Automating Marketing Requests for Inner and Outer Transparency
But it’s not just marketing that needs to organize their tech stacks so that they can function like a well oiled machine. Marketing departments act as nodes of articulation, hub points where internal sales collateral requests, partner collateral requests and more get sent, triaged, shuffled, rerouted, and completed. Even a perfectly organized marketing team, where all technology is interconnected, transparent, and well-utilized can suffer from the problem of outer transparency.
Inner transparency – where members of a team understand how to work together and leverage their technologies effectively – needs to become self-conscious in order to achieve outer transparency.
Diagnose your pain point
How can you tell that your outer transparency leaves something to be improved? When marketing is drowning in too many requests coming in from email, and these requests would be better routed differently or answered through self-service portal, it’s time to think about another way. When your external stakeholders betray frustrations with the urgency of their requests and an inability to escalate, it’s time to recognize a real challenge. And when the wrong messaging or branding is going on collateral because the approval chains are falling apart, it’s time to rethink not just process, but also technology.
If you build it, they might not come – so what’s next?
Outer transparency is not just about making request forms available to outsiders, but rather, it is about making marketing request forms built into the user experience of people outside of Marketing. The Sales team does not want to leave Salesforce, much less learn a new technology or visit a new site; if partners have to try too hard to make contact, they are going to escalate until you’re exhausted or move on in their big book of vendors. This is no “if you built it, they will come” situation. This is a: build it, but make it look like theirs, and put it on their site, and give some automatic self-service options so that the value-added is clear.
Low hanging fruit that delivers for everyone
Finding a low code solution that integrates with Salesforce, for example, or can take on the branding of your Partner Portal, or even can be embedded on your Sharepoint site is crucial. Another thing to watch for? Making sure that when you build a form, the right people can access it, even if they are not connected through SSO (think: partners).
Building from inner transparency to outer transparency should be easy, even if it does involve a shift in thinking. It also does not need to happen in a developmental model: you can work on inner and outer transparencies simultaneously, and, in all likelihood, you should.
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