Fision Explores Patenting The Use Of Blockchain In Its Digital Asset And Sales Enablement Portfolio

Fision may soon build upon its track record of putting marketing and sales teams on the same page by obtaining a provisional patent for using blockchain to exchange critical business information.

Based in Minneapolis, Fision Corp. offers a cloud-based sales enablement tool that manages digital assets like marketing materials as they are distributed to sales teams and includes specific business rules that allow localized messaging. A sales rep who wants to take a client to a baseball game, for instance, could quickly access an e-mail template that’s consistent with similar invitations used by reps in other regions, but with images of the local team and a link to a registration page. This brings consistency to the way marketing and sales processes are carried out across large enterprises.

Blockchain technology, meanwhile, is used to validate transactions such as those involving cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Monero. Fision’s provisional patent is looking at the way its technology uses blockchain’s “immutable” nature to protect digital assets as they are being exchanged from one peer group to another.

“It’s almost accidental. We didn’t set out to do blockchain,” Mike Brown, Fision’s CEO, told B2B News Network. “We already had about 70 per cent of blockchain capability in our original code.”

Fision already has a patent for “computerized sharing of digital asset localization between organizations” and has worked with Oracle, Marketo and others. According to Brown, its products deal with an often overlooked aspect of sales and marketing alignment: setting up what he calls a “central repository of truth of updated brand and legal material which can be manipulated in a PDF, e-mail or other channel. One of its financial services customers, for example, has more than 20,000 sales people to think about.

“How does a CMO support that many distributed sales reps to get you brand controlled, brand compliant, legally complaint sales and marketing materials and not having reps going rogue in sales presentations?” he asked.

Of course, many firms use tools like SharePoint and Dropbox to organize sales enablement assets, but those don’t necessarily go far enough, Brown said.

“Dropbox is like a warehouse where you dump stuff in piles,” he said. “Fision is like a well-organized IKEA store — everything is specific to its use, its need and other stuff it works off of.”

Besides looking into blockchain, Fision recently acquired Volerro, best known for its content collaboration tools. This means Fision customers will not only be able to get access to the materials they want but manage projects associated with them.

“Our long-term play is to win in this agile marketing place by simplifying the ideation and creation of content, loading it into the main digital asset repository and distributing it,” Brown said. “Then we make it simple to localize it around business rules and feed that information back to the corporate marketing team or agency about that content.”

Fision on Tuesday announced a new customer win, which it didn’t name specifically but identified as a “leading e-billing and payment software solutions provider.”