Marketing & Sales Portals

There are no organizations more ready for aggressive e-enablement and a unifying portal experience for their members than Marketing and Sales. Reliable, highly-efficient information movement and management are considered competitive “table stakes” for these users, while knowledge-sharing, collaboration and timely competitive intelligence are emerging and necessary capabilities.

Marketing Portals: Gateways to Information

For Marketing, the portal represents a gateway to critical company and product information and assets that are needed within and across regions, brands, business units and sales teams. And, beyond information, the portal creates a place for Marketing communities and practices to develop and thrive. Here, knowledge sharing, expert-finding, and on-the-ground collaboration create a channel for an effective, just-in-time response to market conditions and programs.

The problem with most first- or second-generation Marketing intranets and portals is that they can be:

• Too “top down” and information heavy, often with poor governance to keep content relevant or current
• Poorly designed, such that even good tools are markedly underutilized by people who haven’t been appropriately trained on these assets and their intended use
• Void of regional and local assets, usually because these corporately-managed sites ignore or are not aware of valuable and useful information originated in the “field” or region.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Marketing professionals don’t want and need a portal channel. To the contrary, we find wide-spread interest in a global, intelligent Marketing platform and channel that e-enables its members and establishes a community of practice for sharing campaigns, collateral, and expertise. The result is a Marketing Portal that serves as an agent of change that reinforces and operationalizes common Marketing processes, facilitates change within the Marketing culture and its practices, and evolves into a single, credible Marketing channel that consolidates and rationalizes key brand assets across the business.

For most companies, the Marketing Portal is appropriately integrated with other employee portal assets in a common user experience that creates a "win-win" outcome for the enterprise and the Marketing community. That is, users have the deep resources and capabilities necessary to do their jobs using the Marketing Portal, and that experience is appropriately aligned and consistent with the experience delivered through other aspects of the Enterprise Portal.

Sales Portals: Delivering Critical Support and Services

Sales Portals deliver anytime, anywhere support and services to sales teams that are virtual or remote. Sales representatives and management can be some of the toughest audiences to support given the nature, environment, and pressures of their jobs — and yet, these same characteristics make these users perfect for a 24/7, self-service channel that can put powerful and useful intelligence at their fingertips. The most effective Sales Portals:

• e-Enable the work practices, processes and knowledge needs of the sales organization
• Connect remote sales organizations accessing the portal via mobile devices
• Respond quickly to changing global and local market conditions
• Create a competitive sales advantage with timely, accurate and highly-targeted insight
• Develop effective selling strategies
• Promote strong customer relationships.

The key to an effective Sales Portal design is to know the users, and understand the operations of the organization. The Sales Portal will carefully inform its Portal Strategy and Portal Design with direct voice-of-the-user requirements, often going into the Sales environment to fully appreciate the work conditions, tools (such as mobile and handheld devices) and constraints in which these users operate. Contextual observation, rapid prototyping, and early and continual user validation ensure these portals get at the heart of the work practices of the sales organization.

For Sales management, these processes and practices are combined with timely business analytics and business intelligence so that performance and results can be quickly and easily monitored. Here, knowledge is contextualized and presented in a highly usable and useful fashion that streamlines Management’s job — to efficiently and reliably run their operations.

Importantly, Sales Portals require innovation to bring new ideas and technology advancements to the Sales teams' desktops. Sales Portals are excellent candidates for leveraging robust collaboration and expertise-sharing capabilities in order to shorten the time to gain competitive intelligence, and provide sales teams the opportunity to quickly share success stories. While these innovations can often represent some change issues for users, the positive impact on productivity and results is well worth the transformation.

LDS designs Sales Portals that are intelligent solutions that:

• Facilitate collection of relevant content, such as presentations, training, competitive intelligence and incentive programs
• Provide alerts and dashboard functionality, including pricing changes, noteworthy and relevant client activity, and key performance indicators from various sources
• Provide reports, such as from CRM queries, historical data, forecasting and quotas
• Facilitate collaboration both within teams and across historical boundaries, to establish sales opportunities and to access subject matter expert perspectives.

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