Can You Sell to Millennial Engineers on the Phone? 

Recently we’ve had some discussion here at the agency about the use of tele-sales, and whether that time has passed. Is it possible to reach people and sell on the phone anymore?  Is – gasp – cold calling still something to task salespeople to do?

We still believe that cold calling and phone selling has its place. In fact, we know of several clients that use call centers as their primary selling channel.

However, we also believe that cold calling and telesales is the single most costly method of selling.  It reminds me of an old McGraw Hill Publishing ad in which a grumpy prospect looked directly into the camera and asked, “I don’t know your company. I don’t know your products.  I don’t know your reputation.  Now, what was it you wanted to sell me?” 

The point of the ad, of course, is to remind marketers that you can certainly sell to someone who knows nothing about you, but it’s always going to be quite a bit easier to push that boulder up the hill if you walk in the door with some brand awareness and even preference already established.

Still, some companies are making it even harder for marketers to use the phone.  JPMorgan Chase and Coca-Cola recently eliminated voice mail for many employees as part of cost-cutting moves; others are considering similar initiatives. Vonage released a study showing annual declines in the number of voice mails left on their systems, and the number who even listened to their messages fell by 14%. In another story about voice mail, NPR interviewed a 26-year-old who said that “voice mail might evolve into something kind of special and exciting – like a telegram once was.” Oh my god!

Tech Accelerators Will Win the Marketing Battleground 

I was stunned to read this:  Gartner Group reported recently that the technology budget for the Chief Marketing Officer in 2017 will be bigger than the CIO’s tech budget!

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, with the explosion in marketing tools coming to the market.  See the graphic put together by Chiefmartech.com, and you’ll see what I mean.  It’s a dizzying array of tech tools to measure and improve marketing.  No wonder marketing feels so overwhelming these days!

50% of Your Content Should be Video

That was a surprising comment, made by one of the speakers at HubSpot’s recent Inbound 2016 event on digital marketing. It’s one of the better conferences on all things online, all things marketing, particularly for a b-to-b marketer trying to make sense of all the ways marketing is changing. And changing rapidly.

So while we’ve all realized video’s importance, that was a bit of a wake-up call when I heard that. If I look at 2017 budgets, for instance, and I pull apart the section on content, is 50% of my activities next year for a client devoted to video?

Great Ideas for Blogs

Often, coming up with the idea for a blog is half the battle. Once we know what we want to write about, the rest has a way of following suit relatively quickly. Your most popular blogs – indeed, your most popular content of any type – will always meet the ultimate content standard: “it must help me do my job better.” If your blog meets that standard of value, and it does so in a way that reinforces company marketing themes, you’ll have a winning blog strategy.

Why is CRM So Hard?

Sales Enablement is all the rage these days. The concept of getting more traction in sales and more alignment between sales and marketing is certainly not new. However, the spotlight on finally eliminating the barriers between sales and marketing is getting more attention than I’ve ever seen in 35 years of b-to-b marketing.

If you’re in the market for a marketing firm, you’ve probably read a dozen articles about how to select an agency. After a while, they all sound the same: “we’re experts in digital marketing, we know b-to-b, we specialize in your industry…”

Sounds like a broken record (if we still listened to records). I went for a run the other day, and it just started popping in my head: here are criteria you’ll never hear when hiring a marketing firm. It ties to the old marketing story about uncovering what people really want, by considering what people want when they’re shopping for a drill: people want to buy a hole, not the drill. Same thing for marketing firms: as a potential client, it’s nice to see the shelf full of awards or hear the presentations about the “creative process.” But, you really want to know how these guys are going to make you a star, and help you hit your revenue numbers.

Google Fred Update and What It Means to You

Between the first and second week of March 2017, web marketers were scrambling to discover the meaning and far-reaching effects of the Google Fred Update. Understanding Google updates usually requires a bit of science—guessing and checking, if you will—because Google tends to refuse to comment on its updates. Let’s face it, its algorithm is what makes Google who they are and no one is going to give away the secret sauce.

With a team that specializes in business-to-business digital marketing, we were watching traffic closely and keeping our ear to the Web, so we could see how our clients would be affected by the update.

Engineers are not like the rest of us. Or, perhaps, maybe they are?

Many companies are confused about how to market to engineers. In fact, while there are similarities, the technical buyer and engineering community does in fact look for different information, presented in different ways, than when you’re marketing simpler products or certainly marketing to consumers.

As experts in how to market to engineers, our agency builds programs that communicate “engineer-to-engineer.”  In fact, while many talk about how they take complex topics and simplify it in their communications, we believe the opposite is the best approach – we take complex topics and keep them complex. The engineering buyer, of course, doesn’t see the content as too complex, and they need that level of detail in order to make their buying decision. So it’s important not to “dumb down” what’s written or presented when marketing to the engineer.

There are quite a few assumptions people make about the “right” way to reach engineers.

In fact, at some recent focus groups on marketing to engineers conducted by two of our clients, there were a variety of surprises that came up that, in the end, shouldn’t have been surprises at all.  But that’s the beauty of research – when you actually go outside the building instead of talking only to each other, customers in fact say the darndest things.

Here are several common themes, or “surprises,” we’ve been hearing from our engineering customer targets:

CRM can be a powerful ally for senior managers or another frustrating software tool that fails to live up to its promises. We recently interviewed a wide variety of CEOs and marketing/sales VPs to uncover, after three decades in the field, what prevents CRM from being used – and how to eliminate those barriers.