Hydar Al Ammar (Seismic), Karen Powell (McCorkell), Matthew Verity (Artis Group)
Sales and marketing enablement software provider Seismic, business management consultancy Artis Group and business to business (B2B) agency McCorkell have formed an alliance to address sales and marketing gaps in Australian and New Zealand businesses.
According to a statement by Seismic, the alliance brings together the provider’s sales and marketing enablement platform, Artis’ technology expertise and McCorkell’s content strategy and marketing technology (martech) consulting capabilities.
Hydar Al Ammar, strategic alliances director for Asia Pacific (APAC) at Seismic, said that the alliance would assist businesses handle the disruption of purchasing products and services by digital technology.
“When we talked to customers, it became clear that some of them had needs or challenges in earlier stages of their marketing transformation journey, such as content creation,” Al Ammar said.
“These are areas where McCorkell would be able to provide value. Likewise, they also had to deal with the complexities of integrating multiple technologies with their CRM [customer relationship management] systems, which is where Artis’ expertise comes in."
By forming an alliance across the customer value chain, according to Al Ammar, the companies can be more proactive in helping customers solve their challenges or attain their business objectives earlier in their journey and support them from start to end.
"This fosters stronger customer relationships," Al Ammar said.
Al Ammar claimed the benefits for customers of the alliance include “higher win rates, faster deal progression and greater sales efficiency, in addition to creating more engaging, personalised customer experiences".
According to Matthew Verity, head of business consulting at Artis Group, the alliance also offers what he refers to as the “final mile” in selling.
“People are being very concerned about getting data captured in the CRM software, and they're using all these reporting tools to find out how to manipulate that data, but they're not actually using it in an intelligent manner to actually drive the seller to get the best results,” he said.
“So, we've gone through putting CRM in, we've gone into putting in marketing tools and martech around email campaign management and content management. What's kind of been lost in that is how do we now effectively get the seller to use those tools in an effective manner to sell to the buyer in an effective way?
“What Sesimic offers is the ability for us to go in there and tie those systems together and say, 'We're now going to get uplisting your CRM by providing Seismic as a tool to drive you to the right content at the right time.'”
He added that Artis, via the alliance, is then able to assist customers in using Seismic’s platform in a natural way.
The alliance is currently available for large enterprises and mid-sized businesses in Australia and New Zealand with plans to expand into Asia in the future.
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