2. New home page design for CLIENT X.  We can't tell you who it is yet, but we'll give you a hint: their domain is one of the first ones ever registered.  Stayed tuned, the new site will launch in late August or early September, and we'll be sure to let you know.

3.  We're continuing to handle online marketing for our wonderful client Value Place.  Since their brand new website was launched in January, they've experienced tremendous results, and here's just one:  a 93% year-over-year increase in revenue since the site went live.

Those are just a few things we're working on now, and lots more projects are in the hopper. 

Like what you see?  We'd love to help you with all things interactive.  Yes, even with social media strategy (despite appearances, we're pretty good at that stuff, too). 

Collaborate for sales-ready marketing and customer-ready sales.

Content management is important, but make sure you focus on content delivery to the client.  Valuable conversations that allow the sales person to rise above the competition, break through the clutter and reduce complexity will drive results in today's competitive environment.

It seems that whenever the Sales Enablement discussion heats up due to a new Industry Analyst prediction or a Sales Enablement article in the press, the discussion turns to a review of the state of content management tools for sales enablement.  It's interesting that these conversations tend to focus mostly on sales performance during preparation for client interactions.  We believe it's essential to look at improving sales performance by extending preparedness to the actual client interaction to achieve the intended sales outcome. This is essential to sales performance since these interactions represent your “moments of truth” to drive initial sales transactions and ongoing strategic customer relationships. 

We describe this as enabling great sales performances.

Just as all other customer communication channels suffer from information overload and the need to break through the clutter to be heard, sales conversations are no different.

There's tremendous investment in creative efforts applied to web and social media based communications – not to mention the many years of creative campaigns with traditional media channels such as advertising and events – yet the appetite for applying this to communications delivered through sales is comparatively feeble.


Why is this important channel so underserved?  We believe there are several reasons that can be described as syndromes that sometimes resemble phobias:

1. The "I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't" syndrome.  Any creative program becomes exponentially more complicated as you add to the numbers of reviewers and approvers.  Let's face it: as much as we all say that sales needs to be involved in sales enablement efforts, the creative development process is not very compatible with the day to day challenges that sales people face.

2. The "silence is deafening" syndrome.  Sometimes the content gets solid reviews through the development process, but once launched the response can be non-existent.  In this situation, no news is not good news and after significant investments in time and precious budget, even some negative feedback would be better than the feeling that it's not being used at all.

3. The "What have you done for me lately?" syndrome.  Selling is a competitive profession and there is no room for error or second best. Therefore you can't rest on your sales enablement content laurels, since it can quickly become obsolete or run of the mill.

Yet the upside potential for creating value is clear.  Creative prowess informed by the guidance of sales people who will be delivering the content and who are best equipped to understand the personas of their client, builds confidence and credibility for sales and your company.  Here are just a few examples of creative tactics applied to sales activities:

Account based advertising: We're familiar with the approach to building a provocative high impact advertising campaign, but with a few tweaks to the copy and delivery media you can create the impression of your brand being everywhere the client is.

Tailored email marketing for sales:  Personalized messages are the hallmark of effective email marketing as measured by higher open and response rates.  Creating templates that allow sales people to use creative email content with a message that is specific to their unique relationship with the account provides personalization that can't be duplicated by the best copywriter and more importantly can’t be matched by the competition.

Microsites and Personal URLs (PURLS): Microsites take the personalized email marketing campaign up a notch by enabling the power of interactive web design.  By designing the content to be configurable by messages and thought leadership content, the sales person can solidify their position as delivering relevant value to their customer.

Proposal presentations:  The presentation that usually follows the delivery of a proposal (often referred to in the RFP process as "Orals") is a stark example of a moment of truth in the sales process.  The stories of success and failure become subjects of legend and lore.  However, despite the pressure cooker atmosphere, it's also a great opportunity to combine the creative skills of sales content developers with the customer centered perspective of the pursuit and proposal team.  It's true that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, but when it comes to the oral presentation you may never get another chance to create a lasting impression for the account team and your company.

These are just a few examples of situations where sales performance is at stake and therefore it is crucial to extend all of the hard work and preparation to the actual client interaction that enables great sales performances.

We'd love to hear from you to share your own examples of these moments of truth and the stories behind the performance.

Wellmont.org was selected by multiple researchers based on:

1. Best practices for hospital websites
2. Effectiveness of Web 2.0 technologies
3. Engagement of target audiences (patient & healthcare professional)
4. Visible strategy to gain more patients
 

Dr. Edgar Huang, PhD from the School of Informatics, led this extensive study, which analyzed the websites of over 2,150 U.S. hospital systems. Dr. Huang stated “Wellmont Health System has set a model for the nation” and suggested that “many hospitals can learn from Wellmont … for new ROI measurement technologies.” His group praised the simple, clean and professional experience, while recognizing the underlying technological sophistication. The researchers acknowledged not only the quality of the content, but also the subtle details such as a Flash intro that plays only on the first visit to the website and provides a play button on successive visits.

(Don't worry, your pilot program is designed to reduce risk, unlike Chuck Yeager in the Bell X-1)

Your objectives:
1.  Work hands-on with sales team to develop core functionality
2.   Design the 'shell' to house sales content
3.   Incorporate relevant existing sales assets
4.   Implement a launch strategy
5.   Provide training
6.   Continuously improve
7.   Build success stories with 'mavens'
8.   Refine and rollout to a wider audience

How long it should take:   10-12 weeks

What you should receive:

1.  Working prototype with complete presentation assets for a single channel/line of business/product/industry
2.  Tracking and reporting components

A sales enablement pilot program is a CRITICAL stage in the process, and should not be overlooked at any cost.  The pilot allows your sales team to mold and shape the solution, resulting in a higher level of advocacy and adoption for the end solution. 

After all, shouldn't your 'test pilots' be involved in designing the vehicle?

Check back soon for Part 3: BUILDING your sales enablement solution

"We don't know how to get started."

Similar to undertaking a new website project, a sales enablement program can be a daunting endeavor.  We understand. To make it a more palatable process, we recommend and follow a simple, 3-step process that creates a solution designed around the customer's lens, yet built for a sales team's process and style.  This phased approach mitigates risk, allows for fixed pricing for the project, and aligns the sales and marketing teams up front, so the end solution has higher adoption rates and better outcomes.

Here's the first step in the process:

STEP 1: BLUEPRINT

Also known as 'discovery', blueprinting is the basis for the entire sales enablement solution.  Think of it as a way to document "what you are selling, who you are selling it to, and how you want to sell it."

Your objectives:
1.  Understand the "sales problem"
2.  Identify all investments that support sales
3.  Interview select members of your sales force
4.  Interview internal stakeholders
5.  Analyze and report deficiencies and challenges
6.  Assess presentation scenarios and delivery methods
7.  Audit current sales assets
8.  Translate all objectives into a problem statement and key metrics
9.  Identify a focus area
10.  Select a measurable problem to address
11.  Select a sales channel
12.  Select a sample team to create champions for the program

How long it should take:   4-6 weeks

The result: 
1. Documentation of findings
2. Project plan
3. Statement of work for the remainder of the project
4. Budget

A sales enablement solution should be designed and developed in the manner of any development project, like a website or an online campaign.  It should follow a strict process from strategy to execution, with agreed upon deliverables at each phase of the project.  And as with any design project or marketing initiative, you should make it mandatory to align internal stakeholders, discover the needs of both your sales force and customer. The result will be a scalable, on-target initiative that resonates with your customers, closes deals, and ties new revenue to your sales enablement investments.

Check back soon for the next post in the series:  Designing a Sales Enablement Solution - Step 2:  Pilot

In July 2008, sales support was a dominant focus, followed by creating content for our website.  Quite a bit of time was spent on gearing up some of our social media marketing initiatives.  This mix has been fairly consistent (with the exception of social media) for the past 4 or 5 years.
 

This year, the picture looks a bit different.  Sales support is still the primary focus, but social media marketing has taken a big leap. In our world, SMM means blogging, microblogging, online video sharing, and social networking apps like  Facebook and  LinkedIn.  It's proven very effective in generating brand awareness, better coverage in search, and a few leads as well.

Noticeably, direct marketing and PR, highly effective tactics historically, have taken a cut. Why?  As a result of trending.  For our business (not for our customers, surprisingly) it's become a less effective tactic because our message is so diluted in the predicted upsurge of everyone else's PR, newsletters, email marketing, thought leadership initiatives, white papers, etc.  It's on hiatus for now, but I imagine we'll start putting more emphasis back on these channels later in the year.

Trade show marketing, to no surprise, has also become less of a focus (although we do have  one partner event later in 2009), because people simply aren't going to most events.

What does your marketing focus look like now, compared to one year ago?  I'd love to hear your thoughts - shoot me an  email or find us on  Twitter.

#8: Scalability matters

Good sales people will have specific knowledge about an individual client that makes the client unique, yet most customers face common problems which can be modeled and segmented. Strive for 80% standard with 20% tailorable content that is relevant to the client with differentiation. Leverage the patterns to build content modules that can be configured by the sales team, rather than developed from scratch every time, allowing them to focus on account specific differentiated value propositions. 

No matter what profession you examine (business, sports, music, acting) the attribute that makes a good company great, a one hit wonder a musical icon or a championship team a dynasty is repeatability and consistency. For sales enablement solutions, I characterize this challenge as the quest for scalability . It's gratifying to have a successful sales call, hit a homerun with a sales presentation, deliver a winning proposal or launch a successful sales outreach campaign, but these outcomes are relatively easy when compared to executing repeatedly, across geographies and the entire sales organization with consistent results.

To achieve scalability for sales enablement we can apply some of the same concepts we've learned from other business systems that are driven by people, process and technology. We've covered the people aspect in earlier posts so let's talk about the role of process and technology in the quest for scalability.

Process:

To replicate success the best place to start is with a process model for the sales conversation with your clients. It sounds overly technical and systematic for something as individual as a sales conversation, but if we've modeled the sales process why can't we model the sales conversation? For example I've had success with scalable sales enablement programs for outsourcing that consist of visuals, content and discussion models designed to help communicate the value of your offerings from the client's perspective. They are organized to help account teams explore and structure conversations with clients around the three simple concepts we covered earlier:

Relevancy - show how outsourcing is relevant to their business issues
Timeliness - show how outsourcing can address their issues, no matter where they are in the sourcing cycle
In Context - show how conversations are in context with various stakeholders and those involved in making decisions

One important step to ensure the process model actually represents reality is to validate the content with industry analysts (i.e. Forrester, Gartner and IDC for outsourcing) as well as clients to ensure a comprehensive view of the sourcing cycle, outsourcing business drivers and client stakeholders. For example the sourcing cycle starts well before the outsourcing business drivers are discussed since the client expends a significant amount of effort into problem definition and examination of alternatives to solve the problem. Outsourcing may only be one of those options. Therefore if you model the process to start with outsourcing business drivers you've only modeled part of the reality.

In order to scale across the sales force it's important to map sales conversation models to day-to-day sales activity and supporting process including discovery, account planning, opportunity management and account management. By pinpointing a discrete stage in the sales cycle you can model the sales scenario and conversation.

For example, selling ahead of an RFP to:

Reduce the complexity of understanding an outsourcing opportunity
Sharpen the solution focus based on the client's perspective
Enable structured strategies and tactics that map to your capabilities
Identify any latent or hidden opportunities

Much like business process engineering you can identify reusable artifacts as building blocks that represent the client's environment. These building blocks include:

Concept - describes the area of discussion (e.g. reducing cost)
Visual - simply and persuasively represent the concept for discussion (e.g. cause and effect diagrams for KPI's)
Content - documents with information, background and selling points (e.g. role specific conversation guides)

The artifacts are then combined into models to use as the foundation for a client conversation, presentation or document. For example account models of the client's environment can be created to include:

--Market Forces (regulatory and compliance issues, competitive issues)
--Business Drivers (reduce costs, improve service delivery quality)
--Stakeholders (CFO, CIO, VP of Operations)
--Domains (desktop support, call centers, financial accounting)
--Process (Incident Management, Lead Management, Financial Reporting)

Value opportunity models take the output from these account models and map the client business issues to a sourcing decision. By examining all the dimensions you avoid leading with a solution based on your definition of the scope when it should be based on the client's intended scope. Using the outsourcing example again, often the client's requirements cut across multiple domains and have touch points with other processes. For example, if the client is looking to improve overall IT Service Management for end users and you discuss just desktop support without considering the related domains of the help desk or asset management or warranty management you've obviously not listened to the client.

Technology:

Technology and automation is critical to serving up the content based on the specific account criteria. To scale the practical understanding and adoption of the sales enablement process models you need to utilize a common, intuitive platform that allows automatic content updates and capture of real-time intelligence, resulting in a conversation that is in context to the client's industry, company, role, and need.

The benefit to your client is:

1. Mutual understanding of the challenge or opportunity
2. Collaboratively establish a shared vision for the solution
3. Confidently articulate your solution and value to other stakeholders

The impact to your sales force is:

1. Reduces time to build presentations
2. Better prepared, more confident client interactions
3. More productive meetings that facilitate executive sponsorship and support
4. Improves sales performance (improved orders, sales cycles, win rate, deal size)

By providing this technology enabled process to the field the account team can start from models that represent the 80% that is common across clients and focus their attention on the 20% that is specific to their understanding of the account. In today's competitive environment it's more than what you sell, but how you sell (i.e. the relationship) that makes the difference between winning and coming in a close second - and remember in sales there's no second place only winning and losing. Therefore maximizing the account team focus on this crucial 20% is instrumental in communicating a winning differentiated value proposition that is specific to the individual client.

Of course winning the deal is the ultimate goal for everyone in the company, but overall the metric of success that matters for sales enablement is the bottom line result based on the intended sales outcome as discussed earlier in Best Practice #5 You have to start somewhere, but you can't be everywhere. For example, a simple clear and attainable (yet powerful) objective is a more successful customer meeting leading to improved sales performance, directly attributed to sales enablement investments.

We'll cover more of these metrics that matter in Best Practice #10, but in our next post we'll discuss the content management challenge and the important role collaboration plays for sales-ready marketing and customer-ready sales.

We don't sell marketing, we sell products.

We're constantly working on our agency's positioning and our messaging, to stand out (not too much!) among our peers and competitors. As a small agency with limited internal promotional budgets, we have to be extra clever and precise with our marketing endeavors. Every word, website, image, tweet, ad, blog post, status update and presentation is complicated by the extra pressure on the cobbler to be wearing awesome shoes while designing equally cool kicks for clients. Peter Madden sums up the challenge beautifully in this AdAge blog post. He says that agencies struggling to promote themselves deal with the "pressure of trying to get to a great idea knowing that anyone who comes across it will be extra judgmental."

So, how to avoid the criticism of a great idea? Make it simple and undeniably unchallengeable.

Central to all of the positioning and branding activities we've endured over the past year or so, we have tried to distill an essence, an end benefit for our clients that's simple and true. It should be a statement that I'd like to hear if I were on the client side of the table, to make me feel comfortable and confident in my agency's abilities.

I've thought about what we deliver - it's marketing and sales communications, it's websites, it's search marketing, it's sales enablement - yes - but is that really what we deliver? I believe our brand delivers on the promise of heightened brand identity, improved brand perception, enhanced customer experiences and better sales conversations -- all for the purpose of selling products for our clients.

We don't sell marketing, we sell products.

In retrospect, some of the products (to include services) we've helped sell for our clients have been many and varied:

We don't sell marketing, we sell products.

I can only imagine, in context of the proverbial elevator speech, the stunned reaction when asked what we do, and the retort is " We sell products." It's simple and undeniably unchallengeable.

I can't wait to try it out. No doubt a great dialogue will ensue.

And any agency that lists 'viral videos' in its offerings is nuts. You see, you can't create a viral video - it's not a thing, it's a social phenomenon that follows some unknown complex formula of success factors. Everyone's trying to crack the code. There are even research studies that try to uncover what goes into creating a viral video.

Maybe it's a simple formula with rare ingredients: creative idea + brand attributes + timing + medium. (Noticeably, quality of execution isn't part of the formula - the lack of which is what powers YouTube, Metacafe, et. al.).

We're thinking about what it takes to 'go viral', mostly as a result of yet another humorous hit on the web. Of course, we're talking about the Evian Roller Babies video, from BETC Euro RSCG. It's cute, funny and different, but is that all there is to it? Not really. Let's analyze with our formula:

CREATIVE IDEA: Check. Definitely creative, plus it's a 'part two' of their original spot for Evian, called Water Babies, which amazingly, was created 11 years ago, in 1998. Long before web 2.0, social media, YouTube, or even broadband. Thus it was limited to mostly broadcast channels.

BRAND ATTRIBUTES: Evian, to me, is a bit of a stodgy brand, at least in the U.S. But it has a more playful attitude internationally, which fits nicely with the attitude and tone of the Babies spots. It is the perfect compliment to the 'Live Young' tag line they've rolled out with the campaign.

TIMING: Couldn't be better. With all the tragic and depressing news of late, Roller Babies was the lift we needed. Plus, who doesn't mind hearing some classic old school beats, like Rapper's Delight?

MEDIUM: This could actually fall under "Timing" as well: compared to the 1998 Water Babies spot, it's the perfect setting to revisit the idea of babies doing extraordinary things: video sharing sites are at a peak, bandwidth is plentiful, and you and I are constantly trying to scoop the next big 'viral' to share with friends on Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace. Trifecta!

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that this isn't just a video on an island - there are plenty of tie-ins. Evian began running teasers a few weeks before Roller Babies premiered, as a taste of things on the horizon: check out Baby Break Dance and Baby Moonwalk (interesting happenstance timing, by the way). And the whole campaign is supported by Evian's website, which (today) was suffering from some technical issues and weird navigation issues, no doubt a result of the tidal wave of traffic to the site.

So, can an agency say it DOES viral videos? No. But does an agency (like n-tara interactive) actually set out to create a viral video for it's clients? Of course! (With the right formula as foundation, plus an immeasurable amount of circumstance and luck).

#7 Enough about me - tell me what you think about me.

Don't start with a discussion of your portfolio, but more importantly don't pay lip service to being customer centric. Sales credibility is based on empathy for the client and a "staged" understanding will seem at best contrived and possibly manipulative.

In presentations I've done over the years about sales enablement I've used the line "Enough about me, let's talk about you - what do you think about me?" as a humorous example of what we might sound like when our attempt to be client centric is actually thinly veiled product selling. I must admit I always attributed the line to Dudley Moore from the movie "Arthur", but when I did a Google search I found that the quote actually comes from another somewhat self absorbed movie character - CC Bloom - from the movie "Beaches". Either way it's a good way to illustrate how misguided attempts at empathy can be received as self serving, contrived and - in the worst case scenario - manipulative.

Therefore the title of Best Practice #7: "Enough about me - tell me what you think about me" represents the antipathy of empathy and serves as a reminder of the need to be client centric in a way that is genuine and plausible.

There has been an incredible amount of time and effort expended across many industries to create issues based messaging and thought leading points of view in hopes of engaging with clients from their own perspective. Often the portfolio managers are leading the charge to wrap business issues around the portfolio in order to drive sales. This well intended goal will fall short if not done with a 360 degree view that removes the product, service or solution from the center and replaces it with the client.

There are two scenarios that often play out that, although natural parts of the evolution can be sources of ultimate failure if not addressed early on. 

1. The curse of knowledge which is a concept described by Chip and Dan Heath in the book Made to Stick. Most of the people in your company (especially the portfolio managers) have a level of knowledge about your portfolio which makes it difficult to simply and clearly articulate the most basic information: what is it, what does it do, what problems does it solve and how does the customer avail themselves of the benefits of your solution. If you've ever been part of a value proposition or messaging session you've most likely experienced the painstaking process of distilling complexity to simplicity followed by the grasping at straws when describing unique value to the client. If the participants are similar in background and function "groupthink" will often emerge as the collective desire to reach consensus overshadows reality, resulting in a watered down non-defensible client value proposition. If the session is with a cross functional group the outcome is often determined by whoever has the loudest voice, carries the biggest stick or gets the last word.

2. The circular reference is how I describe the issues based description of a solution where every benefit is a restatement of a client challenge with a positive outcome. For example if the challenge is compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, the solution is described as a risk management solution to help you comply with Sarbanes-Oxley or if the challenge is how to improve profitability by reducing costs the solution is described as one that that reduces the costs of [blank]. Where is the unique value there? Just by perusing websites and brochures you can see not only individual instances of this approach, but multiple instances of tired and overused value propositions within the same solution and across multiple solutions.

To counter the curse of knowledge and the circular reference I suggest two ground rules: 

1. Filter out all buzzwords and replace throwaway words . Everyone knows the buzzwords in their industry and although they may be unique to each industry the common trait is the ability to render all words spoken after them as virtually meaningless. A current example that cuts across many industries is sustainability; a concept that is very timely and powerful yet bordering on buzzword status. Throwaway words are similar to buzzwords in their overuse, but characterized by having no clear standalone meaning. Examples are managed, aligned and adaptive.

2. Avoid technical jargon by speaking the language of business. It's easier to talk about business issues than to describe technical nuances of your portfolio. Sales people (not to mention executives) are generally better attuned to business language and a byproduct benefit is that it translates well across roles and cultures.

The effort to lead with a business discussion represents positive progress in many ways, but unfortunately is not sustainable unless it's consistently adopted and put into practice by the sales force. In many cases the basic problem is that the dominant point of view from one set of stakeholders (executives, marketing, portfolio management) is not adopted since it's too theoretical for practical selling. However, even if the issues and point of view are relevant to the client challenges, the value you offer and what you are selling, it doesn't go far enough unless it shows the path from the issue to the value of what you are selling.

One of the many valuable lessons I learned about selling to executives from Tom Komer of EXECON is that executives don't expect you to be an expert on their business as much as they expect you to be an expert on how the business of your company can help their business. Executives have numerous experts on their staff, yet only your sales people are in the position to provide expertise by connecting your solutions to their challenges. Anyone can find research and analysis about any number of industries and companies. As Scott Santucci Forrester Research Senior Analyst covering Sales Enablement, pointed out to me, when sales people attempt to establish credibility and demonstrate value by regurgitating off the shelf information, in essence they are trying to play in a space where they don't have permission and therefore are relegated to a status of second rate consultants.

The true power lies in the ability to apply their knowledge to a client specific differentiated value proposition. By posing the right questions and building empathy sales people can uncover knowledge and perspective that the competition doesn't have and create a differentiated value proposition that the competition can't match because it's unique to their relationship with the client.

There are many ways to prepare an individual sales person to establish credibility by building empathy and a differentiated value proposition with the client, but the preparation must be evident when they are actually having the conversation. If we look back at Best Practice #6 "Keep it simple, but memorable" we can see how the advice regarding sales enablement solutions applies here as well. A sure-fire way to alienate the customer is to take them through a Powerpoint death march. I'm sure you all have your own story about well intended presentations that went painfully awry. Unlike the movies Arthur and Beaches, these stories usually don't have a happy ending. If you want to ensure your sales people project empathy, your sales presentations should start with the customer and use a visual and interactive model for discussion. In the next post we're going to talk about addressing the inherent scalability challenge when trying to replicate this throughout your sales organization.

#6 Keep it simple, but memorable

Eliminate information overload for sales and the customer by organizing content based on customer issues and roles not the portfolio. Use visual business and functional level representation of how your capabilities can be configured to build a solution based on issues and challenges of the role.

Simplicity is so often desired yet so rarely delivered. Keeping it simple is not easy and does not mean dumbing it down nor cutting corners to move fast. It actually takes more time, thought and preparation to ensure simplicity that communicates the right message, achieves the desired impact and is memorable. As Mark Twain said in a letter to a colleague "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

There are some excellent books that cover the megatrends driving the need for simplicity and offer ideas for how to achieve it.

- Daniel Pink in A Whole New Mind describes the 6 aptitudes that are required in the emerging conceptual age: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning.

- Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath sets the stage for what it takes for messages to be effective and memorable by defining the 6 key principles for stickiness: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories.

- Garr Reynolds takes these seminal books a step further with Presentation Zen which draws from examples of the teachings of Zen to emphasize the power of simplicity in business presentations to get to the essence of an issue. The process he describes is based on an intelligent desire for clarity as opposed to a misguided mission for oversimplification. In other words it is within the complexity of the planning, design and preparation of the presentation that allows simplicity to appear and flourish.

As it relates to sales enablement this guidance is extremely valuable and leads to approaches to consider when striving to keep it simple, but memorable in a sales environment. The points in time when your sales teams are engaged in conversations with clients represent the greatest opportunity, but also the pinnacle of complexity. These are the moments of truth when the stakes are highest, the mistakes are costliest and the payoff - if the conversation goes well - is the clearest.

During these interaction points during the sales cycle your sales team must be able to draw from their best conversational, storytelling and empathy skills combined with the collective wisdom of the organization to establish a joint vision for success with the client. However the greatest relationship skills applied to selling the best portfolio of offerings in your industry may not be enough if complexity gets in the way of understanding, believing and remembering your vision for success. Unfortunately this complexity often begins when the presentation itself starts with confusing, bullet heavy slides and is exacerbated by poorly designed or over engineered visual representation of concepts.

The digital age and interactive web communications have taught us a great deal about how to engage clients using the best digital marketing techniques. Why is it then that we arm the sales teams with sales presentation that are at best poorly animated PowerPoint and at worst run of the mill bulleted templates that are customized beyond recognition and understanding? There is no reason why we can't use those same digital interactive direct marketing techniques to effectively engage in sales conversations that fortify rather than negate all of our hard work to create positive messages and brand impressions.

There are two elements of the n-tara company heritage that I have grown to appreciate as I've looked at this challenge. One is the background of the founders of the company that is based in advanced visualization and the other is the proximity of our Northeastern Tennessee headquarters in Johnson City to the International Storytelling Center and annual festival in nearby Jonesborough, TN. It is the combination of visualization and storytelling applied to conversations that are the most effective at keeping it simple, but memorable. These ingredients have proven successful in education and gaming and are equally effective for business.

To illustrate the point I'll leave you with a best practice example for sales enablement that draws from the following research:

1. Presentations where the spoken words follow on screen bullet points actually make it harder to learn and retain the information since it creates a load on the working memory part of the brain that stores and manipulates information. A visual does not create the same kind of load on the brain and therefore is a better way for people to process information.

2. Adults learn more effectively when they are active participants in getting to the right answer.

3. Advanced search techniques show that people understand and retain the information better by not merely being presented with the answer from a search, but by following the search clickstream that represents the journey to the answer.

This starts to paint a picture for our simple, but memorable sales enablement solution that is:

We describe these conversations as enlightened conversations. Enlightened because it's not only about what you sell, but how you sell that can make the difference. How you sell and how you engage clients is emerging as the key differentiator in the emerging conceptual age with its abundance of easily accessible sources of information, overwhelming number of competing messages and increasingly complex information. This changing dynamic has created a business imperative to optimize client conversations by rising above the competition, breaking through the clutter, and reducing complexity to drive results.

An important step to meeting this imperative is best practice #6: Keep it simple, but memorable. 

In a May 2009 Report titled: Where To Find Help For Web Design Projects, 2009, Forrester Research surveyed 41 web design firms (including n-tara interactive) to help site owners understand Web design market trends and identify agency demographics and experience.

Increasingly, it is difficult to narrow down and select a web design partner amongst a burgeoning landscape of design agencies, large and small. The report offers an offerings profile of 41 agencies, and a decision set that helps site owners kick-start the vendor selection process.

Vidya Drego from Forrester has created an excellent reference for anyone seeking outside web design help. This report led me to think about some additional criteria we recommend you consider when selecting a web design agency:

Does the agency's process include a discovery phase?

If you aren't aligning internal stakeholder goals and gaining deep insight into audience attributes, you're bound to be left with a solution that misses the mark, within your organization and with your customers. A discovery endeavor should, at the minimum, include stakeholder interviews, website current state analysis, competitive analysis, an audience research study, website business requirements, website functional requirements and a detailed statement of work (with budget range) for completion of the website.

Is the agency well-rounded in its capabilities?

This expands upon Forrester's recommendations, and a word I would use here is integrated. Does the agency have an integrated, holistic approach to the online user experience, or is it dabbling in one-off solutions that don't work together? Sure, we all have our strengths, but look for a firm whose portfolio reflects a wide range of applications and channels - and certainly don't get jaded by any firm that is declaring an upfront, single focus, a la "Social Media Agency" or "SEO Specialist".

Does the agency have expertise in content management?

A good web design agency will empower you to manage your own website. An agency with a solid track record of web content management integration is critical. Choose an agency with a short list of WCM options that fit your need and budget- from open source to enterprise solutions. And if you're a Forrester client, conduct an inquiry to better understand the WCM landscape.

Does the agency have good references?

This is a no-brainer, but references are often overlooked if a web design partner is selected outside of a formal RFP process. Standard questions prevail, (ease of doing business, access to a portfolio of work, process, time to produce, etc.) but you should also consider inquiring about change order processes, licensing fees, the quality of project management, and especially, on-time delivery. There's no greater risk or frustration than an out-of-scope, overdue web design project.

Selecting an agency partner for a web design project is daunting, but by following a few simple ideas, you can make it easier to identify the wheat from the chaff.

We just completed an application of our web design approach, in this case, for The Coleman Company. We launched an all-inclusive discovery process to determine business goals, user goals, and the behaviors of Coleman's customers online. The process resulted in the conclusion that a phased approach was in the best interest of our client, with the first phase goal of putting a fresh coat of paint on a decade old platform. The results are below. Additional phases include a complete redesign and build, on a new commerce platform with a new web content management system. We'll apply a best practices approach to further enhance the site with interactive tools, rich media and rich internet applications. 

 If you're seeking help for your web design project, let us know. See more of our web design work in our project gallery. 

No big celebration, no hoopla, not really any pause to reflect on a decade in business. I guess we're all too busy to look back - we're only looking ahead at possibilities. The fact that I'm just now writing about an event almost a month ago is telling: we're all doing what we always do - head down, moving forward, strategizing, creating, and designing the next solution for our incredible customers. Not much time to think about our story while we're imagining your story.

A BRIEF LOOK BACK

It all started in 1994, when Neil Owen and Jeff Morris, two professors at Purdue University, settled in Johnson City, Tennessee to help create a visualization program at East Tennessee State University which would quickly become one of the top programs of its kind not only in the US, but in the world.

With $14.6M in software funding from Alias-Wavefront and Silicon Graphics, Neil and Jeff built a program and curriculum that quickly got the attention of West Coast game design firms and movie studios, hungry for animation design talent. Entire classes of students were suddenly being recruited by these firms, creating a noticeable 'brain drain' in the region.

Jeff and Neil realized that many of their students wanted to stay in the area to practice their craft, but not surprisingly, jobs for animators and interactive designers were scarce. They also took note that these animation technologies would have unlimited application for business and industry, which was woefully underserved by new and burgeoning rich media technologies. If movie companies and game makers could create alternate worlds and animated escapism, it seemed logical that B2B and B2C brands could bring their products and services to life using animated storytelling.

So in 1999, with some angel investment and 3 business partners, Jeff and Neil founded n-tara, with a mission to utilize local talent and an unwavering focus to leverage animation and interactive technologies for the business community. The company's mantra: 'high-tech visual storytelling.'

A DECADE OF THANKS

We wouldn't be here 10 years later if it weren't for our customers, present and past. To you, we owe a heartfelt THANK YOU.

Thanks for trusting in the little digital agency in the Appalachian Mountains to create marketing and sales solutions for your businesses. Thank you for realizing that your agency partner doesn't have to be in a major market or owned by a giant holding company to have world-class talent on its payroll. And thank you for helping us grow by allowing us to learn from you, some of the most brilliant marketing minds anywhere.

n-tara started with a vision: to bring uncompromising design and advanced visualization to the corporate community. Though our positioning has changed, our offerings have expanded, and our stage has become much more crowded, we've never wavered from delivering on that vision - on time, on budget, and exceeding expectations.

FUN STUFF

--Y2K was on everyone's mind
--Intel released the Pentium III processor
--Dot com's spent $1 billion in advertising....on radio, print, and TV
--Internet Explorer 5 released
--Apple Computer releases the first iBook
--The first version of MSN Messenger released by Microsoft
--Windows 98 (SE) released
--Gas hits $1.22

For another look back at what's changed (at least in the past 7 years), read an interview with VP of Business Development David Siepert.

#4: Be wary of the matrix

Avoid getting caught in the organizational process matrix. Mapping to process is important yet there are many overlapping processes that may fragment the effort (for example: sales, marketing, portfolio development, business leadership and strategic planning to name a few).

#5: You have to start somewhere, but you can't be everywhere

Choosing the area of priority is difficult, yet essential. Choose your battles based on critical stages of the sales cycle (develop opportunity, identify opportunity, close opportunity) and map them to the marketing areas of focus (awareness, interest, consideration, preference, selection, loyalty).

Our previous discussion was about collaboration to gain consensus and ensure clarity of purpose. This post is intended to balance that with the need to focus, prioritize and execute with the right set of expectations and sense of urgency to ensure success.

Although some view process as overly prevalent in organizations, process is as essential to successful business execution as people are to superior customer service. Keep in mind that each process is developed specifically for a single function like strategic planning, product development, sales management, market development and demand generation, and therefore has limitations when cutting across functional boundaries. Each process has a discreet purpose and intended business impact, yet they often have one thing in common, the voice of the customer as the design point. This is important to ensure client focus, but can be confusing when trying to align a cross functional initiative like sales enablement to a problem area with clear objectives and tracking of results. For example the strategic planning process may use similar metrics as the sales process (e.g. orders, revenue and profit) yet the lens used to set the objectives and action plan are extremely different.

The strategic plan is driving impact with a 3-5 year timeframe while the sales process is driving impact within the quarterly and yearly cycle. Similarly the portfolio management and marketing management processes are focused on predicting and impacting customer buying behavior, but portfolio development is tuned to mapping offers to customer problems while market development is aligned to customer preferences and how they are influenced.

To focus your sales enablement initiative, choose the customer interaction point that is clearly understood as a challenge with the greatest opportunity for visible impact. Align your sales enablement approach to the process that is currently used for execution of that interaction and that best measures results. For example:

+ A leverage point in the demand generation process (awareness, interest, consideration) that measures customer engagement
+ A crucial phase of the opportunity management process (develop opportunity, identify opportunity, close opportunity) that measure close rates or length of sales cycle
+ A gap in the portfolio (value proposition, differentiation, business case) that measures the cause and effect to sales or market share

Given the importance of aligning to existing process to avoid duplication and gain sponsorship, yet realizing there are often parallel efforts to drive orders revenue and profit, don't try to be all things to all people. You'll quickly get consumed in never ending adjustments that offer little incremental value and threaten to taint your sales enablement project as a theoretical exercise that never gets out of the gate. Once you've selected a discrete and challenging client interaction you must also clearly identify the target outcome of that interaction and move into execution quickly with a proof of concept. For example:

+ Support a business theme based go-to-market strategy by organizing offerings/proof points around high level themes, such as efficiency with performance improvements
+ Improve the sales force comfort level having business issue based conversations
+ Provide information a sales person must have to isolate a business problem and identify a sales opportunity for the solution
+ Equip the entire sales force to cross sell
+ Identify additional roles that may be involved in making a sale and provide content for conversations with those roles
+ Ensure materials provided to sales and supporting roles are consistent across the business and geographies

The sales enablement solution must not only provide the means to improve the client interaction, but also monitor progress to show cost justification and return on investment based on the outcome. It is also important to build a feedback loop into the proof of concept for quantitative and qualitative information that highlight needed adjustments and continuous improvement.

We'll talk about metrics that matter in an upcoming post, but the salient point is to ensure that you don't get caught up in the process matrix or the measurement mayhem. Sales enablement should be a strategic process with long term benefits, but the reality is that sales results are measured virtually every day so you need to get on with it and adjust your course as you go.

In other words "you have to start somewhere" and keep in mind that (to quote a former colleague): "We'll get there."

#2 Invest in the act of defining

Recognizing and gaining consensus about the problem is no small feat. The time spent defining the problem may be your most worthwhile investment.

#3 Embrace the diversity of perspectives

Seek out and ask all the questions. There are varied, valid and valuable points of view from business leadership, sales, sales leadership, sales operations, product/solution management and marketing regarding the "sales problem" that cannot be left unasked.

Our previous discussion about the need to be relevant, timely and in context as a framework for a valuable conversation with your client also applies to the internal process of building consensus, gaining sponsorship and ultimately ensuring successful execution. The need to drive sales is certainly relevant and timely to sales, portfolio management, marketing and executive leadership. I don't think you'll face any resistance anywhere in your organization to that rallying cry. However, what often gets overlooked is the need to understand the context of the sales enablement challenge and subsequently the need to invest the time in defining the problem and facilitating agreement on the best approach.

The context for sales enablement is of course best understood from the customer's perspective (i.e. start with the customer.) However, the entire context of the challenge for your business is also based on the collective experience and perceptions of the people involved in understanding, connecting with, selling to and serving the client. It's a critical lens that ensures you are considering all internal stakeholders - marketing, sales, sales leadership, sales operations, portfolio management, and don't forget the business leaders who hold the P&L.

There is really no right or wrong answer since it varies based on your environment. For example:

• Your company's current business model (centralized, decentralized)
• Market factors and opportunities (growth, expansion, integration)
• Product and solution strategies (wedge services to get in the door for new accounts, offerings to radiate and grow share of wallet in current accounts)
• Selling strategies (transforming from product to solution selling, transactional to consultative, developing opportunities, accelerating the sales cycle, identifying opportunities, closing orders)
• Marketing strategies (awareness, reputation, interest, consideration, demand, loyalty)

Agreement about your business and market situation is only the first step in the definition of the problem. I can't begin to count the number of conversations I've had with different stakeholders working for the same company targeting the same customers that center on completely different beliefs regarding what is needed to sell. For example consider these reasonable, but very different perspectives:

• Marketing: limited access to target accounts and roles
• Sales: challenge with articulating a differentiated value proposition to gain a second meeting
• Sales Operations: volume of the pipeline, win rate and percentage of client facing sales activity is too low
• Portfolio: inability to match the portfolio to the business problem
• Executive Leadership: the length of the sales cycle is too long and therefore SG&A is too high

Keep in mind that perception is reality and given the dynamics of the market, current perception represents current reality. It truly is the diversity of the questions asked combined with an up to date understanding of your market and customers (let's say it again, start with the customer) that will move you closest to the current market reality and the best way to connect with your customers to provide value.

Although the discussion and definition of the problem often takes on the characteristics of the classic internal debate that organizations will often avoid, the value lies not in the debate, but in the process of asking the right questions and considering all perspectives. The critical outcome is consensus, clarity of purpose and the ability to execute - with speed - in partnership with all the stakeholders.

Best Practice #1: Start With the Customer

Understand the challenges and problem solving processes of your complete set of customer stakeholders at every stage of the problem solving and buying process. It's appropriate (albeit somewhat predictable) that we start our list of best practices with the customer.

My experience is that many of us talk about being customer centric in selling, portfolio and marketing endeavors, but the actual execution that fulfills on the promise is often inconsistent. The customer centric talk is gaining momentum to border on a cacophony as the social media pundits join the fray to offer advice about how to use social networks to converse and achieve a more intimate understanding of your customer.

I recently attended Forrester's Marketing Forum where much of the dialogue was about social media and the growing adoption by B2B marketers. For the first time however, there was interest in linking social media to the B2B sales process. I believe this is crucial for B2B where the conversion of a conversation to a business opportunity usually depends on your sales force. An interesting parallel can be drawn between social media and sales conversations. Selling has always been about conversations. Sales people strive to get to know and understand customers in order to match offerings to needs.

Forrester's Sales Enablement framework utilizes what they call "The Cube" which does a great job of breaking down the components of a perfect conversation - relevant, timely and in context. This framework serves as a good customer centricity barometer and valuable for all conversations whether conducted through traditional direct marketing, social networking or as part of the sales process.

As an industry, we've done a pretty good job with relevancy. Customer messaging is now more centered on client business issues as opposed to merely hawking product features and benefits. A word of caution however is that in some cases the issues based outreach can be overdone and cause the recipient to tune it out. The most recent example is the flood of offers to engage in a dialog that starts with the words "in these troubling economic times you need."

Clarity of message regarding timeliness is less common.

To illustrate the challenge, I break the timing into two simple categories with significantly different requirements.

1. The customer's problem has already been defined and they are looking internally and externally for a solution.

2. The problem needs to be understood or defined and the client is seeking insight regarding the best approach to address the problem.

Marketing and sales programs intended for one stage of the problem solving process, but delivered at another stage will be grossly ineffective. Of course, an even worse scenario is generic messaging that doesn't address any point in time at all. In both cases your credibility will be irreparably damaged and your ability to gain permission to engage in further dialogue based on customer insight severely limited.

Beyond the dimensions of relevance and timeliness, getting the context right for the individual role is even more challenging, yet offers the greatest payoff. There is no doubt that demonstrating empathy for the issues the company faces and the process they undergo to address the challenges is critical to gaining access and interest.

Extending this to an understanding of the role of the individual you're engaged with - personally and professionally - will lead to the much sought after coaching moment where the conversation moves to a level of sponsorship and advocacy built on personal trust and a shared vision for success.

The objectives were clear:

1. Remove obstacles that inhibit Coleman customers' ability to find, research, and buy Coleman products
2. Reframe the brand and provide a better user experience
3. Reduce customer usability issues which result in support calls
4. Increase traffic and repeat visitors

Our methodology included first understanding Coleman's internal objectives and second, understanding the needs, attitudes and behaviors of Coleman's customers. The customer study revealed some interesting insights, including a finding that 2009 will be a year that Coleman customers will invest in new grills and tents for their backyard and backwoods adventures. These types of insights helped us to shape the information architecture and design of the site to accomodate trends in purchases and product interests.

The end goal was to greatly enhance the customer experience. To illustrate the difference - here is a shot of the US homepage...

What do you think? We hope you'll visit coleman.com and check out the new site (or better yet, make a purchase for your next weekend outing...).

 I've recently joined n-tara to lead the sales enablement solutions business. My goal is to help clients cut through the clutter to realize their unique value and drive business impact with sales enablement programs. There is a clear, compelling and growing business imperative for organizations to focus on sales enablement. My point of view is based on experience developing and executing countless solution, marketing and sales programs. I can say without exception the most successful programs are those with a strong emphasis on sales enablement.

There's an abundance of advice (and perhaps in some cases a bit of pontification) that covers what you should do to improve the integration of sales and marketing. It paints a compelling picture of what a day in the life of selling could be. I won't try to duplicate or recast the possibilities. What I will share is a point of view regarding what you can do to execute on the vision of sales enablement. There's really no right or wrong answer since sales enablement scenarios vary as much as the companies themselves. There are however, best practices that can be shared, retrofitted and reshaped based on your situation.

Over the course of the next few weeks I'll discuss my " Top 10 (+1) Best Practices for Successful Sales Enablement." I listed them as 10 (+1) since #1 and #11 are one in the same. The idea is that the last leads back to the first. In other words, you return to the customer view for refinement through an iterative process of continuous improvement. It sounds like a cliché, but it all starts and finishes with the customer. This is a guiding principle that is frequently stated, but less frequently practiced. So here are the best practices including an abstract for each that I'll expand on in future posts.

Top 10 (+1) Best Practices for Successful Sales Enablement:

1. Start with the customer
Understand the challenges and problem solving processes of your complete set of customer stakeholders at every stage of the problem solving and buying process.

2. Invest in the act of defining 
Recognizing and gaining consensus about the problem is no small feat. The time spent defining the problem may be your most worthwhile investment.

3. Embrace the diversity of perspectives 
Seek out and ask all the questions. There are varied, valid and valuable points of view from business leadership, sales, sales leadership, sales operations, product/solution management and marketing regarding the "sales problem" that cannot be left unasked.

4. Be wary of the matrix 
Avoid getting caught in the organizational process matrix. Mapping to process is important yet there are many overlapping processes that may fragment the effort (for example: sales, marketing, solution development, business leadership and strategic planning to name a few).

5. You have to start somewhere, but you can't be everywhere 
Choosing the area of priority is difficult, yet essential. Choose your battles based on critical stages of the sales cycle (develop opportunity, identify opportunity, close opportunity) and map them to the marketing areas of focus (awareness, interest, consideration, preference, selection, loyalty).

6. Keep it simple, but memorable
Eliminate information overload for sales and the customer by organizing content based on customer issues and roles not the portfolio. Use visual business and functional level representation of how your capabilities can be configured to build a solution based on issues and challenges of the role.

7. Enough about me - tell me what you think about me
Don't start with a discussion of your portfolio, but more importantly don't pay lip service to being customer centric. Sales credibility is based on empathy for the client and a "staged" understanding will seem at best contrived and possibly manipulative.

8. Scalability matters 
Good sales people will have specific knowledge about an individual client that makes the client unique, yet most customers face common problems which can be modeled and segmented. Strive for 80% standard with 20% tailorable content that is relevant to the client with differentiation. Leverage the patterns to build content modules that can be configured by the sales team, rather than developed from scratch every time, allowing them to focus on account specific differentiated value propositions.

9. Collaborate for sales-ready marketing and customer-ready sales
Content management is important, but make sure you focus on content delivery to the client. Valuable conversations that allow the sales person to rise above the competition, break through the clutter and reduce complexity will drive results in today's competitive environment.

10. Measure metrics that matter
Aggregated operational metrics that measure sales productivity and marketing impact are essential, but account specific sales objectives are the most relevant and self evident. Account teams know what they want to accomplish in the account, sales operations and marketing understand the business level Key Performance Indicators. Linking the two will provide clarity of impact at all levels.

11. Did I mention start with the customer? 
When all is unclear or significant change is afoot go back to #1 and use the customer as the design point

Over the past 10 years of hands-on experience with sales enablement, we've encountered the same challenges again and again from marketing, portfolio and sales organizations. Since everyone seems to be having similar issues with improving sales force effectiveness, it was only natural that we should create a place to learn, share and start conversations about enabling sales in your company.

So, what is sales enablement? Simply, it's the process of improving sales conversations to maximize sales performance. (A more detailed explanation can be found on our website ). Our approach is focused on delivering three critical components:

1) the creation of visual, customer-ready sales content that simplifies complex solutions and messaging

2) an enabling framework that delivers informed messages that are timely, relevant to their business objectives and in the context of individual stakeholders

and 3) an intelligent, interactive presentation layer that facilitates non-linear, collaborative discussions, and tracks usage and results

SalesEnlightenment.com allows individuals in sales, marketing and portfolio management to select their role, go-to-market model and sales strategy and presents common scenarios based on pain points specific to their profile. Solutions to each challenge are presented along with links to additional information. Visitors can also submit their own stories, pass along to a colleague or join in facilitated conversations with our sales enablement strategists.

We hope you enjoy the web site, and look forward to your stories and feedback. Start a conversation with us about your sales challenges.

PS: By the way, your sales people DO get it, but...what they may NOT get is how to effectively use overly complex and portfolio-centric sales content that isn't customer-ready.

• Thank you Robert Gaskins
• and Walter Cronkite
• for the inspiration
• and the headache

What's your strategy to drive website traffic, online sales or convert casual visitors to long-term customers? If you are selling products online, or if customers use your site to research your products or services, you need a well-planned strategy to attract site visitors and help them achieve their goals.

Consider these three objectives:

1. Reach

Obviously, you need visitors to the site and getting them there requires a holistic approach to search marketing. Are you utilizing search engine optimization (SEO) and/or search engine marketing (SEM) to drive traffic and increase your footprint on the web? Is your site optimized for the most commonly searched-for terms that are relevant to your product or service? And what reach tactics are you employing to drive traffic?

Your reach program strategies should include at a minimum:
a) a thorough SEO review and strategy
b) website content review to make certain that content is optimized for search
c) an email marketing strategy
d) a targeted search engine marketing (or pay-per-click) program that includes campaign specific landing pages for each campaign

2. Engage

Now that you have a good flow of traffic to your site, what are you doing to keep them there and bring them back? Every visitor to your website has a 'job' to fulfill. They may be researching a potential product for purchase, looking for customer support, or trying to match your offerings with their needs. You need to give them something to do, help them make decisions, and answer their questions quickly.

Your engagement strategy should include:

a) a gateway (home page) that is well-designed to accomodate different user types and buying behaviors: those that "I know what I want - I need a clear path to get there", those that "I need to explore to learn more about you" or those that have a role-based need: "I'm a marketing director - how can you solve my specific needs?"

b) An information architecture (IA) that is arranged to showcase most commonly requested content (check your analytics reports for most visited pages and check your search analytics to see items that people are most commonly searching for). The idea is to flatten site structure so that most content is accessible within 2 clicks of the gateway.

c) Applications that encourage learning about your company and offerings (product tours and demos, feature comparisons), and that promote ongoing interaction with your brand (downloadable content, RSS subscriptions, blog posts, newsletters, web-only offers)

3. Convert

Conversion is the act of completing the 'job' that brought the visitor to your site. Conversion may be as simple as requesting a white paper, or as involved as researching, comparing, selecting, and purchasing a product. The key to increasing conversions is to make it simple for the visitor and remove any impediments that may keep them from the end goal.

Your conversion strategy should include:

a) Promoting hot items, new products, featured services, or sale items immediately on the gateway, with direct access to the buy, learn more, or contact button .

b) Providing interactive research and comparison tools to allow the visitor to 'configure' the solution or product that is right for their needs.

c) Optimization of your shopping cart, following a best practices methodology.

d) Utilizing up-sell and cross-sell suggestions throughout the buy process.

If you have a reach, engage, convert strategy in place, how is it working? If you haven't given it much attention, we can help. Our clients include B2B and B2C companies that each have unique goals and challenges, and we will be glad to show you results. These activities are affordable and quick to implement, and the payback can be tremendous.

Contact me to discuss your needs or to share tactics that have worked for you!

A reminder to join us TODAY at 11am EST for a free webinar on Managing PowerPoint Presentations! This live webinar will feature a demonstration of Open Text's Presentation Partner, developed by n-tara works. This easy-to-use PowerPoint management tool enables centralized control, creation, assembly and distribution of PowerPoint presentations, resulting in compliant, compelling presentations and a more productive sales force.

n-tara works' chief technology officer Jeff Morris will be presenting the tool and Jon Schupp, VP of Software Services with Open Text Digital Media Group will be leading the conversation about using Presentation Partner and digital asset management to dramatically increase ROI of your media investments.

You won't want to miss this discussion! Please click here to register.

Do you know where all of your latest, most compliant PowerPoint files are located? Are you certain your field sales and marketing teams are using the most up to date presentations? How do you find, assemble, create and distribute PowerPoint presentations to your sales and marketing teams?

If you use PowerPoint (with 35,000,000+ PowerPoint presentations given every day, virtually all of us do) you'll want to join Open Text Digital Media Group and n-tara works for a live webinar to learn about Presentation Partner, Open Text and n-tara works' presentation management solution. n-tara works' chief technology officer Jeff Morris will be presenting the tool. The webinar will be held on Tuesday, February 24 at 11am EST. It's free and you'll learn how you can easily manage your organization's PowerPoint presentations with a simple solution that requires no IT support.

We hope you'll join us! Please click here to register. 

Much like a 'star' rating system, the application lets you popularize good stuff that you appreciate, but limits the comment clutter that appears after a post. For example, your friend posts a photo of their two year old riding the family dog, and instead of saying "How cute!" or "My dog would freak out LOL!" you can just click 'Like' and your friend will know how much you care.

This feature could move Facebook's applicability as a product/service promotional vehicle ahead by light years: post a link to your favorite restaurant and as friends start 'liking' it, a viral effect ensues. And there's no doubt that Facebook will monitor what's being 'liked' for use in its news and ad displays on your page.

But for now, the "like" feature is great for promoting your friend's pithy status updates or hilarious kid videos.

And if suddenly, your feelings change about something you 'like', there's an 'unlike' link, too.

Are you a Facebook user? Let us know what you think!

Have you heard the story about the Ketchum PR guy and the angry client, FedEx?

Seems the PR executive, James Andrews, got off a plane in Memphis ( the western end of our beautiful Volunteer State ) and posted the following tweet on twitter from his account, @keyinfluencer.

"True confession but I'm in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say 'I would die if I had to live here!'"

Well, at least one person at FedEx was monitoring Mr. Andrews on twitter and grew rather angry at his less than glowing description of the home of Beale Street Blues and Graceland. The employee fired off an e-mail to Mr. Andrews reminding him of FedEx's importance to not only the employees who work there (and who recently took a pay cut) but also to Ketchum as a very significant client. This employee proceeded to copy most of the FedEx and Ketchum senior management team on the letter. The real irony is the subject that Mr. Andrews planned to talk about with the managers at FedEx that day: Social Media.

I first learned of the story from publicist Peter Shankman's blog but David Henderson, an award winning journalist provided what is by far the best coverage of the incident. (True to his correspondent roots he sought out comment from both sides of the story.) Seems there has been so much interest in the incident it actually took down Henderson's blog for awhile. Numerous other blogs have covered the story including Adrants.

Mr. Andrews meanwhile explained that he had had a "run in with an intolerant individual," and then immediately tweeted about it. If that is the case, perhaps he needs to brush up on some of his fundamentals-of-communications skills starting with not sending a letter (or e-mail, or tweet) when one is angry. The old rule of thumb still works in today's fast paced society. Let anger simmer for 24 hours, review it and then decide if you still wish to send.

It is indeed a small world out there. As Seth Godin says, it can't hurt to be kind.

(Many of us at n-tara have been living and breathing social media for quite awhile now. If you'd like to ask us about social media feel free to leave a comment here or join us for discussion at n-tara's LinkedIn or Facebook pages).

When Coleman, the famed leader in all that is outdoors recently asked us to lead the iconic brand's future online strategy we knew we had a great fit. n-tara is full of outdoor enthusiasts, from weekend family RV-ers to Scout fathers and serious backpackers. Knowing that the Coleman brand evokes positive memories, we asked our employees to share their stories with us for this blog post.

"It was 1972 and I was just out of the military. living in Northwest Washington State. It took us two months to cross to Boston where I was going to work in my new job. We (my wife and two kids, aged 10 and 12) had a Coleman pop-up trailer, used a Coleman camp stove, and of course had a Coleman lantern.

We camped our way across country and just had a great time. We would hit a camp site and 20 minutes later we'd have everything set up and coffee cooking on the stove. We still have the lantern and the camp stove." -- Terry Brandon, Program Manager 

"Every year Luke (my son) and I go camping with his scout troop for a weekend and have some good father/son time.

We tell stories, sing songs, swim, make things like whittling wooden boats, s'mores over the fire etc. But the one thing that really is nice to have is our Coleman tent that always goes with us and keeps us dry if it rains!" -- Tim Story, Director of Business Development


"When I was 7 years old. my uncle owned a cattle ranch in Oklahoma. There was a large fishing pond/drinking hole on the property. This same fenced-in area was where the bull was kept. I had one rule 'Don't shoot the bull'. Well, being a 7 year old boy with a new BB gun and my Coleman lantern to light the way for night fishing, I got bored.

I took aim across the pond and hit the bull with a BB in the butt. He charged around the pond and forced me into the water. Just me and the Coleman lantern. No matter where I tried to exit, the bull came to that side. After 45 minutes of this, my father and uncle came pulling up in a truck. They were both laughing so hard. My daddy said, 'You shot the bull, didn't you?'"-- Rob Bright, VP, Business Development 

"Since I started camping and experiencing the outdoors at around the age of 9, at least one Coleman product or another has always accompanied me into the wilderness. While in Boy Scouts, no troop was ever without a Coleman stove, and I personally used a Coleman tent for summer camp every year for over a decade.

As an adult with a family of my own that loves to camp, my father's Coleman liquid fuel lantern still provides reliable light for fun filled evenings playing cards around a picnic table, or the help needed to set up a tent in the dark or the rain." -- Andy Didyk, Director of Business Development 

"In 1950 my dad and I used a Coleman stove that used gasoline. I remember him pumping the stove - you had to build up air pressure for the stove to work. In 1973 we bought a Coleman tent and Coleman sleeping bags for our family vacation in Yellowstone. Then in 1993 I bought Coleman's propane stove and battery lamp for a trip to the Everglades where I spent 2-3 weeks on the ground for a thrilling adventure by myself, primarily to photograph wildlife. The new stove was a major improvement over 1950 - I just attached the propane canister - no pumping! My daughter still borrows the stove and lamp from time to time."-- Jim Hager, Marketing Analyst

For me personally, the brand Coleman instantly takes me back to my childhood summers spent at our cottage on Conesus Lake in upstate New York. My father and grandfather would go out night fishing on the lake and when they returned they would have the glowing, dark green lantern in hand.

Do you have a great Coleman memory? We would love to hear your story. Please feel free to share it with us by posting it as a comment to this blog.

For the past 10 years (we'll be celebrating a very special birthday in May) we've been helping our customers make connections with their target audiences. Online, connections translate to engagement - the act of reaching and persuading consumers to take action, such as researching a product, completing a survey, requesting information, downloading a widget, requesting a demo or making a purchase.

Offline, engagement happens at another level, especially in B2B companies where deals are huge, sales cycles are long, and the stakes are high. Engagement in these interactions takes the form of conversations, which occur one-to-one - between a sales person and his or her prospect or customer. The dialogue that occurs as a result of this interaction is crucial to closing deals, and that's why we've been committed to increasing the quality and frequency of these conversations between our customers and their audiences. 

We've called this activity many things in the past 10 years, but it's now increasingly known as sales enablement. We like Forrester's definition of sales enablement because it reflects our approach to creating sales enablement solutions:

"A strategic process that equips your sales force with the ability to generate valuable conversations with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer's problem-solving lifecycle." 

Note the term "strategic process" because for a sales enablement program to be successful, it requires collaborative alignment between sales AND marketing organizations AND a partner to help execute from a strategic and tactical vantage point.

So what are valuable conversations? Ones that happen at the right time, with the right stakeholders, in the correct context and that are relevant to the customer's need or pain. When all of these qualities align, great things happen, like decreased sales cycle times and increased closure rates.

Another attribute of valuable conversations is HOW information is presented at the point of sell. As Forrester Analyst Scott Santucci states: "It's not what you sell, but how you sell." We can help with the how. 

An example of "how" recently created a bit of buzz for our client Xerox Global Services. They captured the Diamond Award for Enabling Sales at the ITSMA Marketing Excellence Awards for the XGS Tour, a sales enablement solution we created in collaboration with their sales and marketing teams. (You can read about the success of the program here ). The ITSMA is the leading association for technology, communications, and professional services providers.

Sales enablement is a very hot topic these days, and it's an area we are going to focus on even more in 2009. If you haven't thought about sales enablement and how to better equip your sales force with the tools they need to communicate your value message, now is a good time to gear up.

You can contact me personally for more information or to see a demo of our approach.

I just attended a fascinating webinar called "Cost Effective Marketing and PR Strategies for 2009." Sponsors Marketwire and Expansion Plus, talked about what we marketers can expect to see in the New Year.

Here are the top four Marketing Tactics for 2009 (no real surprises here, but it's interesting to see validation):

#1 Social Media
#2 E-newsletters
#3 Blogs (both writing and participating in them)
#4 Online videos

For a more detailed look at the top trends, the entire survey can be found at Junta 42. n-tara interactive plans to use all of these tactics in '09 not only for our own company, but also for the marketing and sales organizations whom we serve.

A Forrester survey mentioned in the webinar indicates that 42% of those polled were using social networks like Facebook at the end of 2008 compared to 25% who were using them in early 2008. What a difference a year makes!

I know that for me personally at this time last year I was just getting started on LinkedIn (after much arm twisting from several friends and colleagues.) Now I can't imagine a work day without LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter (I'm @MarketingMel).

What are your thoughts? How will you be using social media and these other marketing tactics in 2009? We would love to hear from you!

*In a time when agencies are cutting their workforce due to the economic turbulence, it's nice to share even the little successes. That's why this New Year, we're toasting our inclusion in the AdAge Top U.S. Marketing Services Agencies. We're listed as #200 (according to 2007 revenue) but we are bound to vault up the list based on our increase in revenue in 2008. We're in some pretty fine company - it's always nice to see your name alongside the biggest agencies in the world.

n-tara showed growth of 32.4 percent from 2006 to 2007 thanks to our laser focus on delivering strategic interactive marketing communications and sales enablement solutions. According to AdAge, 10.8% ($3.36B) of all agency business is digital, and although not immune from the supposed economic recession, we expect (read: hope, wish, want) that number to increase in 2009 as marketers invest more dollars in online initiatives that have tremendous value and most importantly, measurable performance.

Happy New Year and may 2009 be a prosperous one, despite the news!

"Sounds of the Digital Season" circa 2007

"Behind the Scenes..." circa 2006

Happy Holidays from your friends at n-tara.

Posted by Thomas Eorgan, SVP, Marketing

Welcome to the our new front door - an all new online experience for n-tara. The websites and blogs you are viewing represent the materialization of our new brands: n-tara interactive and n-tara works. For an interactive design firm to launch its own new web presence (even a single one) is a daunting task, especially for our company, which has seen phenomenal growth over the past 4 years. It's daunting, because our pipeline is full of online endeavors, sales enablement tools, and branding strategies for our growing customer base. But, we made a committed effort to apply our discovery and development processes to the creation of our own websites, with good success.

The new websites are a work in progress, with many improvements to be made. We hope you'll keep visiting the sites to see additional features and content, and we especially hope you will subscribe to our blogs and join in conversations with our team and other marketing professionals.

Again, thanks for visiting, thanks for being supportive of n-tara, and if you find any bugs or misspellings - or even colloquialisms -please don't hesitate to point them out to us.

 What is the most significant thing that you see coming down the pipe here at n-tara? 
n-tara works has some new and exciting technologies that solve people's communications challenges. What's exciting on the n-tara interactive side is the strategic and long term relationships that we have established with new client companies like Hunter Fan Company and Edwards & Associates (Bell Helicopter company). I also think that our Sales Enablement solutions are going to continue to draw more and more attention and that we will be doing plenty more in the near future. We have been providing Sales Enablement solutions (interactive sales tools) for our clients since before I started at n-tara but we have evolved, and so have our offerings. I think the market has finally caught up with our capabilities and we are seeing more and more demand for these types of solutions.

What is unique about your role here? 
I was the first account manager hired into n-tara in April of 2002. Previously to that the founders and principals did all the selling. Then they would project manage the job and there was the production talent who would produce the deliverables. I was the first extension arm of the company other than the principals. Currently, I'm very excited about being the team lead for our Sales Enablement solutions practice.

What is the hardest thing you have to deal with pertaining to clients? 
Sometimes clients make it difficult for us to help them. They do that when they withhold information; they don't give us enough information to help them. We have a few relationships with customers that don't withhold or filter information and we are able to help them a great deal. But then there's some that hold back, like they have been through some sort of vendor management training from the 1950's - it just prohibits us from helping them achieve their goals. That's the difficult part. But once you start helping them win they open up more and more to you because you gain credibility and they start to trust you -- that's when we can help them more and more.

What's the most significant thing you've had to deal with pertaining to a client in the last six months?
The most significant thing in terms of helping a client in the last six months, from my perspective, is the customization of the npowered Enterprise platform to meet Lexmark's field sales model. To go in and really understand what they are trying to do and make it work for them, overcoming some challenges in the way their technology is set up and the way they run their business. n-tara's provided them with something that is really, really helpful and we will continue to do so.

In your time here, are there any client visits that stand out as a unique experience? 
Yes, the Iams / Eukanuba sales enablement tool for Procter and Gamble. Their famous mascot, a golden retriever named Euka, was usually in the lobby to greet me. The dog would sit with me as I waited in the lobby. Sometimes the receptionist would give me treats to give to Euka. Also, employees were allowed to bring pets to work and every employee had pictures of their pets all over their work space. It was a fun working environment to visit.

We also supported them with their interactive kiosks at their big national dog show. Their display vendor had configured the hardware inappropriately and the wireless data capture wasn't working. Shane (McCown, VP, Production) and I stayed up all night the night before the show started, making trips to an all night Wal-Mart to get stuff to hard-wire the network. All of the dogs were asleep (thousands of them) and we walked in the back door. Slowly the dogs woke up. First a few barked, then some more, then even more. As we walked to the exhibit the noise of the barking got louder and louder until all the dogs were awake and barking. It was really loud. It was like something out of a horror show.

How have you watched n-tara evolve? 
The best way to describe it is to go back and look at our tag lines and the evolution of our tag lines. We started a marketing department a month after I got here. That's when Thomas (Eorgan) came in. Our first tag line was "High tech visual storytellers." We centered around three skill sets that we were excellent in: one was 3-D visualization and animation, one was digital video (it was newer back then) and the other was interactive technologies. It was Web 1.0 at best then.

People would come to us with a communications problem and we would develop a solution that was usually a combination of those three components. That's the logo - the original n-tara logo. The three arcs represent the three skill sets -the magic is in the middle, a combination of the three; something in the middle is created that solves the problem. As we evolved, we then became a "high impact visual communications company" then a "digital media communications company."

As we continued to hear different customer's needs and problems and providing solutions for them we developed as a company. In the beginning we had the front end design work. Then we would hear from clients that "we want to measure that, we want this to do that without having to do the other thing, we want to have administrative control, we need several permission levels" etc.; we kept building up all this technology base behind the presentation layer which was really when we started developing rich internet applications. That was the birthing process of both n-tara works, and our Sales Enablement solutions practice.

In terms of n-tara interactive,we have evolved into a full service interactive agency. As companies got to know us, they started to utilize n-tara as experts in interactive marketing and sales strategy..we have evolved from an interactive job shop to a long term strategic partner.

There is one thing that has not changed. I said this a long time ago and it still holds true. If there is an interactive communications challenge that needs to be solved for, no matter how complex, I would put our creative and production people up against anyone. They are truly world class talent. They are brilliant.

Next year is our 10th anniversary. Do you have any predictions?
By our 15th anniversary the world will be very different than it is today. We will be speaking in a new language about new technologies and new business models. n-tara will continue to evolve on pace with it all because our focus has always been on solving client problems. The only thing that will be the same is that everyone will still use TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms), they will just be new ones.

What is your favorite n-tara memory?
My funniest n-tara memory is when we were working for UPS and we had to mail assets back and forth during the production phase of the project (back then the ftp sites weren't as robust) and we had to ship media back and forth; and we shipped something using FedEx.

How did that go over?
It didn't go over very well.

Did you keep the account?
Yes. It was a great project. And we quickly setup a UPS shipping account.

What is your favorite sandwich? 
A good chicken parm.

Where do you get that around here? 
Well they closed. Philly's had a really good one. Philly's had a New York chicken parm that was terrific. I haven't found one that meets it but I haven't tried all the places.

What is your home town?
Nutley, New Jersey.

What is something about you that we might not know or that might surprise us? 
I was a college basketball coach for 14½ years at five different universities. I changed careers in 2000 because that profession was incongruent with my life goals and values. In college I installed underground sprinkler systems as a summer job. In high school I delivered pizzas in a 1978 Volkswagen bug (in Nutley, New Jersey, a suburb of Manhattan, just 12 miles from the Lincoln Tunnel.)

 What is the most significant thing that you see coming down the pike for n-tara?
Business opportunity for the works group.

What is unique about your role here? 
Being the CEO, I'm very sales and marketing focused, so as the CEO I'm also CMO.

What is the hardest thing you have to deal with?
The hardest thing we have to deal with is to manage exponential growth on cash flow.

What is the hardest thing you have to deal with pertaining to clients? 
From a sales and marketing aspect its setting their expectations and dealing with the very severe budget cuts and turndowns that we've had in the last six months.

Due to the economy? 
Oh, yes. There's no question we've been impacted by the economy although we still enjoy phenomenal growth it's not at the same level it has been for the last five years.

The hardest thing we have to deal with, with clients, is getting information from them so we can do our job. Those are the two number one things in my mind that stick out.

What is the most significant thing that you've had to deal with a client in the last six months? 
It's the budget cuts with our two largest customers; 50 percent.

What is your favorite sandwich?
Oyster poor boy.

And how is that made? 
Fried, oyster poor boy. It's just a poor boy with fried oysters on it.

What is something we don't know about you that might surprise us?
I ran a 4:19 mile in high school.
And I was a PADI SCUBA instructor for 11 years.

Enjoy and consider "going green" this holiday season.

If you're a fan of The Office like we are, and you're looking for a hotshot new sales person for your company, you'll appreciate this campaign from CareerBuilder. You can vote for The Office character that you would most likely hire if you were required to pick from one of Dunder Mifflin's crack sales team.

Do you hire your sales force based on sales skills or soft skills? Do candidates with great personalities and a positive, winning demeanor appeal to you more than an industry performer with quantifiable results?

In our view, both types of personal skills can lead to great performers, with a little help. When we create sales enablement solutions for our customers, we first conduct interviews of top performers, middle of the road performers, and new, growing performers to discover their personal hurdles in the sales process. We've learned that often times the challenge isn't with the sales person's skills (soft or sales), but with the tools they are using to present to their customers and prospects. We've discovered that there is a general lack of understanding of products and services, and how offerings can be bundled for the greatest opportunity to make a 'solutions sell' vs. an individual product sell.

Through well designed and thoughtful sales enablement solutions, we are able to achieve wins for our customers through a more engaging presentation of offerings that elevates an entire sales team to top performer status. As a value add, these same tools can be used to impart product knowledge and training for new or existing sales professionals - same tool, same message, but for an entirely different need - sales training.

On our website, you can read about some recent successes with sales enablement solutions.

Meanwhile, sales enablement tools aside, who would you hire from Dunder Mifflin?

So today I read with great amusement this post from Sage Lewis called My Wife the Editor. Although I've never been flown all around the world there is something to be said for "the editor having the keys." Interestingly, my parents always taught me that about school custodians. "They have the keys to everything," Mom and Dad would say. "Always be kind to them."

I never thought of the similarity before but in their own ways holders of both jobs have "the keys" don't they?

Be nice to the editors. They can make you or break you. And they know it.

This report just crossed my computer from Marketing Daily. It indicates that internet ad spends were up 15.2% in the first half of 2008. No doubt this is a part of a trend toward increased online spending and a steady move away from the more traditional advertising channels. With the economy in its current mode, customers will demand and desire the ROI metrics that their internet marketing spend can provide.

Cool retro Google logo, circa 2001




It's hard to believe that n-tara is closing in on its 10 year anniversary (we were founded in May 1999) and another company you may have heard about is also celebrating 10 years in business this month: Google.

In honor of their anniversary, they are letting users journey back in time to 2001 (their earliest available index) where you can search webpages and actually see many of the 2001 era webpages. When you click on a webpage result, you get taken to today's live version of the website. When you click on the link to "View old version on the Internet Archive," you are taken to the earliest 2001 copy of that webpage on the Internet Archive so you can see what the full webpage used to look like.

You better act fast, because the journey to 2001 search is for a limited time only: Google is turning off the feature in mid October.

As we all know, search has come a long way in 10 years. Back in 2001 there were a whopping billion+ web pages in existence and today there are over 1,000,000,000 (that's TRILLION) unique URL's. Google is now a verb, and thousands of firms (including us) have made search marketing a staple for their clients seeking to be 'front paged' in keyword searches. To that end, n-tara interactive has a suite of tools and a staff of experts that can help you dissect the art and science that is SEO.

While you're Google-ing, you might also want to check out Google 'Easter Eggs', hidden frivolity that Google has surreptitiously unleashed upon web surfers. PC World has compiled a great list of the 17 best Google easter eggs.

You can also view some fun facts about Google in their corporate timeline, including this nugget:

Google was originally called "BackRub". "In 1997, Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google -- a play on the word "googol," a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web."

These guys truly had a vision.

Have fun and Happy 10th Birthday, BackRub Google!

Aaron's technical experience includes work as a freelance PHP developer for Globi Web Solutions Inc., of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He was a PHP Programmer for Cannon-Sears Group where he developed and maintained web based applications for a wide variety of customers as well as sales of various web related products. He is a former PHP Programmer for Business Information Systems where he developed and maintained web based applications for various county level and in-house customers.

"We are always on the lookout for talented people like Aaron to join our team. We are delighted to have someone with his capabilities and skill set on board with us," said n-tara interactive's vice president of operations, Shane McCown.

Aaron is a 2004 graduate of East Tennessee State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. He resides in Bristol, Tenn. with his wife Olivia and their son, Connor.

Mary Ellen and Tim speak to the Tri-Cities P.R.S.A.

Media, Trends and Visibility that is.

That's the subject Tim Story and I spoke about at today's Tri-Cities Chapter of the P.R.S.A. (Public Relations Society of America) meeting in Kingsport. I covered some of the current PR Trends and then Tim took over with a discussion of SEO and engagement. I tried to synopsize some of the latest information that I learned at the Hubspot Inbound Marketing Summit held recently in Boston as well as some of the information I've just gathered along the way when it comes to today's changing face of marketing and PR. It was fascinating to talk with PR practitioners who are out there "in the trenches" every day and to get their take on where PR and social media is headed. We particularly had a good discussion around LinkedIn and the benefits of using it as marketing and PR professionals. The question and answer period was so lively and interactive they didn't want to leave. Maybe an afternoon-long round table discussion held here at n-tara is in the offing. I taped the whole talk for podcast and plan to post the slides as well to this blog. Be back soon with that information!

n-tara connects buyers and brands.

This was fortified with other connective relationships:

-sales and customers
-marketing and prospects
-presenters and audiences

Out of our own applied discovery process, we had a clear roadmap of how to revise our brand platform, create our new marks, and position our offerings. Out of this effort came the logo designs you see here, the color palettes, the messaging, the imagery, and so on. Ethan Blumenstrauch, our world-class creative director, led the redefinition of our brand, which you can read about in this post. Joshua Hathaway, our talented lead designer, materialized the brand platform into the graphic elements that you can see on our websites. And our peerless team, whom we'll introduce you to individually on the blogs in upcoming posts, programmed and developed the sites and blogs.

Some brand facts:

1. The original n-tara brand mark 'arcs' symbolized the synergy of three core technologies: animation, interactive, and digital video
2. The word 'n-tara' is a derivation of a Malaysian word meaning 'between the curves, between time and space'. The word was chosen for its symbolic meaning…and because the five letter domain name was available back in 1999.
3. The n-tara company logo was reverted back to its original dark charcoal color from a brown/orange color used for the past 3 years
4. The icon in the new interactive and works marks is symbolic of human connection, and the potential for connection. Thus derived the 'glue' metaphor on ntarainteractive.com
5. The two marks are nearly identical in design to symbolize the close collaborative, cross-functional relationship of the divisions.

We hope you enjoy our 'new look' as much as we do. We're always open for your feedback, to help us continue to grow our company and most importantly, to better serve you.

Welcome to our new front door - an all new online experience for n-tara. The websites and blogs you are viewing represent the materialization of our new brands: n-tara interactive and n-tara works.

For an interactive design firm to launch its own new web presence (even a single one) is a daunting task, especially for our company, which has seen phenomenal growth over the past 4 years. It's daunting, because our pipeline is full of online endeavors, sales enablement tools, and branding strategies for our growing customer base. But, we made a committed effort to apply our discovery and development processes to the creation of our own websites, with good success.

The new websites are a work in progress, with many improvements to be made. We hope you'll keep visiting the sites to see additional features and content, and we especially hope you will subscribe to our blogs and join in conversations with our team and other marketing professionals.

Again, thanks for visiting, thanks for being supportive of n-tara, and if you find any bugs or misspellings - or even colloquialisms -please don't hesitate to point them out to us.

Mary Ellen Miller and Brian Halligan swap cards at the HubSpot
Inbound Marketing Summit.

If there is one thing that I can feel confident of after the Hubspot Inbound Marketing Summit I just attended in Boston it is validation. Validation that in creating this new web site, and in particular this blog, n-tara interactive is capitalizing on the sea of change that is currently taking place in this country. Marketing as you and I once knew it is taking its last gasps.

As Seth Godin said in his keynote address, every 30, 50 or 70 years an industrial revolution takes place and we are in the midst of one now.

Godin urged the sell-out crowd of 300 professional marketers to "be remarkable." Then tell the story and spread the word. This blog is one opportunity for n-tara to tell our story (to our sneezers as Seth says) and spread the word.

What makes us remarkable?

Here's a quick history:

• Three Purdue colleagues begin teaching at East Tennessee State University in the 90s.
• They plant the seeds for what becomes the premiere advanced visualization laboratory site in the world. (Competing against Singapore, Vancouver and 11 other cities around the globe.)
• They watch their students going to Sony and other places in California and say "Let's stop the brain drain. Let's keep these people here where we have such a fabulous quality of life in the mountains of northeast Tennessee."

That was nine years and hundreds of awards ago. The most recent of those awards was Best of Show at the Horizon Interactive Awards (our work for client Xerox Global Services competed against over 1000 entries from agencies around the world.)

Now that is remarkable. Gesundheit!

(as quoted by David Meerman Scott at the Hubspot Inbound Marketing Summit, Boston, MA September 8, 2008)

All of us in marketing/PR these days are in the process of unlearning.

What were once tried and true methods of reaching an audience are now becoming the ways of the past. As PR folks, we no longer have a target audience of just a few key journalists. Likewise, as David Meerman Scott told us at the Hubspot Inbound Marketing Summit, marketers used to focus on nameless, faceless prospects. Today there is no such thing. There's a human being connected to each personal engagement out there and as Scott says, one can become 80,000.

Scott told us to "think differently" and be "willing to lose control." This made me think of Tiger Woods. He attained some of his greatest feats after stepping back, and along with his coach, breaking down his swing and unlearning it. Each time he broke it down, he would go through a lull only to later achieve even greater victories with the new swing.

For those who haven't read Scott's book "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" as the cover states, it discusses using news releases blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach buyers directly. No more middle man. We all must think like a publisher. I read the book just before joining n-tara earlier this year. I knew that it was time to step into a new world and break down my swing after years of traditional marketing and PR.

I'm still in the process of unlearning but the conference made me realize we are all unlearning together. This blog is just one part of my new swing. Fore!

What's it like to be around 168,000 of your closest friends? Anyone who has ever been to the night race at Bristol Motor Speedway, knows.

This year we took n-tara interactive's clients and friends from New Hampshire, New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C. on a trip to see "racin the way it oughta be" at the Sharpie 500. Turns out they were in for a treat as they got to see some bumping and jockeying for position and a race that really got under way after 470 of the 500 laps when Carl Edwards sped past Kyle Busch and never looked back.

Our company has 30 seats in the Bristol Club suite. The fantastic folks at Bristol Motor Speedway took great care of us, making sure we never went hungry or thirsty. Our guests had the opportunity to go on a track tour and see the cars up close as the crews worked on them just prior to the night race at "the world's fastest half mile." For the second year in a row Edwards emerged the victor in the #99 Office Depot car and marked the win with his trade-mark back flip to the delight of the crowd.

The most exciting part for me was walking down to the track with my husband while the cars were racing. All of our senses were engaged as we got to feel the heat and the grime, hear the sound of the engines (even with earplugs), smell the rubber and the exhaust and be one of 168,000 NASCAR fans. On that particular night in August, Bristol Motor Speedway ranks as one of Tennessee's largest cities.

It was a great time and we think we've even turned some of our friends from across the country into NASCAR fans! (Thanks to Harold Ross Jr. for the photo above.)

Learn. Discover. Network. Explore…. That's the theme of the Ektron Synergy 2008 Worldwide Customer Conference coming up October 21-24 at The Westin Boston Waterfront. n-tara interactive is pleased to sponsor and participate in this year's conference which will showcase best practices, real-world examples, tips and tools for effective website management.

If you're privileged to be among the attendees, please stop by our booth and meet Neil Owen, chief operating officer, Bob Markham, chief strategy officer, and Thomas Eorgan, SVP of Marketing. Also, make plans to join Bob at our table for an interactive lunch and learn discussion on engagement.

What is engagement? How can it strengthen conversations with your customers? How is it measured? Bob will share insights into why engagement is the hottest marketing initiative, how to create engaging experiences, and how to measure the success of your online marketing ventures.

We hope to see you there!

This November, n-tara interactive will be attending the 12 ^th Annual Healthcare Internet Conference: The Marketing Edge. The conference takes place November 10-12 at the Omni Orlando Resort at ChampionsGate in Orlando.

The conference will be two and a half days dedicated to helping those in the healthcare industry pinpoint the technologies, strategies and solutions to best position their organizations for a consumer-driven future. The information to be presented promises to help us better serve our clients in the healthcare industry, and it's a great networking opportunity.

If you're planning on attending the conference, please be sure to stop by our booth and say hello.

On August 22nd, n-tara interactive was privileged to have several clients and other marketing professionals join us for a seminar entitled Reach, Engage and Measure: Building Successful Customer Relationships. 

Thomas Eorgan, SVP, Marketing, delivered the first presentation, nSight Segmentation: Paint a Complete Picture of Your Customers and Prospects. Thomas discussed how n-tara interactive's segmentation methodology, nSight Segmentation, differs from traditional segmentation studies in that it examines three dimensions - needs, attitudes and behaviors - and cross-tabulates the data to reveal factors that motivate audiences to make purchase decisions, as well as the best messaging and media to reach the target audiences. Not only does an nSight Segmentation Study predict revenue driving behaviors, but it uncovers opportunity gaps between importance and satisfaction among segments with common needs. Thomas backed up his claims with a case study of an nSight Segmentation Study we performed for Bristol Motor Speedway - which was appropriate since the seminar was held on the morning of the NASCAR Nationwide Series Food City 250 at nearby BMS. You can learn more about nSight Segmentation and take a fun little 'quiz' at www.nSightSegmentation.com. 

Next on the agenda was Bob Markham, EVP, Strategy, talking about Engagement: Marketing's New Imperative. Bob explained what engagement is and why it's important. As one example of engagement, Bob showed the very entertaining YouTube video of the Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments. It's a great example of customers engaging with brands, although it's probably not the way the Diet Coke and Mentos intended. Nevertheless, the reach has been incredible with hundreds of thousands of viewers.

As an element in the engagement process, Bob went on to explain search engine optimization and dispelled five myths about SEO. He discussed selection and measurement of KPIs (key performance indicators) and techniques to improve a site's search engine rankings. Then he elaborated on the four stages of engagement: involvement, interaction, influence and intimacy, and the metrics used to measure each step. For a copy of the SEO myths and an overview of the stages of engagement, please download this pdf.

Last on the agenda was Neil Owen, EVP, Strategic Solutions. Neil's presentation was entitled Web Analytics and Measurement: Making Sense of the Data. To begin, Neil summed up the challenges of web analytics with a very appropriate quote from Albert Einstein that is worth repeating - "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." That statement couldn't be more true about the topic at hand.

Neil discussed factors that influence web site traffic, like SEO and SEM, site structure, design, copy, meta data, titles, links, etc. He then explained Forrester's Three Step Process for Establishing Website Performance Metrics: 1. clarify site business goals, 2. identify critical tactics, 3. choose indicative metrics; and he reviewed key questions that should be asked during each step.

At the end of Neil's presentation the floor was open for a lively discussion. All in all, the morning was very informative and a great opportunity for networking. Those in attendance offered positive feedback.

We hope to hold another presentation in the spring. If you would like to be added to our invitation list, please email us.