It’s getting to that time of the year when we start making predictions about what’s to come in the next 12 months key trends, major themes, the ones to watch. But in these uncertain times, it’s becoming more difficult to predict what’s ahead what happened in the past is no longer a pointer to what might happen in the future.
It could be that the current downturn may throw up longer-term positives for B2B marketers. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention and it could just be that improved techniques, more coherent approaches and better ways of working will result from the fact that B2B marketers are going to have to work harder than ever to attract new customers.
Nurture your prospects
In a downturn everyone seems to stay put. Homeowners don’t want to move house, workers don’t want to risk moving jobs and customers are reluctant to move away from the supplier they know and trust. Meanwhile, competitors are working harder than ever to hold onto customers. Increasingly, it’s not only about building a relationship with your their clients. In order to thrive, a business needs to build a relationship with prospects too. Prospect nurturing is something we are going to hear a lot more about.
Truly managing prospects, rather than just burning through them on a cold call list, will require a shift in attitude within many organisations. It means a business’s sales and marketing teams sometimes uncomfortable bedfellows will have to work more effectively together.
Prospect nurturing within a closed-loop marketing programme sees sales and marketing working together feeding from and feeding into the same central prospecting pool or database.
It’s a significant change in the way most sales and marketing teams currently operate. The sales organisation will typically gather leads from directories or business lists and get on with their sales calls. But what happens to prospects that don’t respond favourably to the call? Now the need within most businesses to increase ROI right across the board will result in these two disciplines working more closely together. That’s where prospect nurturing and closed-loop marketing not letting prospects escape, but instead building a relationship with them comes into its own.
Feedback loop
Leads are fed out to the sales organisation for sales people to work them. Where there has been no immediate take up, prospects are fed back into the prospect pool, but this time identified as warmer leads. Armed with the knowledge and insight from the sales team, the marketer knows a little bit more about the prospect and can tailor offers to them or target them with slightly different campaigns or creatives in the future. And so the process goes on. Sales and telemarketing teams can start effectively building relationships with prospects, rather than just making a one-off call.
As a solution, it needn’t be overly complex for the business to implement or require a huge amount of investment. Bespoke prospect pools are available and marketers can segment, count and pull data out of the pools and then squirt it into an off-the-shelf web-based CRM tool such as Salesforce.com.
Crucially, closed loop-marketing, prospect nurturing and the use of prospect pools forces organisations to deal with the disconnect that can often exist between sales and marketing. From a marketers perspective, it can significantly enhance the team’s stock with the sales organisation. Few sales people are insightful marketers, but in this instance they can see the value of marketing activity, since it impacts directly on them.
Close the sale
From a sales perspective, closed-loop marketing helps to increase the closure rate of the sales team and even a 10 per cent increase can make a huge difference to ROI. What’s more, call time is increasingly focused on warmed-up prospects, while spend on direct marketing is so targeted that there are far greater returns than general prospecting. Throw segmentation and blended data into the mix and a business will really start to see the rewards.
Last, but not least, what will certainly be attractive to many businesses is that this approach, in bringing together sales and marketing, helps avert the unsightly fight for budget that inevitably happens when times are tough and the bottom line becomes the main focus.
For businesses operating in such a difficult environment it could well be the approach that sets them above the competition.
Was that a prediction?
