The urgency to meet the timely needs of a company's sales reps, resellers, franchises, and others revenue producers is even more pronounced now in a down economy: Cracks in the marketing chain could be perceived as deeper trouble within the overall organization. According to a 2008 Forrester survey conducted well in advance of last fall's meltdown, more than 40 percent of respondents struggled with campaign design, offer management, and customer segmentation. Nearly 60 percent of respondents lacked the ability to both manage marketing processes and resources and coordinate campaign management across channels.

Companies faced with the dilemma of making marketing staff cutbacks, or risking worker overload, can find safe harbor in multichannel campaign management systems, called enterprise marketing platforms (EMPs). In fact, EMPs are one of the fastest growing areas of CRM. Here are three steps to evaluate the right EMP to keep your marketing channels viable.

1) Look for a Total Solution at a Reasonable Price: Look for a complete solution from a company that demonstrates e-marketing prowess, as well as traditional media and analytics competencies. A streamlined solution will allow your business to maintain complete, centralized control, ensuring message and brand consistency as well as timely access to marketing program materials—and the unglamorous work of execution such as approvals, payment processing, fund tracking, user support, materials production, and delivery. One way to keep costs down is find a company that offers SaaS.

Be wary of an EMP business model designed strictly for marketing and not the IT department. Ditto on the pricing structure: Per-seat pricing and large licensing fees can be expensive long-term options; be sure to compare the various pricing structures available. Ultimately, depending on the size of your organization, it may be prudent to find a dedicated business partner/vendor that knows its way around large enterprises with thousands of channel partners, but is also comfortable working with small start-ups.

2) Know that their automation processes work: A Web-based automated system will free a company's marketing department to develop and execute critical marketing programs and provide assurances to its sales force and business partners that its collateral materials are available for use or customization 24/7 through a Web-based portal.

When evaluating a company that offers EMP services, make sure its systems are reliable and that other known companies are using them. Ask for case studies or contacts of current customers. Once enabled, the automated process should allow flexible multi-wave campaigns and programs to flourish with greater customization in vertical channels, or by product line, for all forms of electronic media and print on demand.

3) Look for hot MDF applications: If everything looks positive in your due diligence for an EMP partner, look hard again at how strong its market development fund (MDF) application really is. The best performers will offer built-in redundancies for error-free execution, making it easier to drive reseller behavior and to fund, track, and manage marketing essentials.

Make sure their account managers are experienced and take the time to understand your customer marketing programs and users. They will need to have the ability to help manage repositories, including the allocation of MDF's that are in compliance with your brand and MDF rules. Shoot for the moon: 100 percent compliance with your brand and MDF rules is not unrealistic.

Great outcomes with measurable benefits
You will know that you made the right choice in an EMP partner when you see forward traction in these critical areas:

• Optimizing Reach: The company has successfully optimized your marketing and channel execution with scalable SaaS digital and physical services by creating a central repository to store, share, customize, order, and deliver marketing materials across multiple channels for various campaigns, including direct mail, sales collateral, signage, promotional merchandise, email, and Web banners.
  
  
• Achieving cost savings and greater visibility: If you can realize the savings on this checklist below, you will know you have one of the best-in-class EPM vendor/partners (as much as 90 percent reduction in execution time and 40 to 70 percent reduction in print waste cost is possible):
  • Decreased cost of campaign execution
  • Reduced campaign time-to-market
  • Improved campaign reach with customized materials
  • Reduced inventory ownership costs with print on-demand
  • Received greater insight into reseller/partner execution
  • Added new visibility to an organization's marketing and channel activities

If you have come this far with your recession-proofing measures and have managed to stay viable through the storm, you will have worked the magic available to you when aligning with the right EMP organization. Imagine where you'll be when the clouds clear.

About the author: Kris Tufto is President and CEO of Marketing Bridge.