Fixing Today's Sales and Marketing Organizations

Transcription

1 CITRIX GOTOMEETING CORPORATE Accelerating Sales and Marketing through Effective Web Collaboration

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Overview 3 Key Communication Challenges for Sales and Marketing Organizations 3 Sales Teams Face New Models for Success 4 Marketers Must Get the Message Out 4 Effective Online Events, Meetings and Collaboration Enhance Sales and Marketing Performance 5 Using GoToMeeting Corporate for Sales and Marketing Operations 7 Customer Case Study: MarketSharp 11 Conclusions 11 Frost & Sullivan Whitepaper 2

3 EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW Thanks to the expanding global workforce, heightened competition and the continued need to cut costs and drive productivity, companies today are facing myriad new challenges. Because sales and marketing are key to maximizing growth, productivity and profits, those organizations are facing mounting pressure to create efficient, customer-centric processes that provide increased reach and revenue while keeping costs under control all as markets become more competitive and brands less distinguishable. To compete, companies must equip their sales and marketing teams with technology that can dramatically enhance productivity and drive innovation by improving the way they interact with customers, partners, suppliers and other employees. Web collaboration is increasingly becoming an indispensable tool in accelerating sales and marketing processes while simultaneously reducing costs. Web collaboration technologies enable individuals and organizations to meet online, present information, share critical data and demonstrate products to increase productivity, decrease costs, expand reach and generate revenue. Sales and marketing teams are increasingly making these tools an integral part of their business processes, to allow faster and better execution of business goals. More specifically,web collaboration is helping sales and marketing teams cost-effectively generate more leads and close more deals. Sales professionals are using Web collaboration to reach more prospects, interact with geographically dispersed clients, reduce sales cycles, create targeted sales messages, crosssell, up-sell and generate more revenue per closed deal. Marketing teams are planning, developing and successfully executing marketing programs using the real-time and interactive capabilities offered by Web collaboration. As a result, they are able to pump up lead generation and create meaningful sales leads faster than before. Citrix Online, a division of Citrix Systems, Inc., is a leading provider of remote access and Web collaboration services. Citrix GoToMeeting Corporate, with the new Citrix GoToWebinar, stands out among the many Web collaboration solutions available today for its ease of use, cost-effectiveness, and unique collaboration and real-time monitoring capabilities. Motivated by a simpler is better philosophy and a flat-fee,all You Can Meet licensing model, GoToMeeting Corporate delivers hosted online meeting and event services designed to help customers achieve their business goals through improved collaboration. This paper examines the key communication challenges faced by today s sales and marketing organizations, and how GoToMeeting Corporate is delivering the right tools to help businesses meet their growth objectives. KEY COMMUNICATION CHALLENGES FOR SALES AND MARKETING ORGANIZATIONS Today s sales and marketing leaders are encountering an array of new challenges, ranging from increased competition to fewer resources to rapidly changing markets. Sales and marketing success relies on creating effective customer-centric processes that improve the quality, execution and impact of the materials they create and the activities they perform Frost & Sullivan Whitepaper 3

4 on a daily basis. Competition is intense, and buyers are skeptical. Being able to get a prospect s attention and turn it into a successful sale is an enormous task. And while sales and marketing share a common goal, and their complementary roles can fuel increased revenues for a company, sales and marketing typically act as two very separate organizations. Both could benefit from increased collaboration. Sales Teams Face New Models for Success The traditional sales model has undergone a tremendous metamorphosis. Today s selling environments are complex, requiring a change in the go-to-market model. Sales leaders must design new ways to meld emerging techniques with highly targeted messages. They re moving away from the conventional linear model prospect, qualify, present and close to a more dynamic and accelerated customer-centric focus, in which sales professionals engage in a collaborative decision-making process with their customers. Sales teams today are facing several interrelated challenges, including the need to: Increase sales-team productivity so sales professionals can reach more prospects more often and in less time; Extend their reach to geographically dispersed prospects and customers while reducing operational costs; Create highly targeted sales messages that engage key decision makers; Provide a collaborative sales process in which customers can offer feedback and interact with sales professionals to devise solutions that specifically address their business needs; Lay the framework to build strong, long-lasting customer relationships to create a funnel for cross-selling and up-selling; Promote a team-selling approach and foster communication among sales regions, reps and managers; Maximize efficiency to close more deals more quickly. Marketers Must Get the Message Out Of course, in the end, sales teams need leads to succeed and effective marketing can be a lead-generating machine. Marketing uncovers sales opportunities by contacting and cultivating influencers and decision drivers, often in places the sales team hasn t gone. Done right, marketing shortens the sales process by delivering the information that prospects need to make their buying decision quickly and efficiently. And yet, from the perspective of today s media-savvy customer, marketing messages often appear tiresome and trite. Companies must develop a message that s both informative and sincere. Frost & Sullivan Whitepaper 4

5 Today s highly competitive business climate is intensifying marketing s key challenges, which include the need to: Dramatically increase productivity to feed the sales pipeline with more leads in less time, while simultaneously reducing the cost of marketing efforts; Reach geographically dispersed, formerly unreachable prospects using emerging technologies and marketing techniques; Gain better intelligence through precise targeting, to successfully pre-qualify leads and give sales teams contextual information on new opportunities that can result in higher sales conversion; Accelerate time-to-market, as product and technology life cycles get shorter; Work more effectively with sales teams through timely collaboration and information sharing; Build a stronger, better differentiated brand; Optimize and demonstrate ROI to better align marketing goals with business goals and contribute to the bottom line. EFFECTIVE ONLINE EVENTS, MEETINGS AND COLLABORATION ENHANCE SALES AND MARKETING PERFORMANCE To continue meeting the challenges they face today, sales and marketing organizations must create dynamic business strategies using new marketing tools, channels and technologies. Web conferencing and collaboration are increasingly being adopted as productivityenhancing tools for critical business processes such as sales, training, marketing and customer support. Web conferencing and collaboration facilitate online communications, offering the capability to meet with individuals and address audiences anywhere, anytime in an Internet-based, real-time meeting environment. Web conferencing is a great way to deliver presentations, product demonstrations, meetings, seminars and training. The technology offers rich functionality, including file and application sharing, annotation, online chat, polls and surveys, Web co-browsing and recording, among other features. Fueled by the increasing demand for real-time communications and its potential to deliver huge cost and time savings, the global Web conferencing market continues to grow rapidly, standing at $705.1 million in 2005 and forecasted to reach $3.1 billion in Online meetings and events are increasingly accepted alternatives or complements to face-to-face interactions, offering greater functionality and cost-effectiveness than traditional sales and marketing programs. Citrix GoToMeeting Corporate offers flexible, hosted meeting solutions in two flavors: GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. Both are designed to enable individuals and organizations to easily, securely and cost-effectively collaborate; present information and demonstrate products online; generate and qualify sales leads; and close the deal. Both are offered on a flat-fee, All You Can Meet licensing basis that enables businesses to benefit more frequently from the value of online meetings and events. And both are helping companies Frost & Sullivan Whitepaper 5

6 increase productivity, decrease costs and expand their reach to generate new revenue opportunities. (Please see Figure 1.) Figure 1: End-to-End Real-Time Collaboration Plan Set time and topic Enter description Manage registration Present Share your content Monitor attendees Gather feedback Meet Deliver demos Collaborate instantly Close deals online The new GoToWebinar, a managed online event service designed to facilitate communication between a presenter and a large remote audience over the Internet, is one of the easiest and most cost-effective Webinar services available today. Better yet, its realtime audience monitoring and reporting capabilities give leaders instant feedback on their marketing messages and help sales professionals target the best leads first. GoToWebinar is a new breed of Webinar technology that boasts significantly better ease of use, performance, cost-effectiveness, security and functionality. GoToWebinar is the first on-demand, do-it-yourself collaboration tool designed to let small and medium-sized organizations schedule and host Webinars with up to 1,000 attendees. Some of the key features of GoToWebinar include: Easy Webinar planning With a self-service interface, GoToWebinar has a simple three-step online process that enables organizers to set up Webinars in less than five minutes. Existing events can be reused as templates, to further facilitating scheduling. Full service registration When hosts enter a short Webinar description, GoToWebinar automatically creates a Webinar registration page and Webinar invitations, reminders and follow-up s for attendees. Customized branding Customers can upload logos, images and photographs to create a company-branded registration page, invitations and confirmations. Frost & Sullivan Whitepaper 6

7 Webinar attendee management GoToWebinar automatically monitors Webinar attendance, audience interest and satisfaction levels, giving the presenter at-a-glance access to real-time audience response information. (Please see Figure 2.) After the event, one-click reports rank Webinar participants by their level of interest, letting sales professionals follow up on the hottest leads first. Free integrated audio conferencing/toll-free conference call option Attendees can use free services for the audio portion of the event with up to 1,000 attendees on a single bridge or, via a partnership with BT Conferencing, access a toll-free audio service. Audience engagement tools Attendee polling, survey and text-question capabilities are standard; so is the Satisfaction Meter, which lets attendees indicate their reaction to the material with just one click throughout the presentation. Recorded Webinar storage and unlimited streaming Through a partnership with Akami Technologies, clients can store and stream Webinars online, for persistent viewing options that allow them to reach multiple target audiences as the need arises. Figure 2: Real-Time Monitoring in Citrix GoToWebinar USING GOTOMEETING CORPORATE FOR SALES AND MARKETING OPERATIONS GoToMeeting Corporate is targeted primarily at the SME market and is offered on an annual subscription basis. GoToMeeting Corporate organizers can host a maximum of 25 attendees using GoToMeeting and up to 1,000 attendees using GoToWebinar. GoToMeeting Corporate is designed for organizations that need to centrally administer multiple GoToMeeting and/or GoToWebinar accounts, provides each customer with a dedicated sales executive and account manager, and offers many additional features, including: Centralized Administration Center Citrix Presentation Server integration Web Services API Customizable Waiting Rooms that can be branded with a company logo Meet Now buttons that can be placed on company Web sites for seamless startup of GoToMeeting sessions Reporting features allowing administrators to create reports to track meeting and usage statistics Frost & Sullivan Whitepaper 7

8 Additionally, GoToMeeting Corporate integrates with Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes, allowing fast and easy scheduling. In fact, Meet Now buttons integrated into and instant-messaging applications let organizers start meetings and Webinars with a single click. The combination of GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar delivers a single solution for companies that want to enhance their marketing and sales efforts to create more efficient and real-time working environments. GoToWebinar is an ideal tool for finding and connecting to an audience, then qualifying and developing hot leads. GoToMeeting is perfect for following up with those leads on a more intimate basis, collaborating within the sales team to develop the best strategies for turning prospects into clients and quickly closing deals. (Please see Figure 3.) Figure 3: Faster Revenue Streams GoToMeeting Corporate provides cost savings and improved efficiency while enhancing the effectiveness of a company s sales and marketing efforts. It can meet all a company s online collaboration needs, ranging from large GoToWebinar events to small GoToMeeting ad-hoc meetings (Chart 1-1). Frost & Sullivan Whitepaper 8

9 Chart 1.1: GoToMeeting Corporate for Sales Effectiveness Sales Imperative Expand Sales Reach and Coverage Minimize Cost of Sales Reduce Sales Cycles to Close More Deals Promote Team Selling and Faster Decision-Making Processes Cross-Sell and Up- Sell to Drive Revenues Benefits of Using GoToMeeting Corporate GoToMeeting Corporate is a complete collaboration solution that enables SME s to communicate with globally dispersed prospects. Through interactive online selling, sales professionals can present compelling messages and expand the reach and coverage of their sales efforts while reducing travel and travel-related costs, resulting in greater productivity and substantial savings. All You Can Meet flat-rate licensing offers an easy and costeffective way to hold online meetings and events. Now, sales professionals can conduct as many online meetings and Webinars as they need, substantially reducing travel and boosting productivity without incurring any additional costs. GoToMeeting Corporate makes it easier for organizations to engage buyers early in the decision process and then follow through with them to close the deal. First, using GoToWebinar sales professionals can present a targeted message to large groups, gather feedback and profile their audiences in order to qualify their interests and identify hot leads. Then, using GoToMeeting they can accelerate the sales process by following up with individual client demonstrations and instant online collaboration. Chat, satisfaction meters, annotations and other participantmanagement tools support rich interactions and instant customer feedback, reducing and even preventing the back-and-forth required in a typical sales process. The ability to collaborate on the fly with other sales team members, including managers, can help sales professionals quickly deliver responses to client queries during an online meeting or event. Plus, GoToMeeting Corporate s Instantly Change Presenter feature lets sales teams showcase a reference customer, subject-matter expert or even an attendee. Furthermore, GoToMeeting Corporate allows for unlimited viewing of recorded meetings and events, giving sales professionals the ability to leverage their work and reuse valuable sales interactions for additional meetings or product demonstrations. GoToMeeting Corporate offers increased access to key resources that facilitate interaction with small groups and large audiences, enabling effective and rapid decision-making across the board. GoToMeeting Corporate allows sales professionals to collaborate instantly and easily with one another no matter where they re located. It also lets team members and managers accelerate the decision-making process and foster a team-selling approach. In most sales situations, the 80/20 rule applies: 80 percent of revenue is driven by 20 percent of clients. Because it s more cost-effective to increase revenues by increasing volume with existing clients, crossselling and up-selling are key to growing any business. GoToMeeting Corporate captures existing clients needs and business drivers better through online interaction and participation, helping sales professionals uncover and leverage opportunities. And with GoToWebinar, sales professionals can more easily educate customers, improving product use and customer satisfaction. Frost & Sullivan Whitepaper 9

10 Chart 1.2: GoToMeeting Corporate for Marketing Effectiveness Marketing Imperative Accelerate Lead Generation Go to Market Faster by Creating Compelling Marketing Messages Reduce the Cost of Marketing Efforts While Getting Higher Returns Build a Strong and Differentiated Brand Demonstrate ROI Promote Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing Educate Customers To Improve Product Use and Satisfaction Benefits of Using GoToMeeting Corporate Using GoToMeeting Corporate, marketers can increase the number, frequency, reach and quality of their marketing events. By using the rich graphical capabilities of GoToMeeting Corporate, organizations can transform marketing events into persuasive learning sessions that generate multiple business opportunities. Additionally, presenters can capture actionable feedback to drive lead-qualification and higher conversion rates. Today s technology buyers are a skeptical bunch. They need to see considerable business value before even considering a new purchase. Marketers must understand the business issues their prospects face, then work across their own organizations to craft compelling, valuebased business solutions. Using GoToMeeting Corporate, marketing teams can gain an advantage by offering large audiences targeted marketing messages that anticipate and neutralize the competition. GoToMeeting Corporate offers an All You Can Meet licensing plan for unlimited meetings and events at a flat fee, making it a costeffective solution. There are no limits on the number or length of meetings and Webinars, and no overage charges. As a result, marketing teams can deliver more online marketing events and reach out to prospects more often while keeping costs under control. Cautious buyers turn to trusted brand names first. GoToMeeting Corporate lets marketing teams build a successful brand image by including company logos on all meeting and Webinar material, presenting a consistent message to prospects and customers. The days of increasing marketing budgets with little quantifiable justification are long gone. Marketers today must provide clear and compelling evidence that a marketing investment directly contributes to the bottom line. GoToMeeting Corporate s on-demand hosted solution reduces upfront investment, demonstrating rapid ROI. Additionally, increased usage of online meetings and events promotes substantial cost savings while driving higher value. And with GoToMeeting Corporate s attendance reporting and monitoring tools, marketing teams can effectively differentiate hot leads from cold leads, then focus attention on the hot leads first. If these hot leads turn into closed deals, the incoming revenue can be directly attributed to the success of the marketing campaign. Marketing and sales professionals often speak different languages, and this can cause confusion among prospects, customers and partners. Marketing needs more help from sales to ground marketing initiatives in customer reality, and sales needs more effective support from marketing to better position higher value solutions and shorten the sales cycle. GoToMeeting Corporate is an effective collaboration tool for internal communications between sales and marketing teams, allowing them to work together at every level from research and planning to content development and account management. Training far-flung customers can be difficult and costly. With GoToWebinar, organizations of any size can deliver online training to up to 1,000 attendees, improving product usage rates and satisfaction levels, ultimately generating more cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Frost & Sullivan Whitepaper 10

11 CUSTOMER CASE STUDY: MARKETSHARP Advanced Marketing Concepts, Ltd. (AMC), doing business as MarketSharp, develops and markets software solutions and support services for the home improvement industry. The company s main software system was designed to provide professional direct marketing, lead tracking and business management. Today, MarketSharp s primary challenge is to gain prospective customers while educating existing ones from a distance. Since implementing Citrix GoToMeeting Corporate, MarketSharp has been able to reach more prospects and generate new customer demand with online sales events and personalized demonstrations all conducted remotely from the company s headquarters in La Crosse,Wisconsin. Using GoToWebinar, MarketSharp is providing online training classes to existing customers to cost-effectively increase product use and drive satisfaction levels among end users. After each seminar, the sales team delivers personalized online software demonstrations to interested customers using GoToMeeting, accelerating sales cycles to close more deals. Thanks to GoToMeeting Corporate, MarketSharp has extended its geographic reach to locate new customers, effectively delivering its business message worldwide. This total solution for real-time collaboration has cost-effectively increased the company s sales and marketing teams productivity while substantially reducing costs. With GoToWebinar, MarketSharp saved up to $30,000 a year in travel for sales seminars alone. The resulting time savings and increase in productivity led to a 50 to 75 percent drop in the average time it takes to close a new sale. MarketSharp was especially attracted to the All You Can Meet licensing model because it lets sales and marketing professionals conduct unlimited online events with up to 1,000 participants for one low fee. Since users never have to worry about overage charges, they take advantage of the technology much more often. And thanks to GoToMeeting Corporate s ease of use and simplicity, MarketSharp employees can use it whenever they need to, without the hassle of complicated installation, training and/or configuration processes. CONCLUSIONS Business buyers today have more options, less time and tighter budgets than ever before. They demand overriding value from their technology investments. Real-time collaboration technologies are making information workers more productive, enabling them to accelerate sales, reduce times-to-market, improve customer service, streamline communications, and control costs. Meanwhile, Web collaboration technologies are advancing at a rapid pace. In this increasingly crowded market, Citrix GoToMeeting Corporate, now including Citrix GoToWebinar, differentiates itself by offering simplicity, security, and cost-effective, flat-rate licensing for rapid ROI. GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar offer all the necessary functionality to help sales and marketing teams enhance productivity, positively impact the bottom line and improve profitability. Frost & Sullivan Whitepaper 11

12 Key value propositions offered by GoToMeeting Corporate include: Simplicity - GoToMeeting Corporate is easy to use, enabling even inexperienced sales and marketing professionals to set up online meetings and events in just a few minutes and allowing attendees to join in just one click. Its free voice-conferencing service makes it simple to set up audio conference calls, and attendees can get a single meeting ID number for both the online meeting or event and the audio conference. Plus, as an on-demand hosted service, GoToMeeting Corporate ensures easy implementation and management. Security - GoToMeeting Corporate is built on an advanced secure-communication architecture using industry-standard SSL and U.S. government-standard 128-bit end-to -end AES encryption to ensure the privacy and security of online meetings and events. Additionally, users are authenticated with passwords and unique meeting and Webinar IDs. The Inactivity Time-Out automatically stops screen sharing after a specified period of inactivity, providing added security. Users can adjust the Time-Out setting to suit their needs. Cost-Effectiveness - GoToMeeting Corporate s All You Can Meet flat-rate licensing model lets users host unlimited meetings and events, making it a cost-effective solution. Organizations can hold online meetings and Webinars as often and for as long as they want. This licensing model helps organizations increase sales, better train their employees, enhance efficiency and productivity and reach new markets while reducing costs. Performance - The Web conferencing technology that an organization uses to present to customers and prospects is often perceived as an extension of the organization itself. If customers or prospects have a bad experience with the online meeting or event, they will most likely have a negative perception of the product that the organization is selling. For this reason, online meeting and Webinar performance is crucial in a sales or marketing environment. GoToMeeting Corporate provides an excellent collaboration experience that keeps customers focused on the message at hand. Additionally, GoToMeeting Coporate's proprietary bandwidth-adaptive compression technology makes it possible to meet with people using a variety of Internet connections. Plus the built-in security architecture is designed to ensure that there is no performance reduction regardless of Internet connection speed. While the needs of every organization are distinct, those that implement Citrix GoToMeeting Corporate will likely see significant impact, including reduced costs for sales and marketing, enhanced communications, increased productivity and a positive influence on the bottom line. Frost & Sullivan Whitepaper 12

13 Silicon Valley 2400 Geng Road, Suite 201 Palo Alto, CA Tel Fax San Antonio 7550 West Interstate 10, Suite 400, San Antonio,Texas Tel Fax CONTACT US London 4, Grosvenor Gardens, London SWIW ODH,UK Tel 44(0) Fax 44(0) Bangalore Bangkok 877.GoFrost Beijing Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Delhi Dubai Frankfurt Kuala Lumpur London Mexico City Mumbai New York Oxford Palo Alto Paris San Antonio Sao Paulo Seoul Shanghai Singapore Sydney Tokyo Toronto ABOUT FROST & SULLIVAN Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting company, has been partnering with clients to support the development of innovative strategies for more than 40 years. The company's industry expertise integrates growth consulting, growth partnership services and corporate management training to identify and develop opportunities. Frost & Sullivan serves an extensive clientele that includes Global 1000 companies, emerging companies, and the investment community, by providing comprehensive industry coverage that reflects a unique global perspective and combines ongoing analysis of markets, technologies, econometrics, and demographics. For more information, visit