Provident Partners use TeamDirection Project to Increase Value for Clients.

Provident Partners (www.ProvidentPartners.net) helps clients with marketing programs ranging from brand creation to lead generation. The team of experienced software marketers created their firm two years ago in St. Paul, Minnesota, in response to the needs of companies with non-existent or limited in-house marketing resources. "Since marketing is a cost center, it makes sense for smaller firms to outsource their marketing needs on an on-demand basis," explains President Albert Maruggi.

The Challenge

With a rapidly expanding business to assist geographically distributed clients, some as far as away as Kansas City, Maruggi needed a bigger team to handle the workload. Business escalated rapidly to where he found himself challenged by new staff, new customers, and hundreds of tasks to track. With over a hundred tasks for a single marketing program, it became essential to find a tool before important tasks started slipping through the cracks. In addition to managing the workload, Maruggi wanted his clients to be in a better position to assess the level of marketing value they were getting from his firm. He felt that often there was insufficient discipline around marketing efforts, coupled with an inability to measure value obtained.

The Solution

Maruggi had tried a number of file sharing and collaboration software tools available in the market. In his experience, he found that the most important issue was not file sharing, but being able to collaborate over marketing priorities and the resulting schedules. "The issue is not how to get an ad to a client to see whether they like it - the issue is having the discipline to keep the trains running on time and the coordination to keep them from crashing," insists Maruggi. Ultimately, Maruggi found the TeamDirection tools on the Groove Networks platform the right solution to work with his far-flung client base as well as a distributed team. The Groove Workspace platform offers the communications tools, security, and the ability to work without an IT infrastructure - an Internet connection is required for information synchronization, but everyone can work offline as well. A separate secure workspace is created for each client. The TeamDirection Project tool is used for both planning and tracking of the various marketing programs. Files required for sharing are linked directly to specific tasks or the project. Attention is drawn to the attached files by paperclips next to the tasks in the user interface, in addition to change markers when something is new or updated.

The Benefits

The TeamDirection Project and Dashboard tools have created an environment of cooperation, a unified team, and mutual respect at Provident Partners, as well as with their clients. Everyone is in sync on their responsibilities and expectations. Their clients can see on a daily basis the work being performed by their outsourced marketing team, seeing results posted in their workspace as well. It makes it much easier for them to assess and appreciate the value provided by Provident Partners says Maruggi. The results obtained by Provident Partners were achieved without high risk or expense. For marketers Maruggi and team, they are able to use the Groove platform to collaborate, without the effort of non-revenue producing activites such as setting up a network or developing an internal IT infrastructure. Their current environment of Groove with TeamDirection, plus salesforce.com, is all they need for now. "The new tools help you work smarter in a low-cost low-risk way," says Maruggi, adding "this is not just an advantage, it's a no-brainer."