Last month’s article discussed the need for more effective business content, and how companies should begin to develop some of their content with the same quality focus they give their products and services. It also reviewed the state of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) market and how supporting Total Quality Content (TQC) is a natural extension of the current value proposition that could accelerate the industry’s growth rate.

Part one suggested a simple way to measure content quality and effectiveness and introduced a new strategic business practice for marketing and sales organizations called Message Management. Message Management is a systematic way to implement a total quality program through out the content life cycle, and it could become a “Killer App” for ECM, because of the impact it has on a company’s sales results.

Part II explores the practice of Message Management in greater detail and puts some flesh on the strategies, processes, and technologies that will make the TQC vision a reality. It also identifies some of the risks the ECM industry faces if it continues to ignore this important issue.

The practice of Message Management will evolve over time as the TQC concept becomes mainstream, the industry embraces the vision, and companies experiment with new ideas, new processes, and new technologies. This article just scratches the surface, and while it provides a basic roadmap, its main purpose is to ignite a more robust and broader discussion on TQC, and generate some intellectual momentum that ECM vendors and their customers can capitalize on.

Message Management Overview

Message Management is to marketing and sales organizations what Total Quality Manufacturing is to the manufacturing sector. It enables companies to improve content effectiveness through a life cycle content management strategy that combines quality processes and best practices that are supported by modern content management technology.

Like TQM, Message Management impacts both the top and the bottom line. Improving the quality and effectiveness of marketing materials and sales intelligence increases strategic advantage along with short-term revenue. Additionally, the processes that drive content quality can also reduce the cost of content development and maintenance.

Message Management focuses on improving the value of the message, the quality of the writing, and the impact of the delivery experience. There are three building blocks that enable this improvement.

1. A set of six strategic principles that drive content quality and effectiveness
2. A structured content planning and message development process
3. An implementation process that leverages the six strategic principles

SIX Strategic Principles

Embrace Customer Centric Messaging

Customers buy because they want solutions to their problems. Traditional marketing and sales content, however is product and feature function focused. Message Management is based upon the principle that the customer need is central to the message and that marketing & sales content should be written from the customer’s perspective. While product functionality and differentiation are important to sales success, these should not stand alone, and should be specifically tied to the issues that are relevant to the customer.

Adopt a 360-Degree View

Companies should manage all of their marketing and sales content in a coordinated fashion. This includes “public content” for prospects and customers and “private content” for the sales and partner channels. In most companies these two categories are managed independently in a stovepipe fashion, resulting in significant duplication and inconsistencies.

In addition to the public and private stovepipes, marketing and sales content is typically produced and managed in a reactionary and fragmented manner, not as part of a well thought out plan. A vocal sales person corners a product manager at an office party, and all of a sudden a new set of collateral for that product (which may not reflect the company’s strategic direction) is being created. Or, a sales executive sees a sales person mishandle an objection or miss an opportunity to lay a trap for the competition, and the next day, a new sales training manual becomes a high priority. This reactionary and spontaneous approach to creating content is expensive, and it increases duplication and inconsistencies.

Taking a 360-degree view means managing public and private content, including content contained in enterprise systems like CRM, in a coordinated and systematic fashion. This can best be accomplished with a modern content management system that integrates with other enterprise software, and provides the workflow to rationally manage volatility.

Less Is More

Simplifying the message is the “Holy Grail” of Marketing and Sales organizations, and Message Management promotes simplification through a structured approach to content development combined with a “less is more” philosophy. This goes against today’s “bigger is better” culture that results in products with more features than we can ever use, “super sized” meals, teachers who grade term papers based on their size, and information overload.

Instead, Message Management puts a premium on textual efficiency and managing content in smaller more logical chunks for more effective electronic delivery. Lets face it, a lot of people don’t like to read any way, and computer screens make reading and absorbing information even more difficult.

A less is more philosophy helps companies simplify their message, and systematically reduce the overall amount of marketing and sales content they produce. Combined with a 360-degree view, it results in less documents, less web pages, less words, less duplication, and less inconsistencies.

Transfer Knowledge…Don’t Just Disseminate Information

The more you educate a person, the more you influence their thinking and behavior. To be effective, marketing and sales content needs to engage the reader and provide them with a productive learning experience. This requires marketing and sales organizations to understand that they are in the knowledge transfer business, and that they don’t just disseminate information. They need to approach content development and delivery as a critical knowledge transfer function with the end objective being how well the reader comprehends and retains the information.

This knowledge transfer perspective is closely aligned to a less is more philosophy, and it has profound implications on the way content is created and delivered, and how marketing and sales organizations gather and share sales intelligence.

Increase Channel Value

Sales channels are expensive, and they are most effective when they are well informed, passionate about their offering, and providing tangible value to their prospects and customers. With the disintermediation of much of the face-to-face contact during the sales cycle, companies need to insure the channels are one step ahead of the market, saying the right things at the right time, and, adding value in the customer’s eyes. This can be accomplished through more effective sharing of sales intelligence and best practices, web based sales coaching systems, and content customization tools that leverage the channel’s personal interactions and increase their value and professionalism in the eyes of their prospects and customers.

Continuously Improve The Content

Message Management is a continuous improvement strategy that reflects the realities of today’s fast changing market places and a shortened message shelf life. Keeping content current and relevant has a significant impact on over all marketing and sales effectiveness. With a less is more philosophy, review cycles, and effective measurement and feedback systems, keeping content up to date and relevant can easily be accomplished.

The Content Planning & Messaging Process

The first two steps in a Message Management initiative are developing a comprehensive content plan that defines an Integrated Content Framework (ICF), and establishing a formal positioning and message development process that generates a central Positioning and Message Knowledge Base (PMKB).

The ICF identifies the various types of public and private content that the company will produce, and how they relate to each other and the sales process. It establishes broad development and update responsibilities, as well as priorities and a strategic direction for each type of content. The ICF should also contain a consistent structure for sharing sales intelligence on the market, competitors, prospect issues, qualifying techniques, and other best selling practices.

The PKMB is a central knowledge base containing the most current positioning, value propositions, and differentiation for the company and each product or service. Managing the messages centrally in a PKMB creates a resource for content developers that improves content quality and consistency, and it also helps every body in the enterprise deliver the message more consistently.

The PMKB is the heart of the ICF, and it is where Customer Centric Messaging begins. The PMKB can start out as simply as a document or it can be implemented as an XML database. This database could eventually become the core of an enterprise wide marketing and sales content repository that integrates sales coaching with marketing collateral, dynamically generates personalized content, and provides the sales channels with robust content customization capability.

Message Management Implementation

Implementing the content plan and leveraging the six strategic principles is facilitated through a three phase “closed loop” improvement process that is built around the Integrated Content Framework. This simple model also provides the ECM industry with a framework for organizing the technologies and best practices required to make the TQC vision a reality.

Integrated Content Framework

The centerpiece of a Message Management implementation is the ICF that was developed during the content planning process. While it is impossible to manage all marketing and sales content in a single physical database, the use of XML to implement the logical architecture of the ICF will enable a 360-degree view for content developers, IT professionals and users alike. XML also allows companies to manage content in smaller more logical chunks for more effective reuse, personalization, security, customization, globalization, and measurement.

Almost all ECM vendors are increasing their support of XML, broadening their ability to deal with more complex content models, and enhancing their interfaces to other enterprise applications. In the future they should all be able to support highly granular XML models enable the integration of marketing collateral and sales intelligence in a single ICF that more accurately reflects the relationship between a company’s products and services, the customer needs, the competition, and best sales practices.

Companies like Ventaso have already developed elaborate marketing and sales content models based on XML, and although most companies don’t need this level of sophistication yet, they should all begin learning how to leverage smaller chunks of content in a more rational manner. A simple way to get started, for example, would be to manage all marketing, sales, and customer service FAQs in an XML database with multiple views.

Creating Better Quality Content

Message Management helps people create more effective marketing and sales content through a structured content development approach that leverages the Positioning and Message Knowledge Base.

There are several other techniques that improve the content creation process and more will be developed as Message Management and the TQC movement evolve. A few that can be implemented today include

1. Encouraging people to create content primarily for electronic distribution. This produces a natural pressure for brevity, and reflects the strategic principle that less is more.
2. Provide collaborative content development tools and templates for subject matter experts. Most ECM vendors provide simple content templates and some are embracing collaborative technologies. In the future they should develop more robust ‘knowledge templates” that could leverage the structure of the PKMB.
3. Use story-telling techniques, especially in capturing and sharing sales intelligence. Case studies and reference stories are some of the most effective marketing and sales content because they have patina of legitimacy that other collateral lacks. This same sense of legitimacy can be applied to sales success stories and best selling practices. Marketing and sales effectiveness companies like Corporate Visions (corporatevisions.com) have been able to significantly increase sales performance by helping their clients become better storytellers.
4. Train people in better writing skills. Writing for better knowledge transfer is not an “art”, and people can learn the skills and techniques to create more effective content. Information Mapping (infomap.com) for example, provides training in a methodology that significantly reduces writing, update, and reading time, while it increases comprehension and retention rates.

Improving the Content delivery Experience

As Pine and Gilmore conclude in their landmark book “The Experience Economy”, differentiation and value come from providing a more pleasing and memorable customer experience. From a Message Management perspective, this means creating a more engaging and productive knowledge transfer experience for prospects, customers, and sales people.

The content delivery experience can be enhanced through better web site design, better taxonomies and site organization, improved searching, automatic categorization, and traditional personalization technologies. There is a constantly evolving body of knowledge on these techniques and technologies, and some ECM vendors are aggressively incorporating them into their offerings

The user experience can also be enhanced with what I call “Active Content” that:

• Enables more conversational interactions with structured information
• Provides users with more “outside-in” functionality

A lot of marketing and sales content is organized in a hierarchical fashion. If some of this content, like FAQs and feature lists for example, were managed as XML objects, it could be delivered in a more interactive and conversational fashion using a hierarchical display metaphor like the folders system in Windows. This will result in a more three-dimensional web page that would allow users to drill down while minimizing the loss of context that occurs with scrolling and page jumps.

Another way to make content more active is through “outside-in” functionality that helps users do various things with the content. This leverages the concept that content is an asset and it complements the “inside-out" approach of personalization, were the software presumes it is smarter than the visitor about what content is relevant. Outside-in functionality gives the user more options to repurpose the content personalize their experience. It also saves them time and effort, and reduces some of the frustrations of browsing the web.

An example of outside-in functionality is a web page that has a “printer friendly” version. This enhances the user’s experience by making the content more attractive, reducing print time, and saving paper. Companies like clikability (clickability.com) have developed other outside-in capabilities, and I believe this kind of user friendly functionality will be commonplace as users demand a richer web experience, and content is created and delivered in smaller more logical chunks.

I stumbled upon the need for more outside-in functionality a few years ago when I funded the development of a prototype of a smarter knowledge gathering capability called “eNotes” that allowed people to clip and organize small chunks of web content in a “Knowledge Cart”. I couldn’t figure out a viable business model for eNotes and concluded that Microsoft and Netscape would eventually build a smarter “cut & paste” functionality into their browsers. Instead of throwing the code away however, I created “my-enotes.com” and allowed people to down load the prototype for free just to see what would happen. There are now over 25,000 eNotes users, and I get a several emails every week from people who love the product.

Another way to leverage outside-in thinking to improve the delivery of content and, at the same time, leverage the sales channels, is to implement robust content customization tools that help sales people quickly personalize marketing materials and correspondence for their prospects and customers. Providing simple customization functionality for creating better letters and emails, improving proposal generation, and customizing white papers will leverage the content, reinforce the message, and significantly increase the effectiveness of the sales channels.

Evaluate The Content

Effective Message Management requires a systematic measurement and feedback system to continually gather input, update sales intelligence, and better understand how prospects, customers, and sales people use the content. Feed back on sales intelligence is especially important, and requires not only discipline and management attention, but also reward and recognition systems that support a knowledge sharing culture.

As the industry begins to support more outside–in customization, the measurement of what users actually do with the content becomes possible. Outside-in actions like printing a page or sending it to a friend are much more telling than page hits, and are a clear indication that the user saw something of value. Clickability provides a suite of metrics on these and other actions, and if Microsoft and Netscape implement smarter cut & paste functionality like eNotes in their browsers, it would be interesting to know which content people valued enough to put in their knowledge cart, or which FAQs are being captured by users on a regular basis.

Summary

Message Management has the potential to become the “Killer App” for content management and to capitalize on the TQC opportunity the ECM industry needs to

1. Broaden the ECM vision to include all marketing and sales content and all three stages of the content life cycle
2. Make improving content quality and effectiveness a key part of the value proposition
3. Create quality focused user groups and conferences with tracks that focus on TQC
4. Establish new partnerships with marketing and sales effectiveness companies and marketing agencies who help customers create content
5. Enhance the current technology through partnerships and new development to:
   • Actively support more granular and logical applications of XML so a 360-degree view can become a reality
   • Leverage their customer’s best practices with new workflow functionality
   • Include better content authoring wizards and knowledge templates that reinforce more effective writing techniques
   • Support more active content, and offer more outside-in customization functionality for web visitors and well and sales channels
   • Provide improved measurement and feedback systems

The ECM vendors could miss this market opportunity however, if a CRM powerhouse like Siebel or Oracle makes Message Management the next logical step in their marketing and sales effectiveness strategy. They already have access to the CEO and the Marketing and Sales Executives, and all they need to do to grab the initiative is acquire a small content management vendor and wrap the concept of TQC into their sales pitch.

The ECM vendors are best positioned to exploit the TQC vision from a product and technology perspective however because of their inherent process and workflow orientation and the fact that the need to improve quality and effectiveness extends beyond marketing and sales content. More effective content is good for everybody, and it is now time for industry analysts and customers to start asking the ECM vendors to define their strategy for TQC. The first major vendor who climbs on this bandwagon has the potential to change the game and become the gorilla in the ECM market place.

Bob Schmonsees (bobs@web2one.com) is the CEO of Web2one, Inc. Web2one helps B2B companies accomplish more of the selling process on the Web. Its patented Interactive Product Page software replaces static product descriptions with highly conversational and personalized prospect education and self-qualification sessions that clearly differentiate a company’s products and services, generate higher quality leads, and shorten the sales cycles. He has managed high tech marketing and sales organizations of all sizes for more than 27 years.