Press Release
March 9, 2005

Best Practices and Case Study About the Impact Marketing Can Have on
Sales Effectiveness and Revenue Growth

The SAVO Group (SAVO), global provider of hosted marketing and sales effectiveness platform Sales Asset Manager™ (SAM), announced that its co-founder and managing director, John Aiello, will present today at the American Marketing Association (AMA) Thought Leadership Event “How to Make Marketing More Relevant to the Sales Cycle.” Joining Aiello in the presentation are Jack Thurston and Tim Lyman, commercial marketing executives from SAVO client LaSalle Bank Corporation (LaSalle), a subsidiary of Netherlands based ABN AMRO Bank N.V. The event, sold out within days of its being announced, takes place at 8:30am at the University of Chicago Gleacher Center in downtown Chicago.

In presenting “Marketing in Lockstep with Sales—From Prospect to Close and Beyond,” Aiello, Thurston and Lyman will share strategies on and practical examples of the ways Marketing can add value to selling efforts and accomplish the elusive “Marketing-Sales alignment.” This event is part of the 2005 AMA Customer Message Management (CMM) Forum, a series of educational programs led by a group of marketing and sales effectiveness industry leaders and designed to help companies improve the impact marketing can have on sales effectiveness.

“In the vast majority of organizations today, marketing recognizes that sales is a key vehicle for message distribution, yet there is little connection with the realities of selling,” said Aiello. “In order to share ownership in sales victories and impact revenue growth, marketing needs to walk in sales' shoes—understand selling methodologies and needs along the relationship development cycle—and deliver practical materials that reflect this insight at the right moments. SAVO's Sales Asset Manager is a platform that has emerged to make it easy for Sales to access, customize and deliver these customer-ready tools exactly when needed. The value of such a solution is borne out in the tremendous results LaSalle Bank has seen in implementing SAM.”

In addition to Aiello's discussion about how organizations can leverage technology to accelerate sales velocity, LaSalle's Thurston and Lyman will share first-hand the challenges and objectives driving the bank's implementation of SAM, and results the organization has achieved. For example, by making graphic “deal announcement” email templates available through SAM, Marketing empowered relationship managers to create meaningful “reasons” to stay in front of prospective customers when interest might be waning. Such tailored, one-to-one communication accelerated LaSalle's sales process by stimulating demand and in one instance, generated $50 Million in incremental revenue in just 3 months.

The AMA, one of the largest professional associations for marketers, tapped SAVO in January to be a CMM Marketing Partner. Throughout 2005, the AMA will offer CMM Forum webcasts, radio broadcasts and more, providing marketing executives with strategies to partner with sales in revenue-generating activities. A complete schedule of events can be found at http://www.marketingpower.com/cmm. SAVO's Aiello will next present in a webcast on April 19th.

About The SAVO Group
The SAVO Group (SAVO) helps marketing and sales/relationship management teams work as one to drive business growth, leveraging technology as a key integrator. SAVO's turnkey hosted marketing and sales effectiveness platform, Sales Asset Manager™ (SAM), automates the access, dynamic generation, delivery and management of customized presentations, proposals, brochures, email and more. SAM has been proven to quickly and directly impact sales success by using resources more efficiently, effectively and collaboratively. The company is privately held and located in Chicago .