Lisa Dennis, President of Knowledgence Associates

It is imperative that sales, marketing, and customer service people all know how to both speak to and listen to their customers. But it is equally important that these departments speak and listen to one another. Each of these divisions receives different information from different customers. This information needs to be shared across the sales, marketing, and customer service lines. The power of the three combined dwarfs the effectiveness of any one of these departments alone.

In this presentation, based on the book, 360 Degrees of the Customer we’ll demonstrate that no longer can we view the customer simply through the sales lens, or the marketing lens, or the service lens. Instead, we should think about the integration of these roles from a customer perspective:

• Marketing – Making the Promise
• Sales – the Listener & Relationship Builder
• Customer Service – the Promise Keeper

This presentation presents a handful of the 100 strategies & tactics provided in the book.

Reserve your seat today!

About Lisa: Lisa Dennis brings over twenty-five years of marketing and sales to client engagements.  She has hands-on experience with both the marketing and selling of business-to-business and business-to-consumer products and services.  She also has system enhancement and design experience for marketing and sales applications.  Her consulting firm serves clients in high technology, insurance, manufacturing, healthcare, and professional services. Clients include Akamai, Citrix, Dell, GTE, HP, Mutual of Omaha, Pegasystems and Tufts Health Plan.

The focus of Knowledgence Associates is the transforming of marketing, sales, and customer service information into customer knowledge. That transformation enables clients to truly “see the world through the customers’ eyes.” The firm’s consulting practice includes marketing strategy, value proposition development, positioning, customer service assessment programs, sales effectiveness assessments, and sales & service training.  Prior to founding Knowledgence Associates in 1997, she held publishing, product management and marketing/sales roles at Bolt Beranek and Newman, Thomson & Thomson (a member company of Thomson Reuters), The Center for Business Intelligence, and World Congress.

Samples of past projects have included:

• Create marketing strategy, for both print and web, for a high-end winery focusing on the baby boomer market, including internet strategy, event strategy and marketing execution of programs and campaigns.
• Redesign sales process, scripting and messaging for sales representatives selling health insurance direct to consumers – including positioning, sales training, and coaching.
• Design and development of an extensive Partner Readiness Program for the channel alliance organization for one of the largest Internet infrastructure companies in the U.S – rolled out to 650 sales people and 20 Fortune 500 partners.
• Development of a product plan for the Canadian marketplace for a Montreal-based subsidiary of a U.S. information provider.  Project included surveying current product array, identifying strengths and weaknesses, competitive product analysis, review of U.S. versus Canadian market impressions, and providing a recommendation for product strategy.
• Creation of a Value Proposition Handbook for a high tech company with a national sales force utilizing partners.  Created a print and electronic manual that delivered joint value propositions sales prompters for every partner.  Partners  included  IBM, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Microsoft, BroadVision, Ariba, Lante, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, CISCO, EMC, Sapient, Nortel, and Sun Microsystems.

Lisa has served on the boards of the YWCA of Cambridge, fundraising for Hinge for Hope, a welfare-to-work-to-profession program; Positive Directions, a human services organization assisting those living with or affected by HIV/AIDS; and The Children’s Room, an agency focusing on the needs of children who have lost a parent.  She is on the board of Sales and Marketing Executives International, and president of  the Boston chapter,  and founder of the Boston Cell of Fast Company magazine’s Company of Friends network. She has a B.A in Writing from Wheaton College, and an MBA in Marketing from Babson College.

 

Meal: Butternut Squash Ravioli