Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Dear Andrew

I’m one of your subscribers and I thoroughly enjoy the Black and White marketing newsletter. The latest offering – the 8 hour marketing plan is a splendid example of how good advice can organise and prioritise a process which at first glance can look totally daunting.

I’ll send you a private email to cover the details, but in essence, I am building a circulation for an informative newsletter on the following:

CRM – All aspects for SME businesses. This is not an attempt to replicate the breadth of CRM GURU but a focussed look at how small systems can provide big benefits quickly in contact management, marketing, sales analysis, customer service, e-marketing, response handling and my own, PRM- Prospect relationship marketing.

Sales Performance Management – Forecasting and the analysis of in-house and field sales activity.

Prediction, Planning and Forecasting – From how to construct a sales budget and a sales plan, to how to forecast ongoing sales in an organisation. Also how to handle complex data to arrive at predictions and trends derived from past sales and past market information. We will also cover how to tie it in to the marketing plan so that the whole thing adds up.

Implementation and management of this process using manual techniques, spreadsheets, statistical software, CRM systems and dedicated forecasting programmes. How to manage the human interface (I am also a sales and sales management trainer)

It struck me that your business is very much synergistic to these areas – by and large, except when it comes to managing the marketing process, we don’t appear to overlap.

Sales Forecasting should be a no-brainer for all sales managers, sales directors and MD’s but in reality, many of them are scared about what the figures will reveal. What skeletons might fall out of their closets!

My target was therefore to organically grow a circulation on 3000 over the year of people who would direct from this kind of informative content. I had also envisaged the possibility of being approached by other list owners but have not yet factored these into any growth plans – so far, a distance learning and a sales training organisation has asked if they can participate (They want our content for their clients) and we will be launching a sales performance management blog with two leading experts in this field in March.

I hope that we can look at doing something together. Good marketing advice such as you offer actually makes the job of selling CRM, Analysis and Forecasting a little easier because clients are already looking at numbers and ways or reporting and analysing them, rather than generating pages of waffle!

Best wishes


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions