The Townsend Report

With the ascendance of digital marketing, managing marketing initiatives has become more and more like managing software products, making Agile techniques attractive for your marketing department as well as your information technology department. I have found that Microsoft Teams is useful for managing marketing activities.  It provides all these capabilities at a reasonable cost: Task management . View your tasks as a list or as cards. Filter and sort in many ways. You can use task management to assign content creation, social media posts, advertising, event planning, and other activities.  Marketing calendar . Use the Teams calendar to show tradeshows and other events.  Digital asset storage . File your logos, documents, and other marketing assets where people can find them.  Teams has an app for Adobe Creative Cloud to share assets in Teams.  Integration with other Microsoft products . Teams is part of Office 365 and its integration with other apps can come in handy for marketing de

Simplicity is one of the keys to successful sales force automation.  This is one of the lessons of implementing customer relationship management (CRM) that is good that I must keep learning it again and again.   Here are my top reasons why it's better to keep it simple than to chase perfection: Sales people need to stay focused on sales .  The simpler your sales process and your tracking requirements, the more likely that they will be adopted by the sales force.  As requirements grow more complex, users will quietly revolt by failing to spend as much time as needed on data entry. Better compatibility with off-the-shelf CRM . Less customization can make it easier to handle upgrades and new features introduced by your CRM vendor.  Reduced implementation time . Less scope means less time and less cost before you go live.  Reduced training requirements . Fewer features reduces what you need to train and also leads to Reduced support and maintenance .  Asking for simplicity and sticking