Jocelyne Attal, Chief Marketing Officer, Avaya, Inc.

“From Utility to Cool”

By Drew Clausen, Segment Marketing (USG) www.usg.com

Who is Avaya? What do they do?

Avaya is a global leader in intelligent communications. They supply business communication solutions to more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies, including The Home Depot, MasterCard, Dell, Google, AOL, Microsoft, Nike and more.

Recently evolved from “Lucent” to “Avaya”.

There products/services they offer include:

• Avaya IP Telephony
• Avaya Contact Centers
• Avaya Unified Communications
• Avaya Communications Enabled Business Processes

Avaya value proposition: They help businesses:

• Reduce costs
• Increase effectiveness and productivity
• Increase customer satisfaction

B2B Marketing Challenge:

Cutting through the clutter and differentiate Avaya in a sea of the highly competitive players in the business communications industry. This is certainly a challenge all Marketers face.

So, how does Avaya compete with a relative small budget?

Do the basics very well

• Know your audience better than thee competition
• Focus on brand awareness, demand generation, sales enablement
• Metrics, metrics  and more metrics (measure based upon business)
• Integrated marketing (unified communications)

Out think the competition with “intelligent marketing principles”

• Go where the competition isn’t (brand in unique places and in context)
• Be where your customer is (Initiate event marketing)
• Leverage technology (host Webinars featuring case studies and white papers)

With a budget that is ten times less than their competition, Avaya utilized “viral tactics” have been used to educated business consumer. The results were impressive.

Intelligent marketing results online:

• 800,000 unique visitors monthly to web site
• 160,000 looking for new products and services
• Experts give instant answers 15,000 each month
• Top briefers delivered 252 presentations in a single month

Note: I believe the creative we witnessed during this presentation was some of the most compelling we’ve seen during the conference. I highly encourage everyone to visit their web site or You Tube to view the extremely creative way Avaya communicated their value proposition to customers in the B2B space. It’s inspiring to see this kind of creative energy/communication in a category like business communications.