Marketing Morphine
Does your marketing drive so much business that you quickly run out of stock? Does your pipeline building activity create so much quality and momentum that your salespeople are begging you to turn down the taps? Are the strength and quality of your qualified sales pipeline so good that you are forced to bring forward your recruitment plans in operations, customer success and management to stay on top of demand?
Or do you bombard your customers and prospects with boring, irrelevant advertising and content that has the same effect as morphine? For so much corporate marketing that is the best outcome. For the rest, do you leave customers bewildered and confused, irritated or running to your competition?
Brute Force
Most companies use persistent, brute force, interruption marketing, and sales prospecting that is no longer contextually appropriate. Customers don’t buy the way you think they do. And they resent the fact you don’t understand them.
When they realise they have a problem, their people make space for it in their minds and start passively looking for ways to address their problem. They check out YouTube, websites, LinkedIn, download white papers, attend webinars that catch their attention, speak to their peers, and very, very, very occasionally, click on an advert. $265bn per year is squandered on adverts that get 1 click or none, lining the pockets f the likes of Google and Facebook. That is 4000 BILLION adverts inflicted on the public that are forgettable, ignorable and irrelevant every year.
Companies inflict billions of unwanted, irrelevant emails on their audience with average click through rates (CTR) ranging from 1.6% (UK) to 3.1% (Australia). Whilst click to open rates vary from 9.9% to 14.9%, think about how few actually buy. From 1000 monthly downloads of freemium software, it’s not unusual for only 200 to open the software, and 20 might do something with it with fewer than 6 making a final purchase. 994 non buyers have to be followed up multiple times by your salespeople. Why? How often do you as decision makers actually download free software to try it out for yourself? Isn’t that something you delegate? Another massive interruption and a huge tariff placed on your salespeople due to their leadership’s lack of imagination or understanding of actual customer buying behaviour.
These depressing conclusions are confirmed by the evidence. Based on the data of 40 million cold calls in 2020 (Connect & Sell) dial to effective rates are running at 33 dials to 1 effective (get through to the intended human being who picks up) unless you’re calling senior executives in IT in which case is is 1:46 dial to effectives. 1 in 14 effectives result in a first meeting.
Where these numbers get really depressing is when you consider that the average conversion from a first to a second meeting, i.e. your salesperson was relevant to the prospect and they agreed to advance to a second meeting, that figure averages out at 1 in 8. Which means the dial to advancement in the sale ratio is 0.03%.
What is the average time in front of the customer of your typical salesperson? 8%? 12%? 21%? I’d be pleasantly surprised if it was any higher. Consider what percentage of your sales payroll is taken up with non revenue generating activities. Upwards of 80% is normal in my experience across all vertical markets on every continent. That comes out of your profits in case you didn’t consider this before.
These numbers are terrifying bad. And that is on us. It’s not the prospects’ fault that our advertising, emails and prospecting calls are so irrelevant, poorly timed and uninspiring that they choose to ignore us. And honestly, customers deserve better. Our salespeople deserve better.
More Is Not Better; Better Is Better
Doubling down on stuff that doesn’t work is more likely to reduce efficacy not improve it. Beating your head against a brick wall and blaming the brick for your headache is not looking at the cause of your problem.
Is Marketing Certainty Even Possible?
Yes
There are several examples of exceptional outliers who break the trend towards mediocrity. What makes them all different is how they are approaching the problem. They are asking the better questions. They are approaching the problem from the perspective of the end customer. They are thinking about the customer AS the customer and delivering their solutions by meeting customers where they are, not where you wish or think they are.
95–98% of your total addressable market (TAM) is in stages 1 or 2 in Bob Moesta’s model. They are making space or passive looking. They are looking for education, help, insight, to raise their awareness levels, to identify options. ANY attempt to sell to them at this point will be met with cold, stony indifference or outright hostility. But this is where vendor organisations, their leader and management are routinely and blithely throwing their salespeople into a full frontal assault on their customers.
“The price of free marketing is all the people who will never buy from you” — Dan Kennedy
Many marketing departments and sales development reps (SDRs) bombard their lists with emails, not realising that for the most part they are getting caught in spam blockers, being blacklisted by Google or sending emails to emails that have been given solely to capture an offer and are never reviewed or read. Amp up the volume, throw more effort, more money, make more noise. Eventually someone will hear us!
Funnily enough, those are the folks transitioning from stage 2 to stage 3. But if you have pissed them off with your brute force marketing and premature sales attempts, IF they choose to talk to you, it will guarded and with deep suspicion. Many will have already written you off and instead choose to engage with those who made them feel safe, who consistently delivered timely, contextually relevant AND valuable insights, quality insights without any heavy handed or pressured selling tactics.
Customers are a savvy bunch. They have highly attuned bullshit detectors, and they know when a salesperson has their own selfish self interest front of mind. They are very aware of when you are trying to dip your hand in their pocket, especially when your clumsy, premature overtures occur at the wrong time in their buying cycle.
Deep Listening
The greatest quality in salespeople and marketers is their ability to listen deeply. It never appears on job descriptions. Few managers demand it as a prerequisite for every salesperson. Almost none are set up to make listening central to their marketing and selling culture and habituated, measured behaviours. Only a minute proportion of companies have made any investment in technologies that enable listening to the raw, unfiltered feedback from their markets, their customers, their prospects and their front line staff.
If you make this shift in your culture and you make this investment in your people and your technology, I make you this promise. All your communication will improve. Your prospects and your customers will welcome it if you apply what you learn. This is not just about customer or employee surveys that ask questions in such a way that you look good and hear what you want to hear.
Are you using objective, real world data that captures actual customer buying patterns and preferences? Are you able to unlock customer decision making from the data that is available to you, or are you guessing?
Do you have the technologies and the data that allow you to identify when a prospect with you ideal customer profile is transitioning from passive looking to active looking; to when they are looking for possibilities? Are you providing them with the most relevant, timely content for wherever they are in their buying journey? Here’s a kick in the pants … do you even know what your customers’ journey really looks like, or are you assuming?
Partners Know An Awful Lot More Than You Do
Few companies do a great job of partnering. And this is a terrible shame. Your partners often have long standing relationships directly with end users. They know the key stakeholders personally, and have done for a very long time. They understand the ideosyncrasies of their local market, the business culture, the preferences.
Do you have a centralised marketing function who treats all markets as though one size fits all?
How often do we hear the complaint that US and UK companies fail to localise content? Or how often do our direct salespeople commit faux pas when they turn up in country because they behave the same when when selling to a buyer in Uttar Pradesh, Lagos or Kyoto as one from Raleigh or Hull?
Share Holder Value vs Employee Engagement
The unholy and unhealthy obsession with quarterly reporting, the distraction of shareholder value being the altar upon which too many companies worship and the hegemony of finance are the unholy trinity of distractions away from what really matters in a great business.
- Your customer
- Your people
- Your community (environment, stakeholders, suppliers, partners, alliances)
Excellent profits are a byproduct of looking after these three first. A study of the S&P 500 between 2010 and 2016 showed that companies with highly engaged employees produced 273% higher profit per employee, 130% higher revenue per employee, 40% lower turnover, 20% higher daily productivity and compound share price growth of 316% year on year than those companies with mildly engaged and actively disengaged employees.
This begs the question, how much attention are you paying to marketing in a compelling way to your own stakeholders, your staff, your suppliers, your partners?
Well?
Pipeline Nurturing
Are you playing the long game? Are you encouraging your marketing and sales teams to engage in relationship and value building activities months and years before you intend to do business with a key target account. Or are you expecting them to jump in with all the finesse of a messy one night stand and put a ring on their finger? Is it any wonder that customers are so often disappointed when they wake up slightly hung over and feeling dirty, the day after you’ve popped the champagne, disappointed, and filled with regret and blame?
Timely, Contextually Relevant & Valuable
Since 2010, the context of marketing has changed. The internet has made the virtually the sum total of human knowledge available at a few clicks of the mouse. And whilst the context has changed, leadership and marketing’s thinking and behaviour has not.
Buyer can access enormous amounts of competitive information instantly. They talk to their peers. They check out review sites. They speak to your customers. They can access all the information they need to learn how. So the purpose of your marketing must be to help them see you and your company as the best possible solution provider to help them achieve their outcomes.
Here is the problem. If you consistently talk about your company, your products and your services, and you use tedious technical language to describe what you do (just like all your competitors do), without consistently positioning what you do in the context of the experience your buyers are likely to be having, the only thing they have to differentiate you is price. You are setting your salespeople up to fail.
And if you aren’t making listening core to your marketing, you will probably spend much of your efforts guessing at contexts that will resonate with your customers. If you are not speaking to them about their strategic plans and direction, and asking “What are you trying to do next?”, you will quickly become irrelevant. And if you are making yourselves the hero of your stories, your prospects will never see themselves as the heroes in the stories you could be developing together.
So enough with your morphine marketing. Put some pep into your marketing. You have not a minute to waste.
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If you want to build a #revenueoperation that puts your customer at the heart of everything you do, creates #buyersafety, and a team of highly engaged marketing, sales, customer success and account growth professionals who give massive discretionary effort, DM me on LinkedIn or book a call via https://linktr.ee/marcuscauchi
