iCentera Strengthens Its Sales Enablement Platform With Best-in-Class Social Media Tools and Management Controls

MINNEAPOLIS, MN--(Marketwire - September 22, 2009) - iCentera (www.icentera.com), the sales enablement company, today announced it is extending its social media capabilities within its industry-leading SaaS-based Sales Enablement Platform with mainstream social media tools and controls to govern content. iCentera's Sales Enablement Platform incorporates the power of social media tools, such as Twitter, and today provides the built-in controls and content management discipline that mid-size and larger organizations demand. By integrating core sales and marketing content with today's leading social tools, iCentera ensures the integrity of content via a single messaging platform that adapts to the changing needs of sales, marketing, partners, and their customers.

"Our sales enablement platform is an industry-established and proven social selling and marketing solution for large and mid-sized enterprises, with a suite of tools that foster interaction and communications such as community portals, discussion forums, embedded chat, content rating, and other disciplines that many organizations are demanding to expand beyond simple content dissemination to better align marketing and sales using social media collaborative capabilities," said iCentera CEO Craig Nelson. "Key to that success is our strategic partnerships with leading B2B-focused social media application vendors that add tremendous value for our 150,000 subscribers, who have created more than 10,000 iCentera portals and have come to rely on iCentera's social sales enablement platform to drive sales productivity and growth."

According to its recently published report, "Sales2.0 Media for Knowledge Management and Sales Collaboration," Aberdeen Research states that 94% of best-in-class companies are using social media within marketing departments along with 88% of corporate sales organizations.

iCentera's sales enablement platform incorporates mainstream social media tools and controls to monetize and control selling best practices to a targeted audience such as sales, partners, and current customers as follows:

--  A single point of entry to aggregate content from many social media
    tools while delivering content that adapts to each user's profile,
--  A controlled and collaborative environment to harness the power of the
    organic social media content created by field sales, subject matter
    experts, partners, and customers without losing the company's core value
    proposition,
--  A wizard-driven method for creating targeted communities to
    collaborate across workgroups and organizations, and
--  Built-in authentication and role-based content management to filter
    and govern access to sanctioned content while reducing the concern of
    unsanctioned information in the hands of sales, partners and customers.
    

Social media is business-critical to an entire business' sales team. Subject matter experts share and collaborate online, reducing the cost of sales and allowing organizations to scale more effectively. In addition, companies gain enhanced awareness by reaching the larger social community, including partners, analysts, press and others that influence sales while driving sales directly through more robust communications with customers and prospects.

"Aligning marketing and sales to drive revenue growth has to be a top priority for any company in today's environment. And now more than ever it is essential for sales enablement platforms to incorporate an array of social media applications to empower customers with a single point of entry and communication that adapts to each user's unique profile," said Jonathan Block, Vice President, SiriusDecisions. "Controlled environments allow for sanctioned content that promotes consistency and provides the capabilities to harness the power of social media content created by field sales, partners and customers."

From a business perspective, the iCentera Sales Enablement Platform provides an environment to drive collaboration and promote structured and unstructured content to help companies sell more by leveraging social media tools that improve key sales metrics such as Bid-to-Win Ratio, Revenue per Account, Time-to-Quota, Market Share, and Sales Margins.

About iCentera

iCentera is sales enablement, with the industry's most advanced yet affordable on-demand Sales Enablement Platform for driving sales, marketing, partner, and customer sales success. Customers include NetApp, Infor, American Marketing Association, TransUnion, Thomson Reuters, Omniture, Eloqua, and Tyco Electronics. To discover why more than 150,000 subscribers leverage iCentera to drive efficient revenue growth and achieve a perfectly consistent marketing voice across their entire company ecosystem, please visit www.icentera.com.

Contact Information: Contact: Susan Donahue Skyya Communications for iCentera Ph: (646) 454 9378