Marketing outsource Itis not what you do, but how you do it.

The situation
This new division of a large company was producing online content for college courses. As a start-up, our client had very few marketing and sales staff, little experience in the college course markets, and no marketing process. They hired O’Donnell & Associates to develop and incubate a process, and to try out their marketing strategy prior to hiring a full staff.

The process
First, O’Donnell & Associates worked with the company’s management to create a marketing plan for the division. Our plan involved a variety of strategies and tactics to launch this new brand and get the message out quickly. We used a variety of direct marketing techniques to generate leads and turn them into sales. First, we targeted key content markets and used Web research to gather names and e-mail addresses (at the time, the list companies offered very limited e-mail lists of college faculty). We used a combination of phone and e-mail to screen faculty and generate leads.

Then, we created a pipeline and process to turn leads into adoptions. Selling online products, particularly via direct mail, requires multiple touches and a mixture of sales and training. We found that our pipeline required a number of contacts from the day a faculty member logged onto the site until adoption. We created a systematic process for working our sales pipeline, and scripted each step of the way.

The faculty liked the concept of delivering course materials online, but was not comfortable with the process of selecting, customizing and adopting materials. We set up Web casts and phone demonstrations with a small team of highly-trained professionals. We also created a product champion program, where early adopters of the product were paid to host local seminars and to mentor faculty in their area.

As the company determined that the process was working and the product was viable, they hired both an inside and outside sales force. We trained the client team on our process, and continued to handle portions of the pipeline, while our client’s team ramped up.

The results
The company’s first two years of sales to faculty came almost exclusively through our pipeline and process. Our client found that this intensive handholding and sales/educational process was necessary to launch their brand into the market. And, they were able to leverage these early sales to find new channels for distributing and selling the products.