Risky Dependence on Inbound Marketing – When Digital Marketing Does Not Work
If you supply a complex, high-investment solution, you are at significant risk if your team is too focused on inbound strategies and outbound email.
The risk is that letting high-value prospects find their own way through the buying process will generally result in lost business. Often companies see leads move from marketing to sales to the black hole (called CRM) without effective touch cycles (designed and documented in a playbook) and without effective nurturing – which effectively triples the return on marketing and sales investments. While your BDRs/SDRs and sales executives are waiting for responses to social media and automated email, a more agile competitor has designed the process and locked the prospect onto the win column. While at best you might be asked to provide a quote only to realize that you are simply column fodder in an evaluation that has already been won by the more proactive competitor.
For me, risk management has always been about assessing business exposure and taking initiative-taking steps to improve a situation rather than still being reactive when there is downside potential. I was curious about a more formal definition of risk management and found on Wikipedia.
“ Risk management is the identification, assessment, and prioritization of risks (defined in ISO 31000 as the effect of uncertainty on objectives, whether positive or negative) followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events or to maximize the realization of opportunities.”
In the context of this discussion, there are four areas where overreliance on inbound marketing and marketing automation puts the “realization of opportunities” (i.e., SQLs and closed deals) at risk.
Executive work styles and late adopters.
C-level decision makers may never adopt the role of self-education via social media. In one closed deal for a client, the chief financial officer of a large utility finally responded positively on the 42nd touch and later signed off on a $1 billion deal (in five months). His did not have a self-educating work style, and there was no way he was going to search blogs or websites to download white papers. He responded to a proven outbound lead generation method driven by an experienced prospect development professional.
Complex internal buying landscapes
Outbound marketing uses personal, direct and regular contact with prospects to be in the right place with the right message at the right time. Evaluation and buying dynamics are constantly in flux, and a personal relationship generated and kept with outbound efforts provides immediate response to shifting prospect landscapes.
Early-stage to late-stage market coverage
Many agree that inbound marketing and marketing automation work best when time is not an issue. That is, it takes time to develop content, promote it, and get prospects to find it and engage with it. But overreliance on this inbound “get found and convert” strategy does not address “very early” and “very late” stages of a buying process.
A primary advantage of an initiative-taking outbound approach lies in the way a company can reach out early to connect with a qualified decision maker and begin to build a business relationship. This activity not only helps the prospect clarify challenges and solutions—it also positions your company as a trusted thought leader and advisor in a way that ideally leads the prospect to view your company as the preferred vendor as the buying process evolves.
And because inbound marketing generates contacts and supports self-education over time, it is easy to miss opportunities that could be deep in the current pipeline. We consistently find 3-7% of the market is in an active buying stage and narrowing the list of competitive solutions today. If you are depending on social and automation to interrupt the evaluation process, you are going to be disappointed. Betting too heavily on inbound marketing providing 100% market coverage is a risk not worth taking.
High-Investment offers
Inbound marketing works very effectively with solutions at lower price points. An example might be a $10,000 piece of hardware. Technical specifications are to the point, and the buying process may include ordering online or rep engagement with a single contact in a purchasing group. But a proven outbound approach is needed when selling a six- or seven-digit enterprise solution with a long sales cycle to a multi-disciplined executive group. To put this another way, imagine you are sitting in front of your demand generation dashboard and reflecting on your marketing strategy. On the screen there are four horizontal scrollbars, and you have moved four sliders all the way to the right to show…
Selling to C-level and senior executives
Complex buying landscape and long sales cycle
Need to assure 100% market coverage right now
High-investment offering
In situations like this, sales and marketing executives should check the definition of risk management above and reflect on the right “application of resources to maximize the realization of opportunities.”
The return on complex sales is too high to risk the identification, care and feeding of potential high- value opportunities on overreliance on inbound marketing and marketing automation.
With the complex sale, it stays critical to ground core strategies in an initiative-taking outbound prospect development process to effectively uncover, nurture and deliver and act on high-quality leads.
The reason teams’ default to social and automated emails is that calling (wrongly called cold calling by many) is hard. You deal with rejection, and sometimes the effort does not seem worth it. However, hundreds of companies prove every day that a combination of personalized voicemails and emails (and conversations) is THE most effective approach to take to prospect for enterprise solutions.
For a deep dive into the subject of email marketing, this is one of the best I have read: https://www.threecolts.com/blog-articles/youve-got-mail-what-email-marketers-need-know
Perhaps this excerpt will tease you into reading the blog: “There’s a reason why one-third of marketers send emails every week, while over a quarter of them send multiple emails every month -because email is one of the most effective tools in a marketer’s arsenal.”
I am happy to help you in any way I can. Let us talk about your situation and at the very least you will come away with some things to try to take a step toward improved prospecting and deal closing. Email me at dan.mcdade@prospect-experience.com.