Adventures of the New Marketing World: A Sales Explorer’s Story

Marketers, how many times have you heard sales assume that we give them nothing and our communications are not customer centric?

Sigh……. I was once one of those reps, tied up in the day to day doldrums of prospecting, working deals and closing. I gave little to no thought on the efforts of marketing. Sure, it was great when the occasional marketing event would happen in my patch of dirt, but apart from that, we were as distant as could be.

Sadly, this is the state of affairs in many organizations. The lack of a two way dialogue between sales and marketing has many side effects, the most impactful of all is missed revenue. How can a communication gap cause us to miss revenue targets? Let me be clear- the realm of revenue contribution from marketing comes in various forms. Let’s explore just one aspect today- the dreaded cold call.

Would you be surprised to know that for revenue teams that actually collaborate and follow best practice (i.e. Sales + Marketing = Revenue Team), average marketing contribution for closed revenue is roughly 30%? Say whaaaaaat?

In case you blatantly ignored the bold letters, this is the average. Teams that have been perfecting revenue marketing for longer see even higher rates.

Allow me to paint two pictures here. Which one sounds better?.

The Cold Call

It’s 8:00 AM- cold calling time. You hope you can reach the executives on your list before they really begin their day. You have a list on the screen, either one you bought or downloaded. The only information about the contacts is their name, title, phone, email and hopefully an org chart. You spent two hours the day before researching 10 companies, building a value statement you hope is somewhere close to combining their situation with a pain point or solution fit. The call hours begin; it’s a good day. You reach three people. One was the wrong contact. One hung up after 45 seconds. The last listened for a minute, then asked you to send them some information about the company that they will read.

The Warm Call

It’s 8:00 AM- prospecting time. You hope you can reach the executives on your list before they really begin their day. You have a list on the screen that came from marketing. This list contains relevant profile information as well as digital body language.

Example: You notice that the head of the department you sell to under the executive team has visited your website product page and downloaded a few specific white papers. This person has also been consuming thought leadership your company has disseminated around the same topics. It’s focused around ROI. You also see that a manager at this firm has been looking at similar information. The manager has shared the content socially and asked how it relates to helping daily efficiency. You are able to see all of this within 3 minutes. The result is that you reach 10 people that day because you focus on calling people on the list who show online behavior at the same hour. Eight talk with you for a few minutes. Of the eight, three ask for information and a follow up call in a week. Five contacts schedule a second call to go into more detail.

The second scenario sounds a whole lot better. Right?

Adventures of the New Marketing World: A Sales Explorer’s Story