At our recent Hearsay Summit, Christine Duque and Nick Ingham from Deloitte Digital made a few provocative claims: (1) the customer experience is dead, and (2) corporate marketing efforts are generally ineffective at influencing the digital customer’s path to purchase. They shared the latest thinking in activating field agents as marketers, which was then brought to life in a demonstration by Audwin Tang, Hearsay’s Head of Solutions Consulting, who showcased how our latest integration with Salesforce marries the distributed and corporate marketing models.

Embracing the human experience

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Christine shared that 80% of the decisions we make each day are based on emotion, or emotional connection. So while corporate marketing can trigger product awareness, it takes an important life event to prompt action. Corporate marketers must help agents and advisors establish authentic rapport with clients, so that they can be trusted partners when that decision-making moment arrives.

Deloitte Digital’s financial services clients are exploring platforms and tools to help agents deepen those connections, while leveraging concurrent top-of-funnel marketing and the power of the data housed within these marketing platforms. This includes new capabilities being launched in and around CRM platforms, such as one-to-one personalized emails, personalized SMS with the likes of Hearsay’s platform, self-serve meeting requests, and the ability to add someone into a multi-channel journey.

Closing the loop with engagement

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Other trending tools include agent-specific sites, for some of the more complex products that are being sold, so that customers can better understand, and relate to, their direct representative in a given firm. Insights and action centers have also proven popular, since they enable a closed loop with marketing efforts. Whether engagement is via email or on the web, it is surfaced to the agent or advisor to then start that one-to-one conversation, or continue it within the CRM.

Activating distributed marketing success

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According to Nick and Christine, successful distributed marketing programs share these common traits:

Integration with the primary day-to-day platform. For an advisor or agent, needing to switch to a different platform or tab is often an inhibitor to success.

Adding the human touch to data-driven communications. Here, data is key. Advisors must be able to leverage data from prospect forms, CRM data on products owned, and insights from marketing, all from one centralized source.

Facilitating agent adoption. The programs that work best have a change management team that creates training materials, listens to the field, and provides a feedback loop to support agile delivery and implementation.

Commitment to fresh and high-quality content. Content must be compliant and consistent, of course, but should also allow the agent to incorporate that personal touch in their communications, to help build more genuine relationships with prospects and customers.

Stitching corporate and field marketing together

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In his technology demonstration, Audwin brought these concepts to life by showing how connecting Hearsay to Salesforce bridges the gaps between corporate data and field activities, creating a more connected and trackable customer journey.

The new Hearsay for Salesforce integration empowers embedded compliant texting from within Salesforce. Advisors and agents can send text messages directly from Salesforce, whether it’s from a lead, account or contact record, without losing context or switching from one system to another. The company can effectively manage brand control and compliance, while the advisor has the ability to have that informed, seamless conversation with the customer.

When those one-to-one activities are automatically captured within the CRM, the engagement history with that particular customer or prospect is enriched. Even with 100 or 200 customers, the advisor has the right context at his or her fingertips to drive a more productive conversation and form a better relationship with that customer.

Not only does that data help the advisor provide better service, but it is now available within the CRM to be leveraged by machine learning, or other technologies around prediction and forecasts. In a virtuous cycle, this new suite of engagement data can then be used to create better human experiences.

The best part about this demonstration? It’s not a vision of the future—it’s all available today.

Thank you to Christine, Nick and Audwin for painting a shared vision of how corporate and distributed marketing teams can partner together to drive a more optimal customer experience!

To view this and other sessions from Hearsay Summit 2021, visit our YouTube channel!