Today I had the honor of presenting at ContentTech. To a packed room of senior level marketers and a few sales people, we talked about the gulf between Marketing and Sales. Specifically, what causes it and how to fix it.
For most marketing teams today, their role in the sales prospecting process is all about living inside the database—a database that they populate by buying advertising, attending trade shows, purchasing prospects lists, creating events that allow the sales team to conduct general networking activities and of course, content marketing.
These marketing efforts give sales organizations huge databases full of prospects, but the sales teams really don’t know a whole lot about each prospect. Primarily they know the prospect has demonstrated interest but they have no idea if there is any intent. And that’s a really big difference.
Further, the sales teams have no idea of what motivates that sales prospect to want to buy what the sales team is selling.
So each day, salespeople dutifully call on the unqualified prospects in their company’s database, in hopes of getting a prospect to provide more context for their initial inquiry. They ask a ton of questions about the prospect’s business, goals, pain points, and more. And if they’re lucky, the prospect will answer these questions, helping the salesperson to properly develop a post-qualification sales strategy.
We’ve all been on the receiving end of these fishing expeditions. They’re painful and usually a complete waste of time. So what do we prospects do? We screen our calls, create a plausible excuse to end the call prematurely, or, in some cases, even rudely convey our lack of desire to be qualified and hang up. It’s no wonder a 2018 Report reported that 43% of sales people fear cold calling.
But there’s a better way. And that’s what my talk today focused on helping the audience understand.
In short, we talked about how marketing teams can use behavioral email to create those leads that sales can’t live without. Namely, leads that deliver calls that count.
I showed the audience how you can structure a strategically planned behavioral email logic that combined with well planned creative, delivers leads to sales that not only clarify intent but more importantly, show sales the exact motivational buttons to push and how to the prospect wants to consume the sales pitch — case study, testimonial, product information, etc.
Chances are you didn’t get to catch the presentation today… but I received such great feedback from it that I’ve decided to deliver it as a downloadable webinar.
If you want to understand how you can deliver the kinds of leads that your sales team will love you for, download this 45 minute webinar version of today’s ContentTech presentation.
