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FISION empowers both sales reps and marketing teams to rapidly localize and deploy content across any channel with minimal need for a back and forth between departments. Consumers now demand the right message, at the right time. FISION empowers massive enterprises that have a multinational presence to better connect with their customers in a way that is on brand, on topic, and legally compliant. Below is our interview with Mike Brown, CEO at FISION:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to FISION?
A: Global organizations face massive challenges managing their content creation, collaboration, storage, and distribution. Meanwhile, every company wants to generate more sales. Having a great product is only half the battle – the other half is communicating who you are and what you do in a way that resonates with consumers. It’s commonly thought that the average American is exposed to between 4,000 – 10,000 advertisements per day. Only the brands that can get their messages through to really connect with a customer will make any difference amongst all the noise.
FISION has discovered that enterprise companies conducting large numbers of transactions with massive customer bases have big problems keeping their digital assets organized so that they can be effectively used by sales and marketing teams. For many clients, locating current, on-brand assets and localized campaign materials for their sales reps across a global enterprise was virtually impossible before adopting FISION.
On average, 75% of marketing assets go unused, simply because salespeople don’t need them. With FISION, marketing departs know what salespeople need, and sales people can easily tweak their content on demand based on what they think customers will respond to in the field. Furthermore, sales reps often spend an insane amount of time looking for the content they need – with FISION, all of their collateral is right at their fingertips allowing them to spend more time selling.
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Q: What kind of solutions do you provide to your customers?
A: Our primary solution is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Sales Enablement Platform. Our DAM platform puts all of an organization’s assets and collateral in one centralized location. With support for over 200 document types, it provides marketing teams a central repository where they can ensure that all of their collateral is easily accessible to the entire company. Users can find exactly what they need—exactly when they need it, with expedited search and no more off-brand versioning. FISION’s centralized, cloud-based library gives complete control over how company assets are stored, retrieved and used.
Furthermore, we’ve built sales enablement tools on top of that digital asset management platform that empower sales reps to easily tweak pre-approved marketing content to meet the demands of their local customer base. Content is provisioned and can only be changed according to very strict permissions set out by the organization, meaning that a sales rep has the ability to change an email or a social post within the brand and legal frameworks set out by the rest of the organization without needing to contact another department.
We also recently acquired Volerro, a SaaS platform that simplifies how enterprise teams create, refine, and distribute content. By streamlining content production and team coordination, Volerro’s cloud-based collaboration service eliminates ‘content chaos’ among product, brand, marketing, and creative teams. Volerro also has the ReVu.Me cloud app that allows team members to work on the same document in real-time with integrated chat and voice conferencing. We’ve recently signed a Super Bowl-winning, National Football League team on as a customer for the product.
Q: How do you make sales teams more effective?
A: Traditionally, when a sales rep needs a piece of marketing collateral he has two options: to call his marketing department and wait for the assets he needs to be created, or he goes out and pulls something together himself. In large organizations, there is so much marketing content scattered across systems, finding the appropriate piece of collateral is often an unsolvable problem in and of itself. Good sales reps don’t have time to wait for content, they want to get their material in front of customers so that they can close more deals. And the best sales reps understand that the material they put in front of customers needs to cater to those customers specific needs and demands. Providing general marketing collateral often just doesn’t suffice, especially in today’s world where so much information is targeted to an individual based on their needs and wants.
With FISION, sales reps can quickly localize and tweak pre-approved marketing content for whatever they need, wherever they need it. For industries, like finance and banking, where legal compliance is a priority, a solution like ours is particularly helpful as we empower sales teams to change marketing collateral while ensuring that it is both brand and legally compliant.
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Q: You’ve received a patent for your technology; what makes it so innovative?
A: We have received an extensive patent, which covers both our proprietary systems and methods-of-use, and further validates the exceptional level of innovation and capability represented in our FISION platform, as well as the unique value proposition we offer our enterprise customers and channel partners worldwide. In addition to establishing a significant competitive barrier to entry, this protection of our core technology delivers a dramatic enhancement to shareholder value.
Our core innovations include the ability to onboard clients rapidly, taking their existing assets and putting them into our digital asset management platform in record time. From there, we have a multi-tenant, multi-tiered system that allows organizations to provision which content is accessible to which teams or individual employees. For massive companies, this control is absolutely paramount, as they need to ensure that some content is accessible to everyone while other documents and digital assets are kept behind gates. The tools we’ve built on top of our core platform to empower sales reps to do things like customize email and social campaigns, send custom content directly to a number of printers, or collaborate with marketing departments in real time puts us well ahead of the competition in terms of our capabilities.
Q: What are your plans for 2018?
A: We have two primary goals for the upcoming year: to bring on new clients and partners, and we’re focused on growing our team.
Some of our existing customers already include a number of Fortune 500 companies from a range of industries, including a global financial services company, an operator of the world’s largest business network, a top global manufacturer of “people movers,” and one of the nation’s largest retail chains. We’re looking to add to that roster in the coming year. Similarly, we’re filling a real gap in the market between CRM solutions like salesforce and marketing automation platforms like hubspot. As such, we’re building great partnerships with companies on both sides of the marketing and sales technology stack like Marketo and Oracle, and we’re looking at some new and interesting partnerships for 2018.
With all this growth comes an increasing demand for top talent to join our team. We received two top places to work awards in 2017 for having a great culture, we’ve partnered with local startup events to help the ecosystem in the Twin Cities to continue to grow and support companies like ours, and we’re actively seeking to fill a number of positions.
