling fast-growing companies and established brands alike to engage their customers more effectively. In fact, the company recently filed for a $75 million initial public offering, highlighting its place in the marketing automation landscape.

As a player in this space, Fision commends Marketo for the advancements they’ve made in the industry and their approach to the sales and marketing cycle. However, for all of its features, Marketo faces a core challenge in bridging the gap between sales and marketing.

Combining Lead Generation and CRM to Start the Sales Cycle

How does a company penetrate all the white noise created by marketers trying to barrage consumers with promotional information? That’s a question many marketers deal with every day. The best way to break through the noise is to send timely and relevant messaging delivered through the communication channels that individuals rely on the most is an effective way to generate high-value prospects. Marketo can effectively be used to give marketers the ability to automate demand and lead generation, enabling users to produce high-quality leads without needing marketers to be so involved in the process. continue reading »

Published April 30, 2013

SaaS Companies Reap the Rewards of Marketing Automation

Posted in Marketing Automation

A vast majority of Software as a Service (SaaS) companies are using marketing automation tools to enhance their marketing campaigns.

Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud technology have been major boons for businesses across the globe. Many companies are beginning to see value in SaaS offerings, which enables them to store and retrieve data via off-site servers and utilize solutions remotely as long as they have access to the web. Instead of a large initial investment, which was required for traditional software, organizations can simply pay subscription fees by the month. SaaS offers a tremendous amount of value and flexibility for an affordable price in the post-recession era.

The demand for SaaS services is high, especially for new Marketing Automation technologies. A new report from ClickZ suggests that many of the sector’s top dogs have turned to marketing automation to quickly engage prospective customers. Approximately three-quarters (76 percent) of the 17 largest SaaS companies in the world are leveraging marketing automation and all of them utilize at least some basic form of website tracking. The fact that these up and coming SaaS companies have chosen to use marketing automation to propel their businesses forward speaks volumes about it’s importance and effectiveness. continue reading »

Published April 25, 2013

Three Keys to Creating Effective Marketing Collateral

Posted in Digital Asset Management, Email Marketing

Effective marketing collateral can improve revenue for businesses.

You can glean a lot from the quality of a company’s marketing collateral. Collateral is often the first impression that consumers have with a brand, so making the best impact is absolutely pivotal. Businesses will often be judged based on the relevancy, consistency and overall quality of the materials that organizations send to potential customers.

Think about it this way – if you signed up for an email newsletter for Coke and the actual email came with Pepsi’s blue, red and white color scheme, how confused would you be? Branding plays a big role in how consumers perceive and react to your messages, especially when engaging a consumer for the first time. It’s very important that marketing collateral is professional, relevant and compliant with brand standards.

As you design your marketing collateral and develop an execution plan for your campaign, keep these three tips in mind:

1. What is the Objective?

Just as every campaign has an objective, so too should individual pieces of marketing collateral. By identifying this goal at the start, companies can design the ideal collateral around this concept. This will help ensure that relevancy is maintained and the calls to action are clear. continue reading »

Published April 22, 2013

Lead Generation and CRM are Just the Beginning

Posted in Digital Asset Manangement, Distributed Marketing Automation, Sales Enablement

Lead gen is only the beginning, Distributed Marketing Automation can help companies finalize customer conversion.

Every dollar that a company earns comes from a customer. But before they were a customer, they were a lead that was converted by sales. Sales, however, doesn’t generate those leads – that task is handled by marketing departments. Without lead generation, companies would be hard-pressed to drive revenue and improve sales.

Customer relationship management (CRM) and lead generation are effective starts to the marketing and sales cycles, and many businesses invest a tremendous amount of budget and strategic thinking into the development of their lead gen and CRM strategies.

Lead generation is frequently cited as one of the biggest challenges that marketers face, with a 2012 study from MarketingSherpa suggesting that approximately 71 percent of businesses view the task as a major priority. A report released by Demand Gen also suggests that marketers plan to up their spending on demand and lead generation by 20 percent over the course of 2013. By getting more leads and passing the higher quality prospects down through the funnel to sales, marketing hopes the company will be able to improve conversion rates and raise revenue. continue reading »

Published April 16, 2013

Marrying Sales and Marketing by Eliminating the Gap

Posted in Digital Asset Management, Distributed Marketing Automation, Sales Enablement

Sales and marketing departments should be married together, but that's not always the case.

The sales and marketing funnel, as it exists, is currently broken. There is a tremendous gap between the two departments and it’s one that is growing increasingly detrimental to businesses as the marketing and sales process continues to evolve.

There are a number of reasons for this disconnect. First and foremost, consumers are growing resistant to the broadcast messages that so many companies have relied on in the past. At the same time, salespeople frequently find they just don’t have the time needed to meaningfully reach leads.

As such, the average salesperson spends up to 20% of their day searching for and creating their own selling materials. In fact, the American Marketing Association found that as much as 90 percent of marketing collateral isn’t even used by sales representatives because it’s too generic. Salespeople want to engage prospects, but they want to do it correctly. Research also suggests that 65 percent of salespeoples’ time isn’t spent engaging customers, because it’s devoted to auxiliary tasks, such as creating their own promotional material so they can personally engage them. continue reading »

Published April 9, 2013