Partners: American Marketing Association

Marketing and Sales Alignment Forum

The American Marketing Association's Marketing and Sales Alignment (MSA) Forum (formerly known as the Customer Message Management Leadership Series) is designed to assist marketing and sales executives increase the consistency, quality and impact of brand messaging across all prospect development and customer-acquisition touchpoints. The AMA has joined with practicing professionals from world-class companies who recognize the importance of synching up the marketing and sales process and are willing to share their insights and expertise.

The AMA MSA Forum consists of three practice areas: demand generation, sales effectiveness and customer messaging. Each area features newsletters, web seminars, radio shows and leadership forums dedicated to bringing an increased focus around an issue that is becoming more and more critical: How can marketing organizations make themselves more relevant to the revenue-generating activities of the sales force? For more information on these programs, please click on the links below. Can't find what you are looking for or want more information, contact MSA@ama.org.

AMA and Avitage Web Events

Event Descriptions

April 2008 - Webcast: Help Sales Sell in a Down Market
Is it business as usual for your sales organization or are you changing your approach in anticipation of a tougher selling environment? Join Jim Burns, CEO of Avitage, along with sales strategist Rob Scanlon of Scanlon Consulting Group, as they share specific strategies and tactics to deal with the impacts of a down market:

Sales dropping
Buyers waiting to buy
Messages "falling flat" -- not as effective as they previously were
A gap in sales support
Curtailed sales training

This informative webinar provides practical advice for contracting markets to help you:

Capture your competitor's share of the pie
Create urgency to buy
Sharpen your selling messages to align to customers' down-market pressures
Leverage and multiply your critical subject experts
Focus training on specific aides to address these market conditions

May 2007 - WebRadio: Account-Based Marketing, Stakeholder-Specific Communications
Narrow-cast your messages for optimal relevance, personalization and timing. Companies large and small have adopted targeted-account selling strategies. This session discusses what services marketing can provide to, and on behalf of, sales to help them optimize the results of this strategy. Why are stakeholder-specific communications necessary? What positive impact could they have for the business and what impact might this have on the marketing organization? What processes and best practices make this communication practice practical? Jim Burns, CEO of Avitage, will get you thinking about moving your broadcast messages and marketing programs to narrowcast approaches.

February 2007 - Web Conference: Execute the Complex B2B Sale through Innovative Communications
Each track of this three-track conference contains four or five modules that allow you to select and conveniently view topics of interest. Guests include Jim Burns of Avitage and Bob Schmonsees, author of Escaping the Black Hole.

Organize Track: Implement Customer Message Management to Foster Better Sales Conversation: introduces a six-stage-implementation framework with best practices in support of the complex sale.
Create Track: Introducing the Value-Mapping Process: describes a unique and patented process by which an organization can visually map the value they provide from the customer’s perspective, based upon customer needs and underlying issues.
Deliver Track: Introducing the On-Demand Web Conference: describes a new model for product-launch and marketing webinars that promises to raise registration levels and increase message viewing.

March 2006 - Webcast: Lessons from an NPR Producer
Marketers know the power of audio to capture attention and convey important messages. But we are daunted by the process and cost of producing compelling programs that listeners will appreciate. We don’t know where to start. Jim Burns interviews Tony Kahn, a producer, narrator and host of more than 50 radio and television programs for Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), National Public Radio (NPR), as well as many others and currently the producer of the podcast series Morning Stories from WGBH in Boston. Jim asks Tony how our CMM principles of pre-producing messages and content to a library, based upon message-map techniques, might change his approach. They also discuss how to produce audio for all delivery purposes: webinars, training, coaching, as well as podcasts.

January 2006 - WebRadio: Bringing Selling Messages to Life
In this edition, we look at some of the latest ideas for improving sales messaging and bringing those messages to life in a way that improves your marketing success. Jim Burns of Avitage discusses how to predefine core selling messages, how to preproduce message-support content and how to cost effectively and efficiently leverage visual and audio aids. Also, specific examples of how this approach is helping companies increase sales effectiveness.

November 2005 - Webcast: Improving the Customer Message Delivery Experience
Bob Schmonsees, author of Escaping the Black Hole, presents his case for enhancing the customer message delivery experience. Jim Burns, Avitage, addresses how web-assisted selling -- the strategy of leveraging media and web delivery to create a competitive advantage through differentiated sales communications -- is transforming the way your critical market messages are being delivered by field sales people to your end customers. He also identifies opportunities and requirements for maximizing this compelling message-delivery method.

September 2005 - Webcast: How to Drive Consistent and Effective Sales Conversations with Customers
Jim Burns, Avitage, discusses how CMM is fundamentally a communication, not an information, problem. He covers strategies and solutions you can implement to address the issue, as well as techniques and approaches that have helped many companies migitage the effects.

May 2005 - Webcast: Turning Marketing and Sales into a State-of-the-Art Customer-Acquisition Factory
Bob Schmonsees, author of Escaping the Black Hole, which is the first book to tackle the problem of wasted cost, time and resources resulting from marketing and sales misalignment. During his research, he uncovered dozens of new tactics and best practices that successful companies were implementing to turn their marketing and sales efforts into a sustainable competitive advantage. He shares two new execution models that enable companies to create a synchronized marketing and sales ecosystem. Mark Organ is a prolific writer and speaker on the issue of getting marketing and sales on the same page to do one thing: drive revenue growth. His presentation highlights actionable strategies for transforming disjointed marketing and sales activities into a single, measurable and efficient process. As co-founder of Eloqua, Mark and his company have been responsible for integrating marketing and sales at dozens of companies -- seeing real-world problems and solving them.

February 2005 - Webcast: Product-Launch Breakthroughs that Improve Sales Ramp Up
Jim Burns hosts a discussion with Rob Scanlon from Sentillion about ways they are equipping their sales people “for the fray” and ramping up sales people for complex conversations in a 45-day program. Many CMM principles and practices are discussed in this hour-long program.

February 2005 - WebRadio: Marketing’s Most Forgotten Tool: The Sales Conversation
This 10-minute interview with Jim Burns elaborates on the value of audio to help explain complex ideas to both the sales channel and customers. Audio also shows sales people how to handle nuance in delivering complex methods and motivates both sales people and customers to take action!

January 2005 - Webcast: How to Make Marketing More Relevant to the Sales Cycle
This three-segment webcast kicks off the CMM Forum series. Tim Riesterer with the Customer Message Group introduces the objectives and viewpoint of the forum and sets the stage with key messaging principles. Jim Burns with Avitage recommends approaching messaging problems from a communications perspective. He discusses the value of using media to motivate action, and implications of delivery methods for message creation and management. Craig Nelson with iCentera describes a new approach, called Virtual Marketing Organization, that marketers are using to push their content deeper into sales cycles by enabling marketing and sales people to easily set up customized private websites or portals for virtually any audience including individual prospects, customers, analysts or webcast attendees.