Working as a marketing specialist on Cisco’s EMEA Customer Success Programme, Dina Alexandru focused on how customer references add value to the sales teams with the help of the company’s unique marketing tool, Kinetic.
This Just-in-Time application delivers relevant assets to the sales force when they need them. It then measures its success to highlight the importance of customer references to the business as a whole.
Where does Kinetic fit into the sales cycle?
Kinetic sends a direct and personalised notification at the start of the sales cycle, measuring items such as open and click through rates. Cisco then analyses the results over time to determine any patterns or trends.
To aid this, Cisco completed a sales influence survey focused on how sales/marketing assets are used in the sales process. The results suggest sales teams want more localised materials, that material must be useable on smart-phones and that they spend more than two hours each week on the search for relevant materials. Kinetic is already saving an average of one day per month in reference search time.
The Cisco approach certainly sparked much discussion. The questions from the floor centred on the level of C-level sponsorship for the programme, and whether automation harms personal relationship building.
Dina’s view was that transparency has helped produce the evidence to excite the C-level, which in turn creates more support and investment. As for personal relationships, the emphasis is on Kinetic being a tool to aid the sales guys, not to remove personal contact.