“I trained for less than three-quarters of an hour, maybe five days a week – I didn’t have time to do more. But it was all about quality, not quantity,” said Roger Bannister.
Breaking the four minute mile was one of those “Were you there?” moments. It is iconic, an amazing achievement and one of the most memorable moments in the last 100 years. Certainly from a sporting perspective.
But as Bannister says, he had to focus on the quality of his training, not the amount. To put it another way, his objective drove him to drain everything out of the limited time he could train. It’s a great example on how focusing on the goal determines how to use resources and time. In short, sometimes the ‘destination’ is as important as the ‘journey’.
The seismic shift to ‘results based marketing’ is not new. The business wants, expects and needs marketing to add value by delivering revenue or engagement among targeted prospects and customers.
This means marketing should be focused on the overall business goal. This can be difficult if more attention is paid to short-term targets than long-term achievements.
Marketers would have to be hiding under a stone to have missed the shifts in how companies buy. Buying teams are getting bigger – up from 5.4 in 2014 to 10.2 in 2018. Add to this anything from 57–90% of research has been done by the time someone contacts you shows it’s complex.
This means demand generation cannot be about one tactic, one person or one response. If we can think about ABM, we now need to think about account-based demand generation (ABDG) and drop MQLs in favour of marketing qualified accounts (MQAs). But convincing marketers targeted on number of MQLs they deliver, or convert to SALs, to shift to a more holistic view can be difficult because it takes longer and is harder to attribute to any given campaign or individual tactic.
So why do it? You should adopt the MQA model because it’s the way your customers buy. It isn’t about our processes, it’s about the customer.
It’s not that you shouldn’t speak to anyone that responds. It’s more that to be able to sell effectively to an organisation, you need to engage with a number of individuals. This means anyone wanting to be contacted should, but they should also be a bridge into the buying team – rather than just a meeting or opportunity to be stuck in the CRM.
Our own research shows if organisations have three or fewer individuals engaging with them at the time an opportunity is created, then chances are it will be lost. Take this above four contacts and chances are it will be won. If the goal is to build revenue, engagement or pipeline, we should see any activity we can track as an opportunity to build a relationship with buying teams.
Be like Bannister. Look at quality over quantity and focus on the overall goal. The journey may get you there, but the destination is how you will be judged.
