Business Challenge

The marketing team at one of the world’s largest Mobile-VAS solutions provider was on a mission to keep their sales teams abreast of the latest updates from their market and competitive landscape. They started a weekly newsletter covering competitors, industry, and their own company. This newsletter was built manually with the help of Google Alerts. Unfortunately, the initiative didn’t pick up steam with the sales team. Reasons included:

  • The company offered seven solutions to clients in the telecom and banking industry. This meant that the competition was spread across these seven solution categories. Further, the sales team was organized by geography and the industries that their clients serve. However, the marketing team was producing one combined newsletter for the entire sales function which covered their entire market landscape and wasn’t personalized to any one segment. This wasn’t working because the sales executives were too busy to go through the entire email and spot the updates relevant to them.
  • The marketing team was sending a weekly newsletter. By the time it reached the sales team, most of the updates were already old and no longer actionable.

This resulted in the sales team, who were busy meeting sales targets, not opening this intelligence newsletter altogether.

At this point, the marketing team realized that they had to figure out a way to deliver personalized market and competitive intelligence that is aligned with the geography, solution, and industry of the salespeople. In addition, the information has to be delivered on a daily basis, not weekly.

They decided to go a step further and send real-time alerts for critical updates.

While conceiving this solution, they realized that it won’t be possible without a system that can automate most of the work.

There was one more unresolved challenge. Many salespeople were not even opening these newsletters. How should the information be delivered so that it’s available to the sales team when they need it, and right within their existing workflows?

The marketing team reached out to Contify to explore if we could build a solution that could help in delivering personalized market and competitive intelligence.

The Solution

During discussions, we discovered that the team was regularly using their internal sales enablement app, which was a centralized repository for their sales collateral. Working with the client, we put together a customized solution that would make use of Contify’s News APIs to integrate custom intelligence into this sales enablement app. The solution included:
  1. Building a custom taxonomy – Delivering personalized market and competitive intelligence is only possible if the information is tagged and categorized. We created a custom taxonomy covering competitors, customers, industries, offerings, solutions, and a set of industry keywords. These were organized by geography, industry, and solution. In addition, Geography was further customized according to the territories of salespeople — Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Europe, and North America. The taxonomy was used to automate the tagging of updates, which was done using advanced keyword-based rules and machine learning algorithms.

  2. Custom sourcing – In addition to the other strategic updates, the client wanted to specifically track 100 customers and 19 competitors. A key source of intelligence from these was their company websites. We integrated all of these websites into Contify. The information was sourced from the press release, products, solutions, and investor relations pages. In addition to this, we also integrated custom industry sources covering the telecom and banking domain.

  3. Setting up industry tracking – The client shared a set of 40 topics to source industry intelligence. We developed extensive rules and trained machine learning algorithms for each topic to accurately source and tag the information.
  4. Access to intelligence through the client’s sales enablement app – We integrated this intelligence into the clients’ sales enablement app using Contify News Feed APIs. The end product was a personalized market intelligence feed for every salesperson aligned with the solution they were selling, in their geographies, and their respective industries.

Benefits

The marketing team has been able to successfully roll out a market intelligence solution that has now been widely adopted by the sales team. They now have a place inside their sales enablement app to consume personalize market intelligence every morning before starting their day and the real-time notifications keep them on top of their market.

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By the Numbers

  • 180+

    Realtime intelligence notification sent