Today’s buyer expects to be able to gather information about the company and its products across a variety of media, which include social media channels where the opinions of friends, family and members of online “groups” exercise a heavy influence. Email marketing is one component, as much as online ads, thought leadership pieces (for BtoB), YouTube videos, the company web site, and micro sites. The buyer’s journey can include many of these touch points in the information gathering stage, before the prospect decides to make a purchase online or call a sales person.
Even though the trajectory of would-be customers through the matrix of information provided across media can vary greatly, it needs to result in: improved positioning of the product and the company vs. alternatives, clearly communicate the value proposition, and leave some open interrogations that will be answered by salespeople who will then have the chance to be seen as knowledgeable and helpful in explain the way the offering will benefit individual prospects.
Sales people on the phone are a uniquely flexible and powerful conversion tool but they also represent a substantial cost. To maximize their effectiveness, they should work on ‘leads’ that have been adequately pre-qualified by Marketing rather than using their valuable talk-time with mere contacts that are not very far along the buying process. Finding the definition of a real ‘lead’ is different for every product/customer combination, and requires continuous adjustment though a closed loop relationship between Sales and Marketing.
Good salespeople naturally develop different approaches to different types of prospects. Marketing can make accelerate this process and make the pitches more uniform across conversations by developing a detailed playbook that takes into account the specificity of different customers. A combination of Products insight, Sales experiences, Marketing positioning and messaging will yield valuable guidelines for maximizing close rates.
Outbound Marketing emails, online ads, even Social Media touches are part of the activities designed to set-up a valuable conversation with prospects. Informing Sales teams of the target, message, offer included in the campaigns, and timing will allow them to make the best of the calls resulting from these communications.
Getting more prospects in the top of the funnel needs to be an ongoing effort, but addressing specific mid-funnel challenges encountered by Sales can be just as important. If Salespeople lose valuable talk time repeating basic data points, it is necessary to provide that information through low-cost/high-volume channels. If sales conversations repeatedly stumble on certain customer objections Marketing and Product Marketing need to provide the proof points and the arguments to move conversation to the nest stage.
Certain technical arguments can also be made digitally leaving the more sensitive task of demonstrating the differentiation versus the competition to a specific customer to a direct conversation vs. sales people.
Drilling both Sales and Marketing on the fundamentals of the company’s business model ensures that all teams understand how to maximize overall revenue by handling each lead with the most appropriate conversion channel. Ideally, conflict between channels is minimized when the lead management scheme is seen as maximizing the use of each channels’ capabilities and revenue opportunities.
Good campaigns involving Direct Sales become great campaigns when each one is individually tracked, results are assessed, and adjustments are brought: to the materials provided to prospects, to components of the campaign, to the sales pitch. Marketing technologies make end-to-end tracking of leads possible so that different approaches can be tested and best practices captured for progressively higher effectiveness.