Using Allego for Marketing: An Inside Perspective
As Director of Product Marketing at Allego, I have found our platform to be an invaluable asset for marketers. Once you read the rest of this post, I think you’ll agree with me.
Because Allego is a growing software company in a dynamic industry, we constantly need to understand what’s going on in the market and be responsive to the needs of our sales force. It’s often difficult to obtain this information from them via face-to-face communications, web conferences, or even email because they’re busy, they travel, or are located remotely. Sometimes they just aren’t able to convey exactly what they need on the spot.
The Allego Difference for Sales and Marketing Alignment
Enter Allego. Upon joining the company, I immediately noticed that we collaborate extensively using our own software. Hardly a day goes by without one or more reps using Allego to share insights from the field that provide insight to departments across the organization. We don’t just talk about the power of Allego to share experiences, bounce ideas off each other, and promote best practices; we do it every day. This has made a big, positive difference in the way I do my job. Here are two examples:
1. Critical Updates from the Field
The other day, one of our senior sales reps recorded an Allego video to let peers in Sales know about a competitor’s new approach, and then laid out the best way to respond. Other reps jumped in to offer point-in-time feedback within the Allego video. I got to watch, listen to, and read this input, which took about two or three minutes to consume.
How did this help me? Instead of missing this information altogether–or finding it out too late–now I have documentary evidence to help me improve our material on competitors and fine-tune our positioning. I can refer to the Allego video as I update our documentation, and adapt some of the language for new and existing collateral.
If we hadn’t had Allego, the rep would have had to send a lengthy email which I may not have read (I’m just as guilty of not reading long emails as everyone else), and it’s unlikely that peers would have participated in the process. In this case, using Allego made a big difference for me, improving my ability to gather competitive information and synthesize it into useful assets for Sales.
2. Sales Feedback
Here’s another example: We recently rolled out an updated sales presentation–which, if you’re a marketer, you know can be a painful undertaking. To me, the most challenging part about creating sales presentations is gaining consensus among a group of opinionated stakeholders. The only way to do it is to get them all to communicate with each other, but putting them in a single room is typically a non-starter because of scheduling and distance issues.
Using Allego, I created a voice-over-PowerPoint version of the pitch and shared it with team members, who watched it at their convenience and then offered either text or audio feedback asynchronously. Viewers were able to use point-in-time feedback to piggy-back on each others’ comments using computers or mobile devices, helping us reach consensus much more quickly than virtually any other method I’ve used. In many ways, it was even better than having them in the same room, since participants were able to pause and compose cogent responses inline during the video playback, rather than speaking extemporaneously during a live session, where such conversations sometimes veer off into digressions or end up in stalemates.
3. …And More Ways Allego Helps Marketers
There are many more examples of how Allego helps me, such as:
- Updating the field quickly
- Easily introducing new assets along with information on how to use them
- Rapidly creating video content that can be used for sales and marketing activities
- Tracking asset use to see what content resonates with internal and external audiences
To me, Allego is an indispensable asset for a marketer. I bet you’ll also feel the same way once you start using it!