CMO Council Announces Partnership with Leverage Software to Study New Trends in Building New Relationships Networks
New Research Will Look at Marketing Best Practices and Approaches for Optimizing Relationship Networks to Gain Better Market Access, Insight and Influence

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 13, 2005 -- The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council today announced a new thought leadership initiative called “Grow Who You Know: Scaling Active Relationship Networks,” aimed at identifying strategies and best practices for marketers seeking to harness the power of relationship networks to improve sales cycles, strengthen customer value and retain and grow accounts. Sponsored by Leverage Software, a leading provider of on-demand applications for relationship networking, the study is part of a major initiative by the CMO Council to identify important new technology-enabled trends that are improving marketing accountability, performance, and effectiveness.

“Relationships are an essential driver of business growth and brand sustainability,” said Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council. “It’s our belief that marketers need to be at the forefront of innovative approaches to cost-effectively establish, grow and reap the benefits of their company’s relationships. In addition, social networking technologies and practices offer tremendous opportunities to bring new value and vitality to events and organizations by enabling introductions, multiplying contacts, engaging and focusing conversations and providing intelligence on critical issues and preferences. We hope to gain new insights into this important phenomenon through member dialogues, as well as more quantitative survey research.”

In addition to fielding new research, the CMO Council will deploy the Leverage Software EventConnect and MemberConnect platform to stimulate peer-to-peer interactions, appointments and meetings around its annual CMO Summits in North America and Europe, as well as across its network of 1,400 members worldwide. The Leverage platform will allow the Council to strengthen its core value proposition to members: knowledge exchange and personal relationship building among senior marketing and brand decision-makers in the technology and communications industries.

“We’re pleased to partner with the CMO Council to create thought leadership in this emerging area of marketing and sales development and to showcase the value our own solutions can create for CMO Council members,” said Mike Walsh, president and CEO of Leverage Software. “As the preeminent affinity organization for technology marketing executives, the CMO Council offers a unique opportunity for top marketers to share ideas and experiences and network with their peers. Leverage Software’s solutions will provide a secure and privacy-protected platform to facilitate exchange.”

Active relationship networks integrate a variety of data management, Internet and web-based technologies in order to bring new visibility, intimacy and control within customer, prospect, membership and referral networks. They can be used, for example, to rapidly identify, optimize and exploit relationships within an enterprise to penetrate new accounts, accelerate sales and reach key market influencers. Just how marketers can take control of these networks to play a larger and more effective role in driving top-line growth and bottom line results is the subject of the Grow Who You Know study.

The new intellectual capital development program will include:

• Formation of an ARN advisory board that will provide input and direction for the initiative. This will include CMOs, event marketing directors, event producers, and association executives.
• Teaming with affiliated organizations (e.g. the Computer Event Marketing Association) and media groups.
• An online survey of strategic marketers to determine how they currently assess and optimize their return on customer relationships, harvest existing contact networks, and make the most of new introductions, opportunities and connections at user conferences and industry gatherings.
• Publication and promotion of research findings, as well as syndication of this content through 150 Internet information channels served by KnowledgeStorm.
• Production of both a webinar and webcast to discuss best practices in Relationship Intelligence Mining and showcase the value of ERNs in optimizing the efficiency and effectiveness of lead generation, prospect harvesting and sales cycle closure.

About Leverage Software
Leverage Software is a leading provider of Relationship Intelligence applications that create Active Relationship Networks (ARN). Its powerful and highly scalable hosted solutions give companies the ability to accelerate sales cycles, optimize customer value and loyalty, and retain and grow accounts. The company’s proprietary on-demand Active Relationship Network platform, including CustomerConnect, MemberConnect, EventConnect and SalesConnect, gives companies, associations and event producer an unprecedented capacity to cultivate and catalyze customers, users, affinity group members and attendees. Based in San Francisco, Leverage Software is used by tens of thousands of professionals and dozens of leading companies.

SalesConnect, EventConnect, MemberConnect and CustomerConnect are an integrated suite of modules that provide Senior Level Marketers with the ability to generate relationship-based leads, and to offer their user communities an environment for peer networking, tribal learning and a direct connection for knowledge transfer to Product Development. This technology is also leveraged to provide attendees, sponsors and event managers the ability to collaborate in advance, during and following events, increasing the value to all event stakeholders. As an integrated suite, Sales and Marketing executives have the tools and analytics across all of their customer acquisition and touch points, resulting in better information and access to make better decisions which result in increased revenues.

About the CMO Council
The CMO Council is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership and personal relationship building among senior marketing and brand decision-makers in the global technology industry. Based in Silicon Valley, the Council works to further the stature, credibility, influence, and understanding of the strategic marketing function among business executives, opinion leaders and critical stakeholders in the technology sector. Nearly 1,400 technology companies are currently represented on the CMO Council, accounting for well over $500 billion in aggregated annual revenues. These include top decision-makers controlling more than $45 billion in global marketing expenditures for many of the world’s foremost computer systems, software, networking, communications, consumer electronics, component, distribution, and consulting brands. For more information, please visit our web site at www.cmocouncil.org, and for more information on “Grow Who You Know,” please visit http://www.cmocouncil.org/programs.html#grow.