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Money Lying Around? Targeted sales calls connect better with clients who invest more

From: CRM Magazine
Date: August 2008
By: Jessica Tsai

When all you hear are woes about the economy, it’s hard to imagine anyone’s in the position to make big investments. Barclays Global Investors (BGI), a subsidiary of United Kingdom–based Barclays Bank, has a unique retail division that sells to financial advisors, as opposed to institutional investors, in its Intermediary Investor Business (IIB) unit. The IIB team sells exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and iPath exchange-traded notes to advisors through its iShares business. But with more than 200,000 financial advisors in the market—on top of the struggling economy—the IIB sales team had to make each call count.

For seven years, iShares account executives had been manually collecting data on prospects and existing customers: online activity at the BGI Web site, calls into the contact centers, and responses to direct marketing and email marketing campaigns. As the customer base grew, the sales team ballooned in size as well—and soon, data requests became overwhelming, says George Shehata, director of CRM and analytics for the IIB group. It was the responsibility of his team of analysts to track, update, and deliver data on new and existing clients.

But BGI faces a challenge unique to the retail side of financial services: “Since investors are going out to the exchange to transact with an exchange-traded fund, we don’t [get] any of the transactional data,” Shehata explains. “So essentially what we’re relying on is a lot of our profile data and behavioral data.”

In November 2007, after exploring four other solutions, BGI built its Prospector tool on the dmEDGE platform from Massachusetts-based direct marketing firm Direxxis. The implementation took three months, which Shehata says he found “remarkable”—other solutions, he says, would have taken three times as long.

With more-targeted call lists, the average salesperson soon doubled conversion rates. Instead of calling 100 people for 10 customer wins, a rep could get the same results from calling just 50. More important, Prospector helped facilitate a deeper customer interaction. “Our distribution model is heavily linked into maintaining a very strong relationship with our client,” Shehata says. Only then can BGI educate advisors to sell more iShares in larger volumes to their client base.

As the sales force became more dependent on Prospector, they no longer needed to tie up Shehata’s CRM analyst team to help them manually generate lists. Instead, “analyst resources were freed up to work on other sales and marketing analytic projects, in addition to taking on more CRM development work,” Shehata says.

According to employee reports, call preparation time was reduced by approximately 25 percent. Not only were client profiles more comprehensive, the Prospector presented the information in digestible reports. The dramatic efficiency was validated by the fact that, as Shehata observes, “everyone is looking at the contact profile report before they ever place the call.”

From just a few clicks on a Web page, salespeople can derive a wealth of information, such as a client’s number and type of investments, Web-site browsing behavior, and type of account and account tenure—insight that allows BGI to find relevant information that suits the specific interest of each client. “The most non-tech-savvy users [can] do what our pretty sophisticated IT team was doing on the back end,” Shehata says, adding that the implementation itself put very little drain on the technology department. Moreover, the success of Prospector in the United States has motivated BGI to expand the solution to the European iShares team as well.

Perhaps what’s most exciting is the fact that, despite current market conditions, sales personnel report that they are connecting better with high-profile clients who actually invest more. “Our salespeople say, ‘We found this client we didn’t know about before, who’s now going to invest $6 million,’” Shehata recounts. “And they found them through the Prospector.” —Jessica Tsai

THE PAYOFF…WITH DIREXXIS’S DMEDGE, BGI WAS ABLE TO:

  • double its conversion rates;
  • eliminate the need for analysts to create call lists for the sales team;
  • Reduce precall preparation time by 25 percent;
  • earn higher-value accounts; and
  • cut implementation time by a third.

All Budget Blinds’ Franchisee Marketing Materials Now Housed Under One Roof

From: BUSINESS WIRE
Date: 12.4.2007

NEEDHAM, Mass.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Direxxis, a company leading the way in delivering end-to-end direct marketing solutions, announces that Budget Blinds, the leading window covering franchise in the United States, has selected dmEDGE to power its franchisee marketing programs. dmEDGE is Direxxis’ comprehensive turn-key direct marketing solution that fuses all of the necessary marketing campaign functions into a user-friendly web portal that serves to effectively connect organizations with their customers and business partners.

“dmEDGE allows our franchisees to focus on their primary business—selling window coverings, area rugs and other decor items from leading manufacturers—while making it easy for us to support them by providing good-looking, brand-focused ads quickly and in a format that most printers prefer,” said Suzi Carragher, Director of Corporate Communications for Budget Blinds. “Direxxis’ dmEDGE solution also enables Budget Blinds to keep all of our professionally-designed materials in one central repository, so franchisees have ‘one-stop marketing’ access to all the approved marketing materials.”

Before implementing dmEDGE, Budget Blinds had a self-administered site and was challenged with controlling the quality of the creative product being used for local franchisee marketing. Previously, franchisees needed to establish relationships with local graphic designers who would occasionally take too many liberties with the approved marketing pieces. This often resulted in distorted photos, “Frankensteined” ads, omission of legal disclaimers, typos, missing phone numbers and the like.

While searching for options that would address this very troublesome, and potentially brand-damaging, situation, it found dmEDGE to be the solution that best met all its needs. “We were very pleased that Direxxis was willing to work with our team to create a custom solution that really worked for us,” Carragher said. “And, dmEDGE can still adapt to our changing needs.”

Carragher found that Direxxis was also good at helping Budget Blinds get up and running, as well as updating the system. “Direxxis has been great to work with! They were extraordinarily organized and sensitive to deadlines when we were implementing the system. When we need to update items on dmEDGE, the Direxxis team will have it done when they say they will, which allows us to keep commitments to our franchisees.”

What dmEDGE features does Carragher find especially beneficial? “The printable PDF format that we use for our creative prevents errors and enables franchisees to control the customizable portion of the message. Printers prefer the format because they can only print the file. Printable PDFs eliminate finger pointing. Also, with dmEDGE franchisees don’t need to be design experts to provide their local marketing vendors with good looking ads and compelling offers. In addition, we can guide the franchisees to choose sound offers and include necessary legal copy. dmEDGE is a great tool for organizations like ours looking to control brand identity from local to national levels.”

The dmEDGE portal system creates an advantage for the Budget Blinds organization and its franchisees because now they can use the same data buying and assembly techniques utilized by top centralized direct marketers to execute campaigns. Some of the far-reaching benefits the dmEDGE solution provides the Budget Blinds organization include:

  • Less time needed to execute campaigns and communications. Franchise owners don’t need to spend all of their time coordinating different vendors and researching data sources so that their time can be spent running their businesses.
  • Increased learning. With a feedback loop, the marketing knowledge will be continuous in nature and shared between all franchisees and the corporate office. Corporate campaigns can be effectively tracked and franchise campaigns can match response and customer information back to mailings for analysis.

“Ultimately all of this will unify the Budget Blinds branding and marketing initiatives throughout the system,” concluded Carragher.

About Direxxis
Direxxis creates and delivers turn-key, web-based end-to-end direct marketing solutions that enable our clients to build great relationships with their customers. Our marketing solutions help clients target prospects who share the same characteristics as their best customers, greatly improving their acquisition efforts by enabling them to reach the right prospects at the right time. Direxxis’ dmEDGE solution, designed especially for organizations with a decentralized sales structure, has a flexible architecture that allows marketers to streamline the complex, detail-oriented direct marketing process and focus on the principles that drive direct marketing success. More information is available at www.direxxismarketing.com.

All trademarks and registered trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

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You exceeded our expectations

“The Direxxis team should be thanked. When you get a standing ovation, it's a good indication that you exceeded our expectations."

Director, CRM and Analytics
B2B Marketing

Marketing to a business to business audience? Consider using personal appeals. Don't just stress the benefits to the company. Tell them how they'll benefit personally. Tell them how your product or service will simplify their job. Talk about praise or promotions. And. always include an additional offer - one that rewards them professionally.