~~An introduction to introductions: Lindsey Demetris and Pittsburghese, or How To Speak Articulately Without Being Understood~~
Lindsey Demetris is a marketing guru who prioritizes creating a harmony between the marketing message and the presentation of the sales team. Studies show that misalignment between these groups allows companies and corporations to lose 10% of revenue. If you have sales and marketing alignment, you see 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher sales win rate. In sales driven organization the affairs between sales and marketing needs to be on the same page. Rather than lamenting, the sides of the lead development and sales organization need to come together and have a conversation about what message is sent out.
If an organization is experiencing this friction then the sales and marketing departments should sit down and have a meeting where they talk about what the marketing message should be, who are their ideal clients, and then bring together these assumptions to understand whether or not they are on the same page. And getting to that page starts walking in each other’s shoes. Marketers should be familiar with the feet on the street message and they should be aware of what the sales process looks like. We need to create unity between the selling process and the message that goes to the public.
~~The Conceptual: Marketing is More Than Memes and One-Liners, or How Do I Turn My Call Me Maybe into Despacito!~~
What we need to ground is the ideal client persona. The ideal client. To understand what the ideal client is we need to set up time to do this exercise. We need to figure out what this looks like. In our existing book of business who matches our ideal customer. Then we need to think about what our ideal client demographics are, what is their job level, what is their seniority, what do we solve, where do we add value, and what are the ideal goals of our clients. Where do these clients go for information? What experience are they looking for when they seek out your product or service, and what are their common objections to your product or service. After you have this conversation you can come together to build a unity and target your ideal client from the marketing side and the sales side.
Getting a handle on the attributes of your ideal client, the soft and specifics, leads to a lot of success. You may find that most of y our ideal clients are family businesses, they are very direct in their decision-making, and they wish to be articulated to in a specific way that matches their comfort zone. On top of that we need to understand what the life event that occurs precedes our engagement with them. Realtors may target divorcees, transfers, people moving. Studies show that 60% of the buying process takes place before the lead ever contacts the business. In this age of digital and social media while the lines of sales and marketing blur, we need to have an online presence—socially and digitally—so people are aware who you are and what it is you’re doing. From here we need to look at the point of conversion of new and potential clients. Did we receive an e-mail? Did we receive a phone call? Did they download a white paper?
Once we understand where someone is in their research process then we can have a more accurate idea of where they are. We need to ask people where they came from, what stuck out for them, and where they developed an interest in our company. This allows sales to double down and report back to the marketing department on where the pieces of progress and success are coming from. If our ideal clients are finding value in a specific niche of our market then we should target that niche as it speaks to people who are action-driven and willing to embrace change.
Marketing focuses on the features and benefits, the sizzle of the core of our organizations, but in sales we focus on pain as opposed to gain. In the ideal world both departments are singing from the same sheet music. When marketers are missing is the message, they need to think about the core of sales—FUDWACA. Frustrated. Upset. Disappointed. Worried. Angry. Concerned. Anxious. These emotional words will help you as a marketer by helping you digging to the root of the problem that our prospective clients are facing. Sales people and marketers should use the phrase FUDWACA as a reminder of the importance of emotions in the process of gaining leads.
Most buyers have already researched, they’ve done 60% of their decision making, so we need to bridge the gap. Once we’ve done our due diligence to define our ideal client and who we should be speaking with then we should develop the marketing content that supports the sales process. These pieces should then be disseminated on social media. But, you should be as sales focused on social media as your peers. Remember the user experience from your own perspective. Continued posting, limited, and focused engagement with your groups and communities will facilitate the satiation of prospective buyers so that when they finally see a call to action they are motivated enough to reach out because they’ve grown to trust you.
We need to know what the most valuable step for our prospects will be, not what the most valuable will be for us. The calls to action that we create should be far beyond the generic piece you’re speaking about. That means that when you’re creating calls to actions they need to be germane to the information that you are presenting to your audience. This step of if you enjoyed X then you might look at Y will create a crystal-clear process to allow prospects to follow a manufactured journey that leads them to action where you will be able to help them.
Our ideal client, who they are, what makes them tic, and where they’re coming from must be the core of our intentions when we go to market and advertise. We don’t want to be a disruption into their day, we want to engage them where they wish to be communicated to with the type of language and in the place that they want us to engage them. A lot of this only functions if you are consistent and you know your message.
If you wanted to get in better shape you wouldn’t go to the gym for a single day. To be ready you need to focus on a lot of variables in terms of developing strategies to health. Just as we need to develop relationships, add value, and build trust with our community to become a thought leader who is a passive component to be accessed when someone is looking for the call to action that will drive them to engagement.
But we have to move past the desire of positive messaging as marketers. Rather than talking about what people want from us, we need to engage what they are struggling with and what we can do to help them. Understanding what they deal with day in and day out will help us engage someone to the point where they want to reach out. To do this we need to have an open environment between the two departments of sales and marketing. As marketers, our goal is help facilitate success for our sales team. We need to be open to productive feedback and we need to see ourselves as working on the same page. An easy way to see what problems you can solve would be by interviewing past clients and uncovering what motivated them and what you solved for them in order to get more accurate messaging to the demographic that you’ve already closed.
~~The Technical: What Piece of Marketing is Related to Sales, and How Can We Process Lead Management?~~
When it comes to marketing the place where the ball is dropped is lead management. Teams—between sales and marketing—a lead pops up and leads to celebration, but the real question and focus should be on what happens next. Beyond developing content and knowing who we’re looking for, we need to understand what we’ve got down and what happens next. We need to have a system in place that controls the life of the lead. We need to know where it lives, where it goes, and who it goes to, and we need to track the lead and support the process for sales to pursue the qualification of the lead in order to measure a yes or a no out of the end.
One touch is not enough. At least eight to ten touches must be taken before a potential client is able to make a purchasing decision. Once their head pops up, what does the conversation sound like before they’re able to make a judgment call. Marketing needs to be concerned with where did they come from and what campaigns are performing, and then marketing needs to focus on tracking ROI. People argue that you can’t prove ROI on marketing, but if you build a system then you can track people through the buying process to the point where you can compute ROI through your marketing efforts.
The question about leads is a healthy dialogue because if it exists because of a disconnect between our message and our system. If our sales teams give up way too soon then we need to supplement sales through marketing to develop sales ready content that focuses on the buyer’s needs. If marketing helps sales create templates for follow-up and pieces of content to drip on prospects in order to reel them in a more productive and measured process that adds value to the conversation and assists the sales in their goal to close business.
In the beginning of a conversation we simply want to add value to the conversations with prospects. We want important and relevant information, but once we go deeper into the funnel and deeper into the conversation then our sales ready content should be supported research done on your own clients in order to build content that speaks to the buyer at the place they’re at in solving their pain or fear
We need to be building our content with a three-step approach that’s in line with what our sales team is doing on the field. We need to identify the challenges of the prospect. Understanding what they are doing today. And then we need to offer an alternative approach. This is the most effective way to give out a piece of marketing. By asking is X really helping you get where you need to be? At Y we do Z and here’s the success that we’ve found with our product or service. If the buyer has pushed hard enough to engage then at some point we need to move past the virtual into a voice-to-voice conversation so that our sales ready content moves us into a comfortable conversation.
Once that conversation is ready we need to find out their needs based upon their budget and their decision-making process. To do this we need to stay on our message with consistency and we need to service people on their level with the language that they’re looking for. For calls of actions we like to play around with the language. Eight important words to remember are: featured, exclusive, advanced, download, secret, access, or special offer, or limited time. Playing around with different calls to actions may lead to different results: Let’s do this! Instead of download. These sort of pattern-interrupts will put people at ease and is playful. It’s not a directly culturally inundated piece of language and that can be productive.
The final piece for marketers to think about is their list. Think about this with a triple A standard: Accurate, Appropriate, and Acquaintance. Once you’ve had a triple A standard on your list you can leverage that and begin pulling in productive results for your business. This acquainted piece requires knowledge and connection. We need to have connections to the people we’re reaching out to and then produce value for them in a way that enables them to engage with us in a productive manner.
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