MMI Can Give You a Marketing Automation “Edge”
We visited MMI Solutions, a small but promising Marketing Automation company in outside New York City. They already have some top-notch customers like Kodak, Canon, and Expedia that have used their tool, MMI Edge.
MMI Edge is designed with features allowing for cross media marketing at the highest levels, including the creation, tracking and reporting of PURLs (Personalized URLs), QR codes, web activity, e-newsletters, e-mails, and web to print. The tool has a very worthy differentiator in that it was specially designed to help marketers who deal with indirect channels, allowing them to closely control the messaging that goes out to indirect customers.
Allinio: Good morning Steve! Great view of the Hudson River from the MMI office! It must be very inspirational. So tell us, how does your product/service allow Marketers to better gather, analyze, share, and act upon data?
Amiel: Our system is uniquely customizable to reflect the specific business characteristics and requirements of our clients. Our MMI SalesEdge solution provides marketing organizations with the ability to create multi-touch automated “Express Campaigns.” Once the sales team has identified and researched a prospect, our MMI SalesEdge solution enables a salesperson to personalize and customize the campaign to their specific needs.
Allinio: Please explain to us the value proposition of your product/service to Marketers?
Amiel: Helping marketing provide sales with branded Express Campaigns to take advantage of the leads they are uncovering at earlier stages of the buying cycle. These are the leads sales call bad because they do not have the bandwidth or savvy to nurture them.. This is evidenced by the following:
– Over 60% of leads provided by marketing have a sales cycle greater than 90 days. (Marketing Sherpa)
– 89% of leads provided to sales are given up after 4 tries to communicate with prospect. (PODI 2011)
– 80% of those original leads generated will by within 12 months. (Marketing Sherpa)
This means that the majority of those leads will not be follow up to closure. The fact is, with the right tools, sales could easily increase their closure rate significantly.
MMI SalesEdge enables salespeople to nurture and close more of the qualified leads by providing with these highly targeted Express Campaigns specifically designed to nurture longer-term opportunities.
We are the only competitively-priced SaaS solution that delivers sophisticated marketing automation and lead nurturing tools to any direct or indirect sales force. Our unique architecture allows Master Licensee users to:
- Automate the lead generation and nurturing process across all touch points yet provides a simple and powerful Partner Portal Dashboard.
- Score and distribute prospects based on pre-established criteria predicated on product, territory and other personal attributes.
- Inexpensively provide each reseller with the same automated marketing and sales portal features as the Master Licensee.
- Provide each reseller with customizable content specifically to promote their brand as well as the reseller’s brand.
- Allow resellers to run their own Express micro automated campaigns based on their own interaction with their customers, prospects and supplied leads.
- Create a firewall between resellers and the Master Licensee providing protection of their customers and prospects. However, the ChannelEdge™ provides visibility to the Master Licensee to track the progress of distributed sales leads from the host.
- Improve sales performance with our simple lead management module.
Allinio: What is a common misconception that the market has about your product/service?
Amiel: The most common misconception is that we are a direct competitor to Salesforce.com. We work with existing CRM systems to enhance and add value to their capabilities. Sales force automation is a contact management tool that focuses on forecasting – it is not a prospecting and communication tool. Salesforce.com and its competitors have opened their systems to allow for integration with marketing automation providers. MMI SalesEdge has the ability to work in combination with any CRM automation system.
Allinio: What is the most successful or innovative use of your product/service by a business to date?
Amiel: Our most innovative campaign includes a large pharmaceutical company that has only 70 detail sales representatives to reach over 7,000 doctors and influencers. Our MMI SalesEdge allows sales reps to create personalized campaigns including direct mail, email and leave behinds based on their specific knowledge and experience with each one of these doctors. The program is run directly from and on the sales reps computer tablet. It is the first program of its type to provide “practice specific” marketing material that is both personalized and executed by the sales rep. It also provides marketing and sales management oversight that tracks the sales activity by rep and region, as well as what messaging is being responded to by physicians and influencers.
Allinio: What is your greatest challenge as a marketing organization?
Amiel: We are an unknown solution to a known problem. The industry is still young and our biggest challenge is the battle against status quo.
Allinio: We really like the way you can segment control of the messaging to prospects by channel, whether it be a direct sales person or the sales team of a partner. That could be useful for a complex sales organization, since salespeople and partners come and go, but you must manage the messaging to appear consistent. We look forward to hearing more success stories from you in the future, Steve!