Frequent Communications Drive Sales, and E-Marketing Generates Awareness

Ran across a couple of things today that caught the eye....over 30 manufacturers are involved in ElectricSmart's e-Cat launch (including some surprising names), ABB used a convention specific blog and did you know that good sales and marketing requires 14 times?

And now the specifics:

• ElectricSmart is launching its SmarteCat product on Saturday night at the NAED Leadership Summit.  The catalog has over 30 manufacturers in the initial launch.  Some of the participating manufacturers are Rockwell Automation, Schneiddr Electric, GE Energy, GE Lighting, Lutron, IDEAL, Ronk, Shat-R-Shield, Thomas & Betts and Philips / Advance.  An impressive array.  The service looks interesting, and if someone signs up for a Premium account, they can have access to pricing. Can easily print or email specific pages to customers (or to self).  And it's neat how there are featured videos embedded into catalogs. The tour is a nice feature.

What this shows is that manufacturers are convinced that more and more customers (end-users and contractors) are looking for information on the web.  I don't know the pricing, but if it is inexpensive enough, could envision manufacturers using this as another document repository to reach more customers.

• ABB held their Automation & Power World Conference last week in Orlando.  Impressive show with over 5000 attendees.  They blogged from the show, sharing important information from various speakers.  Nice way to communicate to various audiences. With the growth in social marketing, this is the tip of the iceberg in how manufacturers, or distributors, can extend the reach of a face-to-face meeting to enable non-attendees to gain value.
• Reportedly 14 is the magic number, as in the number of times you should contact an "inactive" customer to capture some awareness from them. While no salesperson wants to call on a customer 14 times to hear "no, we don't need anything", marketing can play a big role in developing an "interactive sales and marketing engagement strategy".  Marketing has the ability to be an "alternative sales person", helping maintain relationships, share information and eventually generate revenue. This article states 14, I've also seen 18, but the point of the matter is "frequency of communication captures mindshare, mindshare captures marketshare." Do you have an integrated sales and marketing engagement strategy? Do you believe that non-sales engagement can generate sales?

Do you communicate 14 times to underperforming customers? Are you actively marketing via "e"? Should distributors market via "e" or is this a manufacturer's way of going around the channel? Or are they defending their brand in support of the channel?