Auto E-Marketing Helping Net-based Insurer

Software Magazine, Sept, 1999 by Elizabeth U. Harding

InsureTrust.com LLC, an Atlanta-based pioneer in the professional e-business risk-management field, markets its services to high-profile companies that rely on e-commerce. Since the idea of e-business management and insurance is fairly new, and most companies migrating their business strategies to the Web have no allocated budget for it, effective marketing is critical.

"We're the inventors of Internet hackers insurance," says Rick Davis, InsureTrust.com executive vice president. "We sell to a pretty diverse group of people, bringing together insurance functionality with IT-security functionality."

A big challenge for InsureTrust.com is to let these diverse groups of people within a company know that they need to protect themselves with some type of risk-management service. The InsureTrust.com sales force talks to the CEO about business marketing and customer-driven issues, to the CFO about financial obligations, and to the CIO about responsibilities regarding change management and bridging the gap between IT and business. On average, this sales process involves at least four separate conversations with five to six different people within a company.

"Under a single sales process, we bring together the top business and financial decision makers along with top technical decision makers for information security," says Davis. "In order to put forth a coherent message, we needed to efficiently customize marketing conversation geared toward these different decision makers."

InsureTrust.com turned to Market-First Software Inc., Mountain View, Calif., for automating e-marketing. "Customization was our number one oriteria for choosing MarketFirst," says Davis. "We are a Lotus Domino shop with an open architecture and could have built our own piece of software, but that would have been a six-month process atleast, and would have cost us anywhere between $300,00 to $600,000."