Longwood Software's Access to Hot Assets

Marketing and sales solution provider Longwood Software announced early last week a new feature for its flagship TagTeam marketing materials management system. Its new "hot list" function allows sales and marketing teams to sort resources based on their own frequency of use and that of their peers, thereby alleviating the inconvenience of searching through an entire database for relevant materials.  

According to the company, the benefits of the solution are fourfold:

• identify, access, and manage the most-used items;
• receive automatic notices of new or updated items in the library;
• view the most popular items based on peers' use of the system; and
• manage personal profiles.

While the concept of a hot list has been around for a long time (e.g., favorites, bookmarks), Kimberly Collins, managing vice president of CRM at Gartner, says that this type of feature in a marketing and sales context is actually a unique application with what she calls "futuristic capabilities." Existing solutions provide personalization functions, such as dashboards, to present people with what they want to see, but as a Web 2.0 feature, the hot list can be accessed anywhere in TagTeam. What's particularly intriguing about the release, Collins adds, is the ability to promote collaboration and information-sharing within an organization. Not only can users identify their favorites, they can see what items are in use by peers who operate in the same role, providing them insight into resources they may not have been aware of otherwise.

Automatic notifications are particularly useful for sales teams working in the field, Collins notes. "A lot of times, people take out old marketing assets into the field.... They don't know something's been updated because they just keep pulling it from the same place," she says. With the new offering, users are alerted to new or updated information, ensuring they're equipped with the most relevant information, which in turn allows them to be more effective in the field.

For marketers, the problem often lies in the lack of insight into the materials they push out. "They lose complete visibility into whether it's being used or not, [or] if it's effective," Collins says. Therefore, she anticipates that as this solution gets more sophisticated and collaboration and internal discussion continues to grow, sales and marketing will develop a feedback loop that will communicate the benefit of having -- or not having -- a particular piece of content.

Hot list will work in conjunction with TagTeam Discussion, a product the company released this past April. Scott Richardson, Longwood's chief executive officer, describes it as "social networking for sales and marketing programs," and the company stresses several networking strengths enabled by the hot list:

• discussions;
• user-contributed content;
• peer group rankings; and
• a free exchange of insight about materials.

"Once you have drawn together a repository of your information, that information wants to get leveraged, reused, connected in a lot of different ways," Richardson says. After establishing a central resource center, he adds, the ultimate goal is to create an environment that promotes dialogue, collaboration, and contribution.

News relevant to the customer relationship management industry is posted several times a day on destinationCRM.com, in addition to the news section Insight that appears every month in the pages of CRM magazine. To contact the editors, please email editor@destinationCRM.com.   

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