Point of View

We believe fostering better conversations with customers is the key to improving marketing and selling effectiveness. But most conversations today are not conducted live and in person. This puts a greater burden on content, as well as live conversations, than ever before—content because it is a primary engagement vehicle and live conversations because they are rare and precious.

Using the full array of today's communication methods, how can marketing and sales professionals:

• Deliver messages in ways that capture and hold attention?
• Conveniently exchange knowledge from internal experts, analysts and customers?
• Motivate behavior changes?
• Persuade people to take action?
• Capture feedback on individual interests?

This approach requires a new way to create sales-ready, customer-relevant messages. We believe it's time to move beyond documents to new ways of communicating, which leverage the power of pictures, sound and video—in short, multimedia.

Marketing and sales should align around the objective of helping customers buy solutions to business problems. This objective is realized by delivering the most relevant messages to each prospective customer. This requires the ability for sales to access and deliver communications that are tailored for each audience and situation.

The role of marketing is to manage this process by creating the right messages, producing the right content to help sales understand and deliver the messages, and soliciting feedback to improve and refine the messages.

The key to timely, effective, low-cost media communications is a central library of pre-produced messages. Assets must be intuitively organized as message modules that are ready for instant assembly and delivery. Also, the content must be delivered using the preferred delivery method of the target audience.

Organizations need new strategies and processes for building “mediated messages” and turning the front line into producers. The result is the ability to carry out solution selling, to create value through sales conversations and to use communications to produce a competitive advantage.

Messages
Messages Must Support the Sales Process and Be Aligned to It
Language, methodologies and a common framework must be aligned to support cross-functional teams that create and maintain messages with the front line. We go beyond sales-process methodologies to provide proven message- and content-creation methods. The result is a better buying and selling experience for all participants.

Content
Media Motivates, Text Informs. Move beyond the Document to Compelling Multimedia Content
Selling content must help convey complex or important concepts; we help companies create dynamic content by leveraging multimedia. We bring more than 15 years of expertise with multimedia and offer new ways to capture and create large volumes of professional-quality content quickly and cost effectively.

A publishing model is essential to an organization’s ability to respond quickly with cost-effective, professional, relevant programs tailored by the front line for each customer communication. With Avitage, content is produced in modular segments, so it can easily be updated. This extends its shelf life and adds value by making it possible to reuse content in programs for which it was not originally intended.

System
Simplify Your Message Management, Deployment and Delivery Efforts
Communications must be assembled by the front line, so they are relevant to the specific interests of each customer and situation. This assembly function is a key part of our system. Not only are PowerPoint® shows assembled by personnel in sales, sales support, marketing and training; but streaming and downloadable multimedia programs, and even eMeetings, can be built on the fly! And, by managing communication assets at their core level in the Avitage Collections system (PowerPoint slides, audio, Flash® and Windows Media® files), all of the elements are easy to maintain and update.

Another important component to our system is the ability to collect feedback from the front line. Comments are solicited around suggested market, message and slide changes and delivered to appropriate content owners.

Impact
Innovative Communications Can Improve Your Bottom Line
Companies who embrace our innovative communications and development framework realize significant improvements to their sales processes, resulting in revenue growth and profitability.

By closing the gap on information lags and making communications more compelling and relevant, Avitage helps to:

• Increase win rates
• Decrease the length of the sale
• Leverage channels more effectively
• Preserve margins

Avitage's Community:


Follow our CEO:

See the Full Video Interview
on the Challenges of Today's
Buying Cycle
View the video