Well, there goes another year of marketing & sales. Though how much did your team or business evolve your approach in 2014? What are other businesses doing to improve their marketing and sales efforts.
I wanted to take a moment to dive into some of the areas our clients saw improvements within their campaigns this year and what that might look like in comparison to your campaign or strategy.
I'll admit upfront that running a business at times doesn't allow the time and resources to change and evolve as much as you'd like, but what's the real cost to your business for everyday you continue doing it "the same ol' way".
I believe that keeping it simple is a good policy. But, evolution is unavoidable for any business wanting to be better, stronger and faster. Being a slow adopter nowadays can often procure the harsh reality of becoming out of sync, ineffective, antiquated or redundant (literally). It happens often. So, what can you do to make sure you're not included in the latter.
The marketing and sales functions are a great place to start and a classic example. As consumers wise up and evolve by already avoiding the "same old" marketing of years gone by, it’s technology that begins to answer and arm businesses or marketers with the powerful intel needed to reconnect with our customers.
How are you driving your strategy with qualitative insights?
So, how do we work smarter both with our marketing and sales initiatives. I personally get incredibly excited about how much opportunity there is for business to start evolving their process and shifting their paradigm around the roles marketing and sales play within a business.
Often and traditionally thought of as two separate functions, and yes I love the false romance that sales and marketing are cohesive. What do you mean? I love their campaigns, or those guys don’t get it. But moving on and seriously, my mind still boggles at the tools and technology available to business owners, marketing teams or sales managers, but yet most are still overlooked or bogged down in tradition, ad hoc activities or plagued by fear of change or loss. If I need to convince you that the climate now demands streamlined processes and leaner organisations you may be travelling a path of high risk and low engagement,
More focused inputs + greater intelligence = higher (more meaningful) outputs.
Part A. Symbiosis
At the end of the day pain points and challenges of your ideal personas or customers are your ticket to attracting the right types of buyers. Forget the slippery scripts or cleverly crafted marketing messages and get to know your customers.
- Chat with a salesperson.
- Go on a sales meeting/call.
- Interview customers and have a meaningful conversation about their challenges, pain points and frustrations.
Part B. Taking Advantage of Technology
It's 2014/15 and if you're not using technology to support your processes and marketing efforts you're behind the game.
Beyond that, whilst most businesses are still contemplating the mediums and placements they can get eyeballs or traffic, simply focus on building something epic and truly customer orientated supported by technology that adds a little special sauce to your sales and marketing process. A synchronised process that harnesses logical strategy and leverages technology.
Why? We all need a reason, right? I use this stat frequently, but only because it simply can’t be ignored. “57% of your customers purchase decision is made before they even contact your business.”So, your prospect is well and truly on his or her way to making their mind before even talking to you. That’s ok, if you’re the frontrunner, but what if you’re not. And what if your competitor is the first choice on a majority of customers lips. Your behind, but you might not even know it. Unless you talk to sales.
Suddenly your REAL opportunity value is diminishing. Having said that, think about every time one of your sales team picks up the phone–are they calling a prospect, contact or lead that’s “sales qualified” at least marketing qualified, or is it just one of those “hail mary” - “hope to hell” phone calls. Within certain organisations, cold calling and door knocking still occurs, but what's the COCA (cost of customer acquisition) for these modes.
Stop Cold Calling.
Because we all know how much prospects love those phone calls…. (I hope my sarcasm transfers). Because we all know it sounds like this. “Oh, hey Intrusive Phone Caller - I’ve given you no permission to call me, but your product sounds so good”. Said no real prospect ever. Maybe, if you're selling unicorns. What if that person was qualified, meaning they had a detailed history of interaction, engagement and interests with your brand. I think that phone call would go a little differently.
So, it sounds like we need more persona (buyer) power (intel) captain.
Power to the sales people! Did you know? The notion of picking the fruit (prospects) as it ripens is one that gets most teams excited. Making calls that prospects want to talk to me? Wait? What? Really? Who me? Yes, you. The hard work of marketing resulting in one cohesive and continuous effort to move the prospect down the sales funnel and into a paying customer is what everyone wants. But, this is not an inbound post, it’s about your business leveraging highly accessible, very logical and practical technology available and being used right now, by smart teams all over the world.
Part C. The Intelligence Available Today
What's available or within reach for a business today that adopts a smarter go to market approach. The below outlines some of the signals and data you can gain.
Pre Sales Contact:
- Most popular or preferred piece of content (Which pain point or buying signal)
- Most effective landing page (Which pain point or buying signal)
- Most popular blog post (Which pain point or buying signal)
- Most popular call to action (Which pain point or buying signal)
- Keywords driving the traffic (Which pain point or buying signal)
- They frequented the site including full history of interactions.
- How many emails they interacted with. Engagement
- Social Media habits. (What makes them tick).
- Social Activity
- An overview of their online profiles
- Time since last touch (Interest Levels)
- Time between touches
- Shared with
- People within same company touched or engaged
- Their Role
- Their Greatest Challenge
- Their Marketing Budget
- Their Industry
- Workflow interaction (stage or cycle)
- Overall Lead Score
Post Sales Contact:
- Response to email (was it opened, did the click on a link, did they re engage with further content)
- Phone calls made by sales team
- Was it timed within 1 - 12 hours of the prospect engaging with relevant content?
- Which persona is resonating into sales the most.
Appointments conducted by sales team with which personas.
The second list of metrics is a sample of aspects available to your team within these tools. It should demonstrate the advantage your team will have team before even picking up the phone. Ideally, if you're doing it right, you'll have customer contacting you. "Inbound"
As a result you’ll begin engage, nurture and hone your approach to helping and offering a great customer experience. The evolved process to payday in 2014/15.
