Below you can read Nicole Hite's transcribed interview and watch it as a video.
My name is Nikole. I am the director of marketing for IMS Integrated Merchandising Solutions. We specialize in distance process outsourcing, which is a less fun way of saying that we execute in-store marketing for Fortune 500 retailers and brands. I would give RELAYTO a score of 10 out of 10.
What business problems are you solving with the product?
We primarily use RELAYTO to support business development and account growth goals. It facilitates content marketing and account-based selling tactics that we employ. For us, RELAYTO supports the entire sales cycle for initial outreach and lead capture. We use it to host white papers, case studies, and infographics.
As we migrate into the early stages of engagement with prospects, we transition into using Hubs, what we refer to as our prospect portals. They keep prospect-specific capabilities, presentations, and more curated content around products and services. Once we move into an opportunity stage, we transform those prospect portals into what essentially become RFP resource centers. As we work through what often ends up being months of back and forth with several rounds of RFP responses, presentations, and detailed analysis results, we need to keep organized and easily available to key stakeholders in the RFP process.
What we're working towards now is the next phase of how we'll transition Hubs from prospect and RFP centers into client resource centers as we onboard prospects with new clients. The idea is to have the Hub continue to be a tool to facilitate conversation and horizontal growth opportunities for our account teams.
What do you like in RELATO the most?
RELAYTO is intuitive and simple to use while also offering robust customization potential. I feel like most of the time you get one or the other, but rarely both in a tool. RELAYTO supports nonlinear and prospect-centered presentations at IMS.
Our solution offering is extensive and nuanced. Our sales teams need to be able to craft a conversation that addresses their prospects' immediate needs but also allows them to pivot when the conversation opens the door.
RELAYTO's robust navigation and linking structure support this with ease. Previously, we would have had to spend time editing a PowerPoint presentation into something that we could convert into a PDF. Then we would share it with our prospects only to have it buried in their inboxes. With RELAYTO, we can immediately follow up on a conversation by flipping a link to the piece of content or sending them a reminder of their copy URL.
Finally, I think the biggest piece for us is the analytics and security components. These go hand in hand. Our sales teams demand visibility into prospect activity in their areas of interest. RELAYTO features provide a level of security and visibility that we can't recreate in more traditional content formats.
What do you dislike?
At IMS, I feel like we are just scratching the surface of what's possible, and I wish that I had more bandwidth on our team to really blow out all the ways that we can exploit RELAYTO to engage with different segments of our audience. They're growing and adding new functionality so quickly that it's difficult to keep up with all of the new features.
What recommendations do you have for others considering?
I strongly believe that the quality of our prospect and client materials needs to match the level of the opportunity or the size of the prize, which necessitates a degree of customization that we can't achieve by recycling the same content for every conversation.
Similarly, today's customers are much savvier and expect a highly curated experience that linear presentation and traditional content collateral cannot support. The trick in my mind is to find a tool that delivers this degree of customization without requiring hours of setup, technical intervention, or creative resources to get these instances off the ground.
RELAYTO is the best tool that we've found that facilitates a bespoke prospect experience while allowing us to scale our output to meet the demands of a growing marketing department and a busy and productive sales team.
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