2 Things Profitable Sales & Marketing Professionals May Want to Know

Posted by Mike Coombs on July 11,2014

A couple of recent personal experiences have generated this post. Here are my two main points that sales and marketing people in small-to-medium size businesses may not know:    Graphic_old_lady_small

You can sell with social media.

(If you know what you are doing.) 

That’s not the conventional wisdom of a lot of sales and marketing professionals (for good reason). And...

Lead generation with web and online tools provides better ROI, and is more cost effective than old school methods.

(Again, if you know what you are doing.)

That may not be the conventional wisdom of many marketing folks at small and medium sized businesses.  But take a look at big business.  They are all about “Inbound” now.

Anecdote 1: You can sell with social media.

Your team has a huge, database of business and personal information available.  It’s search-able by company, interest, location, product, education and a variety of other factors.

It’s practically free.  It’s called LinkedIn.  You may have heard about it.

This week, I became a sales qualified lead for a local company.  The sales person and I exchanged nice notes.  This sales “kid” had to spend about :20 seconds to find me. He knows my age, status in life, interests that happen to match what he sells.  And he knows what college I went to.  He used that fact to contact and interest me.  It worked.  And I know, that he is very new in the area and new to his sales job.  But he easily found me as a lead. That’s how the web works… all the time.

My company does exactly that for several happy customers.

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Every business-to-business sales team should have a LinkedIn expert.  Like all software, there are tricks and methodologies that can make it sing for lead generation.  Connect it to CRM?  Awesome.

The next time someone tells you that you can’t attribute sales to social media… tell them… “Right…except for LinkedIn”, where you can find, qualify, and contact prospects.  And attribute sales to leads found there.

Anecdote 2: Lead generation with web and online tools (like social!) provides better ROI, and is more cost effective than old school methods.

I started my career directing and selling local television commercials. Did I mention I am “a seasoned professional”?  Of course, then, there was only TV, radio, print, billboard etc.  While TV was expensive, it was effective because there were far fewer stations, no DVR’s, and absolutely no competition from the online world we swim in today.

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Nielsen and Arbitron ratings showed what our viewer/listener demographics were, for our purchased time slots. We bought eyeballs, reach, and frequency, on a cost per thousand impressions basis.  We bragged about how effective our cost per thousand targeting was.  But still, television and print advertising, was and is, broad and expensive and difficult to attribute specific sales to. Throw enough at the wall and something will stick... you hope.

More recently I have placed hundreds of thousands of dollars in various online adwords campaigns.  In those cases I can tell you exactly what it cost, click by click, to get each interested potential customer to (typically) do something on my clients website.  I can also tell you exactly what pages they were interested in when they came to the website and how long they stayed on-site.Google_AdwordsJPG

Today you can attribute specific dollar amounts to specific people who click to your website when they are actually looking for you, your topic, product or service... when they are motivated.  (You can get them “free” too, if you have a sophisticated inbound marketing content strategy.)

Today’s Inbound Marketing methodologies “live closer” to the sales department then old school marketing methods ever have.  Inbound marketing strategically finds, identifies, nurtures and presents sales departments with qualified leads. We understand and track the value of a lead and how much it costs to get it.  Smart, strategic, relevant Inbound Marketing starts with the value of a lead, NOT the expense of the campaign.  Better data makes inbound marketing efforts far more cost effective than traditional methods. You can tell what works, and what doesn't.

It’s smart digital outreach, recorded in CRM for marketing and sales. It generates leads.

And an important reminder:  “The customer” has changed in the way they consume media.  The web wins.  Is your sales and marketing and customer service strategy, web and digital and email focused? It should be.

And yes, you probably should still consider the old school methods. Wisely.

But too many small and medium sized businesses are under-investing in more cost effective digital tools and strategies that would clearly make them profitable.

Why?  They have the budget.  They have a website, a LinkedIn page, email, lots of other disjointed digital efforts.  But they don’t have a coherent inbound marketing strategy or the on-staff expertise to create one.

But it is easy and cost effective to outsource.  Everyone will end up a hero.

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For more information on social media and all things inbound:

What's the Future of Social Selling?

Free Inbound Assessment

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Topics: Inbound Marketing