Supplier relationship marketing for marketing services
New approach to sales & marketing SRM
Market Developer's approach to resolving these issues, and effecting a step change in the effectiveness of organisation-supplier relationships, is to provide a platform that provides application-specific access to the organisation's customer database, or subset thereof. This access is provided 100% over the web, via an Internet Explorer browser.
Simple interfaces provide the full functionality that specific data-driven suppliers will need to undertake the work required of them.
Where questionnaires are required to collect further information or generate sales leads, these can be auto-generated, and as they are defined, add fields and value options to a table within the database.
Key to successful supplier relationship management is the ability to tightly integrate the results created externally to the organisation with front line staff. In sales & marketing terms, this means real time allocation of information and calls to action to sales or customer service staff, generated by the customer retention (customer satisfaction/ information gathering), lead generation or other marketing-led initiative.
Market Developer enables this integration through the real time allocation of leads, enquiries, alerts and compliment messages. These can be triggered to a single point of contact (e.g. sales executive) or to multiple points (e.g. to managers as well). In combination with sales pipeline, opportunity management and reporting functionality, this provides the immediate allocation and call to action required, with the critical tracking component that provides an organisation with an short and long range analysis capability.
Application-specific interfaces, tailor-able through the use of access controls, exist for telemarketing/telesales and research firms (including verification and management controls), data processing, enhancement and data analysis bureaux.
Figure 2 illustrates the simplifying effect that Market Developer will have on integration of sales and marketing suppliers with the organisation:
Fig 2
Using the Market Developer methodology and platform to integrate more effectively with external data processing specialists substantially simplifies the ongoing activity of cleansing and maintaining the database integrity over time. Market Developer's platform allows a processing house to provide the organisation with a virtual 'self cleaning' service, which ensures verification of addresses,
reduplication and enhancement can be carried out without intervention by the marketing, information services or database people. It further ensures that data conflicts are avoided as a result of processing and updating the database out of hours.
Conclusion
The 'no software' solution delivery made possible by the Market Developer application service accessed via Internet Explorer browsers provides the starting point for an integrated approach that simplifies and improves upon current working processes between sales and marketing organisations and their suppliers.
However, the web is far from the whole solution. The success of the Market Developer methodology is based on three further factors:
Firstly, it requires that each type of supplier can access the organisation's database (or allocated datasets) using tools that are fit for purpose and enable them to work as easily as their own (typically client- server software) applications.
Secondly, the tools that suppliers use to access the organisation's data must be tightly integrated with a real time lead allocation and tracking capability and associated reporting that supports real time short- and long-range analysis.
Thirdly, the ability to dynamically (and easily) add information to the database, which can then be viewed by sales and service staff, analysed and reported upon, without relying upon programming staff, enables initiatives to be kicked off quickly and cuts out set up fees.
The value experienced by organisations of this approach is to cut down internal management time associated with managing functional processes between the organisation and suppliers; to improve the effectiveness, speed and conversion of information, leads and feeds into sales, and to drive more initiatives that further develop business for the organisation.
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