Goodbye spreadsheets, hello collaborative marketing network
- Summary:
- Too often, tracking cross-organizational marketing campaigns involves complex spreadsheets. Workspan thinks it has a better way: collaborative marketing.
Amit Sinha, founder and Chief Customer Officer of Workspan believes he has a solution for you, and after getting a tour of the marketing network (which just recently when GA), I’m sold.
Sinha comes from SAP where he was VP of Marketing of Hana, leading the efforts to take Hana to market. Part of that market launch involved working with many partners and even more marketing campaigns. For instance, SAP has a deep partnership with Intel on the chip side, and together the two companies have over 200 marketing campaigns planned.
To manage the Hana go to market strategy, Sinha used spreadsheets. He would track by partner and events. He believed (and still believes) that partners are a key component of any GTM strategy. Partners give you access to new audiences, increase win rates dramatically, and offer a pull approach vs. a push approach (which means customers are coming to you). A collaborative GTM with partners also supports strong alliances and marketing opportunities with new launches and new ecosystems.
Still, managing activities involved in a collaborative GTM strategy with partners is daunting, and Sinha felt there was a better way to do it than complex spreadsheets.
Like Facebook for marketing
The closest comparison of Workspan is Facebook. Workspan is a many-to-many marketing network where a company can connect with partners and collaborate on campaigns. It’s simple. You sign up for the service and set up your campaigns and programs (called Funds in Workspan). Then, invite partners via email to join and collaborate on specific programs or campaigns. Invite your marketing agency, GTM market partners and even independent consultants who have a role in your marketing campaigns.
When you invite a partner to a campaign, you decide the role that partner plays. You have full control of security and access to your network. A “collaborator” has full access to the details of the entire campaign. A “participant” has access to everything except campaign funding details:
A campaign in Workspan has a number of features:
- Define goals such as revenue, pipeline or awareness
- Invite partners and employees
- Create work items and assign them to different people.
- Plan and approve assets - including offering features such as comments and updates.
- Notifications are sent via SMS, email, and there’s a messaging app directly in the service that people use when they are connected.
Everyone connected to Workspan can work with multiple partners by campaign or program, and if you are an administrator of your Workspan account, you can search Workspan to find other companies using the service you might want to connect and work with.
Programs (Funds) are a way to manage a collection of campaigns whether that’s by theme, project or campaign. A dashboard and a calendar give you a view of all your programs, and you can easily track tactics, activity, and financing across the board.
Sinha showed me a campaign that has eight partners. He demonstrated that each partner could view something different depending on how they were set up in the campaign. Partners can see each other, so there’s full disclosure of who is involved and what their role and activities are.
A feature I liked was the ability to make a copy of a campaign or program. So if you run the same style campaign with multiple partners, you can easily duplicate the campaign and invite a new partner. You can also select what parts of a campaign to copy if you don’t want all the elements.
Integration of key marketing technologies
With most campaigns, there are many technologies involved including marketing automation, CRM, social networks, analytics and productivity tools. Workspan includes integrations with Marketo, Salesforce, MS Dynamics, Eloqua, NewsCred, Kapost, Facebook, Twitter, Google and many others. The integration right now is one way where you pull data in from those systems. You also decide who in your company has access to use the integrations.
I liked that you could open an asset created in Google Docs directly in Workspan and do your review. It can be a pain to move between systems to perform campaign activities, having it all accessible in a single location is good for partners as well.
You can go back and look at your campaigns long after they are running. So if you’ve indicated a number of funds to invest in a campaign across activities, the integrations help you keep track of how that activity is performing. If you aren’t happy with how a campaign is performing, you can send a message to the campaign manager, change your funding allocation, or make other changes as needed.
Good campaign spark innovation. Sinha talked about opening campaigns up for discovery to help spark new ideas. Consider a campaign you run in one region. Other regions might see it and how it’s performing and want to get involved. They can send a request to join the campaign, or make a copy of it for their region.
Workspan recently announced its GA
Workspan is now available to anyone who wants to escape the pain of managing campaigns in spreadsheets. Sinha said they already have 70-75 companies using the platform. While he wouldn’t give me exact dollars for using the service, he did tell me that you don’t pay by number of campaigns or programs and you don’t pay by the number of users in your company or your partners’ companies. Sinha said they didn’t want to restrict what you do or who you work with.
Pricing is tiered, and the tiers are based on the amount of Funds (budget) you manage overall and the number of key relationships (partners) you manage.
My take
Partners can play a big role in helping you gain new business. The best partnerships collaborate closely and require a high level of trust to ensure everyone has bought into a campaign or program. Workspan opens the door to trust. It gives everyone involved in a campaign a clear view of what’s happening, where the spend is, and who is responsible for what. Individuals within companies and partners have their own view (My Work), where they can quickly see what they have to do across campaigns and programs. Sinha said that Workspan is about trust, providing a shared system of record for every campaign.
I manage partner marketing for a company, and we’re working hard to develop campaigns that leverage the best of what our partners and we bring to the table. I use a spreadsheet. I would use Workspan in a heartbeat. I would use it for more than managing campaigns that involve partners. I would use to manage campaigns overall. And while I know there are other solutions available to manage campaigns within a company, having a tool that would allow me to manage partner-based on non-partner based campaigns is a no-brainer for me.