It's always nice when a client is so pleased with something you have done that they tell their peers in other companies about it. Last week the Chief Marketing Officer of WR Grace, Laurie D. Andriate, presented the Keynote address at the spring meeting of the Learning Innovation Network. She spoke about her success with an innovative solution that merges learning and doing.
Laurie recounted the challenge that faced her as the new CMO: "Our mission as a company was to drive growth through innovation; our challenge was how to do that effectively within an organization that is sales-driven and technology-based. We needed a better way to transform customer insights into actual plans that lead to top-line growth."
She said the company needed a way to bottle innovation: "Innovation is the lifeblood of our growth. It requires that we think and act differently; we have to collaborate across businesses that are quite autonomous; across regions that are in different parts of their life cycle; and we need metrics that allow us to understand whether we're being successful."
Fortunately, Laurie was familiar with LeveragePoint’s learn-while doing solution from her previous company, where she had licensed LeveragePoint for Marketing Strategy. Both LeveragePoint and WR Grace were interested in expanding the "eWorking" model in a new product, called LeveragePoint for Value Management. So they partnered to create a next-generation solution for WR Grace, and a new product to take to market for LeveragePoint.
Real-time change management for busy people:
Laurie described the results of the collaboration: "What LeveragePoint gives us is a very efficient way to deliver the knowledge along with tools you need to do your job, as you're doing your job. It's very innovative. It is a very innovative way to learn and do because it collapses the distance between learning and doing."
"LPI has created real-time solutions for people who are very, very busy in a way that doesn't require a lot of training to use the tool. It is very self-study, effective, and scalable, able to roll this content out globally. As people come into a job, they need new capabilities to do their job; this framework allows them to learn their job as they're actually doing their job, and for me, that's the true innovation."
Capturing institutional knowledge:
Another new feature of the LeveragePoint platform is the ability to capture and share the knowledge that people carry around in their heads. Laurie described how this feature works at WR Grace by relating a story of an expert manager who left the company: "The first challenge for any organization, and ours in particular, is retaining institutional knowledge. We've had people moving in and out of the marketing function. This becomes a huge challenge.
"An individual named Charlie had developed tremendous insights about markets and customers with regard to a new product we were launching, but unfortunately he left our company. The new marketing manager who took over was afraid of not being able to get the product to market on time. With LeveragePoint he was not only able to get up to speed, he also had access to the insights -- because of the way it's structured -- that were left behind after Charlie left our organization. He was able to not only pick up where Charlie left off, but to build upon that content, so you didn't have that churn that you normally get as you turn your organization over."
"LeveragePoint takes that to the next level because of its collaborative environment and social aspect, allowing information and expertise to be shared across functions, teams, regions; it allows the iterative development of content across the organization that--in my experience before--was really not possible. You need to mine all the knowledge in your organization, and this virtual platform allows you to do that through collaboration and sharing across teams."
The virtual conversation:
Finally, Laurie shared the results of a new LeveragePoint feature described as benefiting from the conversation that never happened: "The next iteration of innovation is creating that virtual dialogue with our sales teams. The ratio between our marketing and sales teams is pretty low; marketers want to support the sales teams to deliver a value-based message to customers. Sales is trying to explain to customer why they should pay more. Marketing says that a better conversion to have with our customers is to tell them why it's a good deal for them.
"This methodology allows marketing to ‘go’ on every sales call because they create a value-based message in language from the customer's perspective, because they're forced to do so by this tool. Even better, it provides a mechanism for feedback from sales to refine the value message; you may think you're creating value here, but it's not resonating with the customer. This iterative approach to creating and delivering value to our customers is yet another innovation behind this platform."
We have always believed that the only meaningful metric for an innovative online business tool is business results. So when our clients experience those results and share their success with others, we feel pretty good about the decisions we’ve made and the partnership that led to that success. Thanks Laurie, that’s a great story.
Jonathon Levy
Chief Strategy Officer
