Tag: leads

3 Dirty Little Secrets About Marketing

Screen Shot 2016-01-14 at 10.59.59 AMGo ahead and get mad at me. Feel free to fill up the comment section below. I’m going to share our closely held secrets with sales people, skeptics and other critics of marketing. I know you would rather I not, but it’s best for all of us, trust me. Here we go…

 

#1 – You got lucky – if you generate leads off the first drop/wave of a new account acquisition or a lead generation campaign for a solution, you’re more likely to be lucky, than right. Yea, you may have had a compelling offer, and the call to action was intriguing, but the chances are, you just happened to hit a prospect at the right time.

Sure, in some industries you can buy data that identifies a company’s spend on certain products or services. But you don’t know if the budget is available, what portion of it, or who controls it. And since this is a prospect, you are most likely targeting a title, which could be a decision maker, a budget holder, or just a curious information seeker.

At the beginning of a campaign you simply don’t have the information on a prospect to know where they are, or how to advance them in the buying process. So, if a prospect does put their hand up and says, “Call me,” you most likely hit them at the right time in the buyers’ journey.

#2 – Your messaging is weak – the effectiveness of your message is being compromised by the fact that you are trying to motivate an audience to think or feel differently without explaining why. According to Pat Spenner, co-author of the new book entitled The Challenger Customer, marketers spend too much time focusing on how they want audiences to think, or feel, without understanding their current mindset.

Research for the book found that the receptiveness and/or openness to a message depends heavily on an audience’s existing belief system, which drives their behavior. According to Spenner, marketers first need to understand and break down the audience’s current mindset using insights about their business, customers, markets, etc. It’s an opportunity to “teach” audiences that their current thinking is no longer valid and why a new way of thinking is needed. If done well, the new mindset will uniquely lead them back to your product/services or brand.

For example, Merck developed the cholesterol-lowering drug Mevacor at a time when doctors knew little about the effects of cholesterol on the body. The current mindset was that hypertension (high blood pressure) caused heart disease. Merck used clinical research to show doctors the impact of high levels of cholesterol on arteries and the correlation of plaque buildup with coronary heart disease (the “teaching” moment).

As a result, doctors should test patient’s cholesterol levels to see if they are at risk. If a patient had a LDL cholesterol level above a certain point, doctors should start with a therapy regiment that included diet and drug treatment (the new mindset). The only cholesterol-lowering agent available at the time was, you guessed it, Mevacor. Merck, by getting doctors to change their mindset about the causes of heart disease, lead them back to their product. As Spenner puts it, effective story telling for marketers should “lead to, not with.”

#3 – You’re doing lead nurturing the wrong way – changing mindsets takes time. Yes, you’ve built prospect profiles, aligned content to their interest, and you may even know how to engage them in their preferred communication channel. The problem may not be your content marketing efforts but the fact that prospects are stuck in the status quo. They may find your information interesting, but it hasn’t convinced or motivated them to change their behavior.

Nurturing efforts should continue to break down, or build up, the new mindset across the buying group. The ability to drive specific information aligned to individual buyer’s needs may actually be causing more dysfunction within an already dysfunctional group. To advance a prospect/s refocus efforts on driving consensus on the issue and solution within the buying group. If done correctly, like Merck, prospects will come to own conclusions that you offer the best solution for their needs.

 Motivating an audience to change doesn’t happen overnight. Unfortunately, marketers are under constant pressure to perform and rarely have the luxury of time to change their approach. It’s the reason I shared the first dirty secret, to buy marketers time to create the type of campaigns that deliver insights told as a story revealed over time.

The first wave of your campaign will generate leads, but it’s the waves that come after that really count. If marketers can stop telling customers why they need their product and let them come to that conclusion on their own, response and conversion rates will double based on my experience. But don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret.

How Marketing Impacts Sales Performance

You know the question is coming, because it comes every year.  You know who is going to ask it, because they ask it every year.  It’s just a matter of when, perhaps at the end of a difficult quarter, or during a mid-year review meeting.  As budgets are being discussed it comes; “What are we getting from our marketing dollars?”

It’s a fair question to ask, and given the size of some marketing budgets, marketers should be asking the same question.  To answer the sales executive (usually the one asking the question) you must first recognize what they are really asking, which is; “what is the value of marketing to them?”  Specifically, they want to know the impact marketing is having on sales performance, beyond leads.

A few years ago, we did some interesting research for a medical equipment manufacturer.  Their analysis showed that they were missing opportunities but they couldn’t agree on why – was it a sales or marketing issue?

To uncover the answer we interviewed hundreds of buyers (customers and prospects) in order to rate the performance of the company compared to three competitors, at four stages of the pipeline, product awareness (unaided), consideration, proposal and win.  We then constructed a quantitative model to reflect the impact of changes in performance. Two years later, we were given a unique opportunity to measure the impact of recommendations and investments.

The research yielded three key insights on the importance of marketing and how it was impacting their sales success:

1. Increasing Opportunities  – without marketing support sales cannot move consideration rates.  The company’s unaided product awareness rate was 62%, compared to 88% for the market share leader.  The consideration rate was even worse at 46% compared to 86% for the leading competitor.

The organization had a strong sales culture.  So to demonstrate the need to increase marketing activity, and not just sales coverage, we included “relationship with the sales team” as a key consideration drive, along with typical drivers such as; price, brand, and service.

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The research showed that the relationship with the sales team was not an important consideration driver.  In fact, the data revealed that reps could do very little to change buyers’ perceptions relating to products and service.  It also revealed a new buyer that was not being reached by the sales force.

The company increased the marketing budget and reallocated funds from events into digital marketing.  They ramped up webcast, videos and built a microsite specifically for this new buyer.  As a result, Awareness rose 17 percentage points to 79%, and Consideration, originally at 46% rose to 62%.  The model showed that an incremental 1% change in consideration rates yielded 20 new opportunities, and almost four new wins with a value of almost $2M.

2. Sales Coverage – increased marketing activity can create the perception of greater sales coverage.  Buyers were asked how often they saw a sales person within a 90 day period.  They mentioned seeing the company reps on average of 0.8 times, basically once a quarter, while reporting rep visits from the leading competitor at 2.5 times, almost once a month.  Two years later, buyers stated seeing the company’s reps 2.4 times per quarter, on par with competitors.  As a result of the ramped up marketing efforts, buyers perceived an increase in visits despite the fact that the number of reps in the segment remained the same over the two year period.

3. Sales Enablement – marketing can identify shifts in buying behavior.  The company’s performance had increased in all stages of the funnel except for one, existing accounts Reps had mentioned that customers had become more “price sensitive” and competitors were undercutting them.  The company was the product leader in the industry and the senior management team still believed that technology innovation was the key consideration driver.

The follow up research found that the sales force was indeed right.  Buyers had shifted their priorities.  With changes in reimbursement, healthcare reform, and an effective competitor campaign against overbuying technology, buyers had indeed changed, much faster than anyone suspected.

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As a result, sales material and value proposition had to be updated quickly.  Instead of espousing the virtues of innovation, it now needed to help buyers justify the investment.  Leading to a shift from “bells and whistles” to “ROI models and product configurators.”

So, how do you communicate the impact marketing has on sales performance?   Tell the sales folks that marketing can identify new buyers and influencers, increase the number of opportunities reps see, improve a buyers perception of sales coverage, and enable them with the right value proposition at the right time to win the deal.  Of course, you’ll need the data to prove it.

In this case, the increased marketing investment and activities yielded $50 million in new sales over the two-year period…just as the model predicted.