EDITORIAL FEATURE
Three Warning Signs That Your Marketing Effort is Headed Toward Failure By Craig Klein, CEO of SalesNexus.com
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arketing is expensive. It takes a lot of money to acquire a new customer and it really bites when that effort does not produce sales. If you are like most business owners, you lament that salespeople are just not as good as they used to be. There was a day when good salespeople had so perfected their closing techniques that they could “sell ice to an Eskimo” (forgive the overused phrase.) Selling was all about charm and method. Today’s sales professionals seem to fail in these qualities. Will you hate me if I tell you that is an incorrect assumption? I’m not saying that you have genius salespeople. Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. However, I have found that the marketing failures almost always are about decisions made by the business owner and the marketing approaches he endorses. OUCH!!! Here are three things I see in companies that are headed toward marketing failure:
expert look good, it really doesn’t matter if you cannot convert those sales leads into revenue for your business. Far beyond targeted digital advertising, you need to be starting two-way conversations and educating your sales leads rather than just dumping them into your online CRM and expecting your sales people to convert them. In a recent article from the Content Marketing Institute, Saracino says, “…we are shifting from being the mouthpiece for the products and services our businesses sell to being conversation starters, think tanks, entertainers, community builders, and idea hubs.” Your Salespeople Complain About the Quality of Sales Leads Beyond targeting your marketing efforts to a specific audience, sales team members need to know how to quickly disqualify sales leads that are not ready to make a decision at this time.
They Get Lots of Sales Leads and Few Sales When the CRM software is bulging with lots of sales leads, you may expect the sales team to convert a large percentage of them to closed sales. It seems like a reasonable assumption, but you know what they say about assumptions.
In today’s digital environment, it takes a huge number of sales leads to fuel the pipeline. Sales people need to conserve the time they spend and commit it to only the ones who are ready to make a decision. We recently created an eBook entitled “The Magic 5 of Content Marketing that Drives Sales” which could help them qualify well.
There is a good chance that sales leads have been generated by “throwing money” at the internet without a strategic plan for obtaining quality leads from a narrow target market. Using search marketing strategies to fuel pay-per-click campaigns will often lead to an incredible volume of sales leads. While it may make your SEO
None of the sales leads are wasted though. The majority of them should be placed in a lead nurturing email campaign. During the lead nurturing period, the sales leads are fed a steady diet of helpful information. They get a quality education from you whether they end up purchasing from you or not. Your
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sales people will love working with better educated and ready buyers. You Are Losing Customers That Have Been With You a Long Time This article is about marketing and talking about client retention seems a little farfetched, but it is not. With today’s buyers always hungry to learn more and be informed about what products and services they use, it is pretty easy for a savvy competitor to take your clients away from you. When was the last time you used email automation targeted at your existing customers? Your CRM software will allow you to segment your database and begin sending content to current clients that is helpful to them. You may want to send them interesting tactics contained in your product which are underutilized. One effective email might be a case study about how you responded to a complaint, apologize for the possible impact on them and explain how you made corrections to the system. Surprisingly, showing your vulnerability and human errors will cause people to feel more loyalty. Transparency has power in today’s communication. There are an endless number of things you can communicate to those customers. Which of these three warning signs are showing up in your marketing effort? Now you know what to do about it.
Craig is the founder of SalesNexus.com, a leading provider of CRM, Email Marketing and Lead Generation solutions to business 2 business sales teams.
SMALL BUSINESS TODAY MAGAZINE AUGUST 2013
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