Nov 27th, 2008| 
In a recent conversation with Ville Kuusela about sales processes he mentioned that because we work in a B2B environment, we often forget B2C sales tactics still apply. His point was simple: we overlook the fact that we’re selling to people and not just to businesses. Not only do we need to convince buyers on the business merits but also make a human connection – very much as we do with consumers.
That’s why it makes perfect sense to use consumer centric tools and repurpose them for the B2B market. One particular set of tools that caught my eye produce interactive portable documents. These products can include the likes of PageSuite®, Olive ActiveMagazine, Zmags Publicator and eMagCreator.
Interactive portable documents produced by these tools are flash files that are more “interactive” than traditional pdfs. You can create files that animate and work as a presentation & brochure combo. Some of these products also support mouse-over effects and even stream video inside the documents. This is all at the skin layer. What’s extra cool is that these products offer analytics on the read documents, similar to web server stats. Below is a part demo from Zmags that showcases what it can do.
Now imagine if we could use these types of tools to help during the sales process? Picture this – your sales guy sends a brochure as an interactive portable document to a hot lead. The sales guy can check to see how the lead responds and how the brochure gets passed around the organization. All this information is available from his SalesForce® dashboard – very similar to LeadLander.
Now we are talking! It seems PageSuite are open for their tool to be repurposed for such a need. And why wouldn’t they be? It makes good sense to address the growing needs of intelligent sales processes.
What about other vendors? According to Sasha Frey from Olive Software, some of their publishing clients are already using the analytic components as a sales tool. But I got a feeling that the publishing houses use Olive Software to optimize advertisement placements on e-magazines. Not so much as to track brochure/datasheet performance which is what I’m looking for.
Another heavy weight in the market is Zmags. These guys are focused on the publishing market, and Joakim Ditlev from their Marketing had this to say “We see various examples of smart product management by aid of analytics. In some cases, Zmags own analytics in not enough. That is why Zmags supports direct integration with third party statistics tools such as Omniture or Google Analytics.”
I guess that’s another route to take. Integrate an interactive portable document brochure with third-party vendors who specialize in sales intelligence analytics. And who better to talk to then LeadLander? If any of these vendors were to integrate with LeadLander, they could very well produce the dream-team solution. I think such a partnership is worth exploring – especially as the market starts to expect more sophisticated sales intelligence tools.
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December 4th, 2008 at 11:35
Thanks for highlighting this issue, Zaki. Digital publishing is currently just considered as a better looking alternative to PDFs, but there is so much more it can do – espcecially for marketers.
Please, allow me to elaborate a bit on how Zmags customers gain advantage of the in-built and detailed analytics.
Retailers use the stats in their flyers or catalogs to see what products are the most popular. They cleverly rearrange, so the most popular items are stored in the back of the stores. While looking for this customers get inspired to buy other things.
Newspapers and magazine publishers use stats for proofing. In stead of sending out hard copies to advertisers, they send extended soft copy versions. Not only do they show where ads was placed in the publication, advertisers also get the overview of exactly what caught the attention in their add. Small dots show exactly where the reader clicked to zoom in. Extremely value-adding and cost-saving.
December 5th, 2008 at 11:46
Hi Joakim, thanks for your input. I think you guys give real value to newspaper/magazine advertisers. What you offer is a very neat bridge between new age internet ads (with real-time metrics) with old-school print ads (with the cozy feel of reading something real.) Its neat! Now how about developing it as sales tool for guys like me
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January 9th, 2009 at 18:03
hey Joakim,
That was a good read. Keep up the marketing tips. I couldn’t help but mention, there is something rather interesting within one of LeadLander’s competitors, called Visitor Track. I chose to go with them instead because of the extra information provided. I didn’t much more to add other than I’ll keep reading.
February 25th, 2009 at 15:33
The best tool out there that i have found for digital publishing is eMagCreator. this company sells the software rather than acting as a 3rd party to host and create your publications. You can make and publish as many mags/catalogs/etc. as you like and change them at your own will without being nickeled and dimed for every change. the software also has all the cool features you would want in a digital edition such as videos, google maps, google adware, reader tracking and the list goes on and on. I love this software…. and it is soooo simple to use!