October 17, 2005
Mixing it up | Laurie Banks says bringing sales and marketing together will bring her ad agency new clients
By Andy Vietze
The idea came to Laurie Banks about a year and a half ago while she was attending a trade show in Chicago on behalf of a client. "I was just listening to all of these people talk and thinking there has to be a way to help both revenue-producing divisions of these companies," she says, referring to the sales and marketing departments.
So Banks, who is the Banks in Perry & Banks, the long-time Portland advertising firm, has spent the past year slowly turning her idea into a reality, and she now has a few clients who have signed on to see if it works ˆ and a list of others she says are waiting in the wings. Banks thinks it has the potential to be huge.
The idea? "I call it integrated sales and marketing," says the 49-year-old Fort Fairfield native. She has spent more than 20 years working in advertising and broadcasting in Maine, and she says her new offering is just the sort of thing businesses in the state need to take their marketing to a new level. Integrated sales and marketing sounds simple enough, and the 69,300 sites you find if you type the phrase into Google suggests that it's not exactly a new idea. Banks says her concept of pairing the two is new, though ˆ so new she's had a difficult time coming up with a one-sentence pitch to sell it to businesses. "We're working on our elevator speech now," she says.
She's happy to explain it at length. "Sales and marketing are two different departments [at most companies] and their charters are different and even at odds. Sales is based on the short term, marketing is long term," she says. "I figured if you could figure out ways to pull them together, offer those services under one roof ˆ it's like chocolate and peanut butter."
How does one do that? Here's an example. "For many of our clients, trade shows are their life blood," she says. "They can walk away from a show with 2,000-4,000 good leads ˆ that's a lot to manage. So I said, 'Give us those leads; we can prequalify them.'"
If a client's sales team is planning a business trip to Dallas, she explains, they can go online to Perry & Banks' custom database and see which of the businesses they met at the trade show are in the area. "We'll contact them and ask, 'What interested you about our client?'" Then Perry & Banks' new call center staff will follow up on the lead. They'll send e-mail press releases, product updates, white papers and other promotional material directly to the people who have shown interest in their client, so that the client is always considered when a potential customer is ready to do business.
"We'll keep the relationship going so that when the sales person is ready, the relationship is still warm," says Banks. "This allows our client to use their sales people to do what they do best, which is face-to-face selling and closing. Sales people hate cold calling ˆ we do that for them."
All this sounds like plain old sales. But Banks insists that adding it to an already experienced advertising team makes a powerful new beast. Marketing and sales execs can have a common strategy. "The beauty of having marketing and sales under one roof is that marketing can be more in tune with what the market needs," she says. "A very successful marketing campaign includes research. With our contact center in house, we can get very close to what our clients need. We can get immediate and personal information so they can almost use retail-type marketing techniques in business-to-business sales."
Still, while Banks' concept of integrated sales and marketing is an approach that is arguably more comprehensive than has been tried in the past, it's not really all that new. Portland-based WebDirect Advertising has been doing lead generation ˆ even providing leads for its clients' customer centers to generate sales ˆ since the company's inception four years ago, says operations manager Dana Given. The company is a subsidiary of the Cumberland-based Jordan Group, which does more traditional print and radio advertising, so in a way, it's offering those services in addition to sales help. "And [we're] not just providing leads," Given notes. "We take it to the next level of actually making a sale. One of our clients is Children International, a charitable nonprofit, and we've been doing the equivalent of sales closing for them."
Banks says she'd never heard of WebDirect before, but that what the company is offering is different. "It sounds to me like they do direct-response marketing," she says. "We're full-service marketing."
Proving the concept
Banks has been in advertising in some form or another since the early 80s. After graduating from the University of Maine with a degree in journalism, she got a job behind the camera at Channel 2 in Bangor. From there she went to public television, where she was promotions director, and then it was on to a media buyer job at Chellis, Conwell, Gale, at the time one of Portland's biggest advertising agencies. It was a short-lived stint. "Agencies are fairly volatile, and new management came and ran it into the ground within two years," she says. "I learned from it, though, that you have to be honest and ethical at all times when you're given the trust of your clients."
That was 1986, and Banks was in a tough situation. "I was four months pregnant when it failed," she says. "And nobody hired pregnant women back then." She ended up working a couple of years for Linda Lee, a former Chellis exec who had started her own company, and then she reconnected with Lee Perry, with whom she'd worked at Chellis. "He came to me and said, "I always though you and I would make great business partners." In 1989 they launched Perry and Banks Marketing. Before long the duo had landed Bass Shoe, and a raft of big name clients followed. "We did projects for L.L. Bean, Sears, Fox Lumber, we had banking accounts," Banks says. "We had a mix of business-to-business and retail accounts. It all happened really quickly." Everything was on the ups ˆ and then in 1997 Lee Perry died suddenly.
Banks continued on, weathering a recession that saw many companies cutting their marketing budgets, and kept the name Perry above the door. "I thought it was important to his memory and to his family to keep the name," she says. Kemp was added to the moniker in 1998. "Alex [Kemp] took a small equity position in the company when Lee died, and over the last few years, he bought a little more and then a little more equity. But I was always majority owner," says Banks.
Kemp and two other former employees ˆ Pamela Boudreau Kemp and David Goldberg ˆ left earlier this year to found Kemp Goldberg (see "Spinning off," p. 40), and by then Laurie Banks was well into her new scheme to add a sales component.
A key part of the new offering is Perry & Banks' Internet-based database, accessible by its clients and constantly updated. Banks can use it to break companies down by location, size, level of interest and many other variables. And she's set up a virtual call center of three people working from home to do the customer care and research.
As of September, she started working the sales leads for three companies, though she declined to name them. "I talked to two of them, and both considered their relationship with us to be a competitive advantage and didn't want to go public," she says. She says she has several others waiting in the wings.
"Every CEO, every sales executive that I've explained this concept to has said, 'Hey, that's a great idea.' I think managing growth will be our biggest challenge," she says. "We have several clients right now who are saying, 'How fast can we get this thing going?'"
Banks, however, wants to start slowly. "Right now we're proving the concept," she says. "My expectation is that our growth could be rather dramatic. I'd like to keep the reins on it a little bit. I don't want to get into a situation where we're too large to manage. I figure we only have one shot to get this thing right."
Dumb customer vs. smart
Tony Mikes of Second Wind, a Pennsylvania-based ad agency trade group of which Perry & Banks is a member, says that he sees the ad world trending toward Banks' concept of integrated sales and marketing. "Laurie's timing is good," he says. "She's able to go into the marketplace more ready than others."
Mikes credits the notion of merging the two specialties to a book that came out in 1993 called Integrated Marketing and Communications. The book was written by Don Schulz, Stanley Tennenbaum and Bob Lauterborn, the latter a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and seen as something of a guru of the concept. "Laurie and I and a lot of others became his disciples," says Mikes. "But corporations didn't buy it at the beginning. Agencies bought it. Corporations weren't buying it because they were buying everything else ˆ downsizing, mergers and acquisitions, globalization."
But things changed when Internet usage became widespread. "Before that the dumb consumer would get all their information from the people trying to sell them things. Now the smart consumer can go online and get the information they need in a half hour," says Mikes. "They'll go to the dealer, 'Don't tell me what the price is, I'll tell you what the price is.'" The smart consumer forced corporations to start looking at marketing and branding differently. "Sales and marketing have had to make peace with one another," he says.
And, Mikes says, that changed the relationship between corporations and ad agencies. "Corporations used to say, 'Here comes the agency, hide everything, it's a big bill.' Now they're saying, 'Here comes Laurie Banks, she makes us money.'"
But is Banks the first? Mikes hedges a bit. "Theoretically we all thought about it," he says. "Of the 900 agencies that we work with at Second Wind, there are less than a dozen doing this. I'd say she's at the forefront."
Mikes says it won't be long, though, before a lot of others are nipping at her heels. "This is the era of companies like Laurie's," he says. "In the next five years you'll be seeing a lot of this."
Once the new process gets cooking, Banks says, it has the potential to spin more business off for Perry & Banks. The companies for whom she's doing lead generation will most likely be interested in her marketing services, "because we already know their business so well." Or a company that seeks Perry & Banks out for marketing will finds that it can use the sales help. "I think it's a real feeder system," she says.
So Banks, who is the Banks in Perry & Banks, the long-time Portland advertising firm, has spent the past year slowly turning her idea into a reality, and she now has a few clients who have signed on to see if it works ˆ and a list of others she says are waiting in the wings. Banks thinks it has the potential to be huge.
The idea? "I call it integrated sales and marketing," says the 49-year-old Fort Fairfield native. She has spent more than 20 years working in advertising and broadcasting in Maine, and she says her new offering is just the sort of thing businesses in the state need to take their marketing to a new level. Integrated sales and marketing sounds simple enough, and the 69,300 sites you find if you type the phrase into Google suggests that it's not exactly a new idea. Banks says her concept of pairing the two is new, though ˆ so new she's had a difficult time coming up with a one-sentence pitch to sell it to businesses. "We're working on our elevator speech now," she says.
She's happy to explain it at length. "Sales and marketing are two different departments [at most companies] and their charters are different and even at odds. Sales is based on the short term, marketing is long term," she says. "I figured if you could figure out ways to pull them together, offer those services under one roof ˆ it's like chocolate and peanut butter."
How does one do that? Here's an example. "For many of our clients, trade shows are their life blood," she says. "They can walk away from a show with 2,000-4,000 good leads ˆ that's a lot to manage. So I said, 'Give us those leads; we can prequalify them.'"
If a client's sales team is planning a business trip to Dallas, she explains, they can go online to Perry & Banks' custom database and see which of the businesses they met at the trade show are in the area. "We'll contact them and ask, 'What interested you about our client?'" Then Perry & Banks' new call center staff will follow up on the lead. They'll send e-mail press releases, product updates, white papers and other promotional material directly to the people who have shown interest in their client, so that the client is always considered when a potential customer is ready to do business.
"We'll keep the relationship going so that when the sales person is ready, the relationship is still warm," says Banks. "This allows our client to use their sales people to do what they do best, which is face-to-face selling and closing. Sales people hate cold calling ˆ we do that for them."
All this sounds like plain old sales. But Banks insists that adding it to an already experienced advertising team makes a powerful new beast. Marketing and sales execs can have a common strategy. "The beauty of having marketing and sales under one roof is that marketing can be more in tune with what the market needs," she says. "A very successful marketing campaign includes research. With our contact center in house, we can get very close to what our clients need. We can get immediate and personal information so they can almost use retail-type marketing techniques in business-to-business sales."
Still, while Banks' concept of integrated sales and marketing is an approach that is arguably more comprehensive than has been tried in the past, it's not really all that new. Portland-based WebDirect Advertising has been doing lead generation ˆ even providing leads for its clients' customer centers to generate sales ˆ since the company's inception four years ago, says operations manager Dana Given. The company is a subsidiary of the Cumberland-based Jordan Group, which does more traditional print and radio advertising, so in a way, it's offering those services in addition to sales help. "And [we're] not just providing leads," Given notes. "We take it to the next level of actually making a sale. One of our clients is Children International, a charitable nonprofit, and we've been doing the equivalent of sales closing for them."
Banks says she'd never heard of WebDirect before, but that what the company is offering is different. "It sounds to me like they do direct-response marketing," she says. "We're full-service marketing."
Proving the concept
Banks has been in advertising in some form or another since the early 80s. After graduating from the University of Maine with a degree in journalism, she got a job behind the camera at Channel 2 in Bangor. From there she went to public television, where she was promotions director, and then it was on to a media buyer job at Chellis, Conwell, Gale, at the time one of Portland's biggest advertising agencies. It was a short-lived stint. "Agencies are fairly volatile, and new management came and ran it into the ground within two years," she says. "I learned from it, though, that you have to be honest and ethical at all times when you're given the trust of your clients."
That was 1986, and Banks was in a tough situation. "I was four months pregnant when it failed," she says. "And nobody hired pregnant women back then." She ended up working a couple of years for Linda Lee, a former Chellis exec who had started her own company, and then she reconnected with Lee Perry, with whom she'd worked at Chellis. "He came to me and said, "I always though you and I would make great business partners." In 1989 they launched Perry and Banks Marketing. Before long the duo had landed Bass Shoe, and a raft of big name clients followed. "We did projects for L.L. Bean, Sears, Fox Lumber, we had banking accounts," Banks says. "We had a mix of business-to-business and retail accounts. It all happened really quickly." Everything was on the ups ˆ and then in 1997 Lee Perry died suddenly.
Banks continued on, weathering a recession that saw many companies cutting their marketing budgets, and kept the name Perry above the door. "I thought it was important to his memory and to his family to keep the name," she says. Kemp was added to the moniker in 1998. "Alex [Kemp] took a small equity position in the company when Lee died, and over the last few years, he bought a little more and then a little more equity. But I was always majority owner," says Banks.
Kemp and two other former employees ˆ Pamela Boudreau Kemp and David Goldberg ˆ left earlier this year to found Kemp Goldberg (see "Spinning off," p. 40), and by then Laurie Banks was well into her new scheme to add a sales component.
A key part of the new offering is Perry & Banks' Internet-based database, accessible by its clients and constantly updated. Banks can use it to break companies down by location, size, level of interest and many other variables. And she's set up a virtual call center of three people working from home to do the customer care and research.
As of September, she started working the sales leads for three companies, though she declined to name them. "I talked to two of them, and both considered their relationship with us to be a competitive advantage and didn't want to go public," she says. She says she has several others waiting in the wings.
"Every CEO, every sales executive that I've explained this concept to has said, 'Hey, that's a great idea.' I think managing growth will be our biggest challenge," she says. "We have several clients right now who are saying, 'How fast can we get this thing going?'"
Banks, however, wants to start slowly. "Right now we're proving the concept," she says. "My expectation is that our growth could be rather dramatic. I'd like to keep the reins on it a little bit. I don't want to get into a situation where we're too large to manage. I figure we only have one shot to get this thing right."
Dumb customer vs. smart
Tony Mikes of Second Wind, a Pennsylvania-based ad agency trade group of which Perry & Banks is a member, says that he sees the ad world trending toward Banks' concept of integrated sales and marketing. "Laurie's timing is good," he says. "She's able to go into the marketplace more ready than others."
Mikes credits the notion of merging the two specialties to a book that came out in 1993 called Integrated Marketing and Communications. The book was written by Don Schulz, Stanley Tennenbaum and Bob Lauterborn, the latter a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and seen as something of a guru of the concept. "Laurie and I and a lot of others became his disciples," says Mikes. "But corporations didn't buy it at the beginning. Agencies bought it. Corporations weren't buying it because they were buying everything else ˆ downsizing, mergers and acquisitions, globalization."
But things changed when Internet usage became widespread. "Before that the dumb consumer would get all their information from the people trying to sell them things. Now the smart consumer can go online and get the information they need in a half hour," says Mikes. "They'll go to the dealer, 'Don't tell me what the price is, I'll tell you what the price is.'" The smart consumer forced corporations to start looking at marketing and branding differently. "Sales and marketing have had to make peace with one another," he says.
And, Mikes says, that changed the relationship between corporations and ad agencies. "Corporations used to say, 'Here comes the agency, hide everything, it's a big bill.' Now they're saying, 'Here comes Laurie Banks, she makes us money.'"
But is Banks the first? Mikes hedges a bit. "Theoretically we all thought about it," he says. "Of the 900 agencies that we work with at Second Wind, there are less than a dozen doing this. I'd say she's at the forefront."
Mikes says it won't be long, though, before a lot of others are nipping at her heels. "This is the era of companies like Laurie's," he says. "In the next five years you'll be seeing a lot of this."
Once the new process gets cooking, Banks says, it has the potential to spin more business off for Perry & Banks. The companies for whom she's doing lead generation will most likely be interested in her marketing services, "because we already know their business so well." Or a company that seeks Perry & Banks out for marketing will finds that it can use the sales help. "I think it's a real feeder system," she says.
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