What about the other 97% of buyers?
Why do things that experienced sales veterans know not get passed on to Marketing? Does Marketing not listen, or is Sales not sharing? I have often talked about how in this digital age that Sales and Marketing need to align with each other another and here is another example. Recently I had a meeting with two extremely experienced and smart sales executives (Note: these are prospects who are now clients); this was my first time meeting with one of them who was brought in to help make the final decision on our partnership. The associate at one point stated: “you are a web design firm”. That actually kind of offended me. Not that it was his fault, but I think than many people have a misunderstanding what Inbound Sales and Marketing is.
I mentioned to him that if he asked me if we were a website design company, I would say “no”. What we do is provide Sale Qualified Leads (SQL) for our clients. How we do that is by using things like social media, Google, and other digital mediums, with their website as a hub. But it involves so much more than just website design. I asked him what he sees when he looks at most company websites. He responded that “it was a bunch of junk about that company”. I told him that he was correct then asked him what happens when a new sales person starts making prospecting calls and they do nothing except talk about themselves. He laughed and said that was simple: the prospects hang up.
That is exactly it: if most experience sales executives know that talking all about you is a bad practice for amateurs, then why do we allow it on our websites? There is a golden rule in sales that you should spend 80% of your time listening to your client, and I think that marketing needs to learn this rule. A DemandGen Report webinar on Inside the Mind of B2B Buyers: New Paths to Purchase, pointed out that over 9 out of 10 buyers consumed content on their way to purchase — especially white papers, eBooks, webinars, podcasts, video clips and much, much more. What kind of content worked best? Content personalized to them — their industry, their title, their stage in the buying process, their consumption device (iPhone, Blackberry, laptop, etc.) To compete today, you need great content well-mapped to your buyer personas.
Much like how Sales knows how you have to take a prospect through a buying process, most Marketers, and especially people who develop websites, need to learn that same process. It starts as status quo and then moves through to problem identification to option evaluation and then eventual purchase. If your website and marketing strategy is not mapped to this process then you are doing your company and your prospects a disservice. You are wasting their time and yours. It’s no wonder that many websites only convert 3% of their traffic. Actually, it fits exactly with what sales strategist Chet Holmes says: At any given time, about 3 percent of your market is in active buying mode. So your website is able to convert that 3%, but what is it doing for the other 97%.
What is your website/marketing strategy doing to capture, nurture and eventually close the other 97%? And that is where today’s progressive companies are working. They’re not fight with price cuts and giveaways cutting into margins with every other company out there. No, they are targeting that 97% that are not looking to cut your margins and waste your time.
The progressive companies are out there, demonstrating thought leaders and helping educate prospects. And as any good sales person will tell you, they would rather be the person crafting the need and requirements as opposed to coming in after your competitors have already done so. I used to find it interesting when one of my sales reps would bring me a RFP (Request For Proposal) and want to bid on it because it would make their month, quarter or year. Often I would tell them that it was not even worth the effort. Why? Well, I can thank Tom Sant for that. In his book Persuasive Business Proposals, Tom Sant takes you through the process of evaluating if it is even worth bidding and wasting your time. He asks two key questions: 1) have you had influence on, and 2) have you had access to and if yes, how much, the decision makers or influencers in the buying process. If you answer “no” to these two questions, it’s not worth bidding. I believe that this same process needs to be part of the modern B2B sales process. If you have not been involved in the early stages in the process then someone else, your competitor, most likely has, or will. So who do you think is going to get the business if you continue to do nothing?
My question to you is: what are you doing today to get in on the early stages of the other 97% of buyers who are going to eventually buy your product or service?