Marketing is part of a process. Often a process we don’t have control of, but have to work with. I found two blog-posts this morning talking about getting squeezed:
1. What happens if nobody’s looking for you?
Chris Rand at BMON talks about overcoming the situation where your prospects aren’t searching for your new-and-improved or totally-new widget.
“What you need to do is to work out what the potential customers are looking for, and to muscle in on that territory. Just invented the world’s first red widget, which nobody thought would ever happen, so nobody’s looking for? Write some articles about boring old blue widgets, get the widget buyers to your site through natural or paid-for search, and then drop the red widget bomb on them.”
Chris also shares a story of what he did with one client, which was generate a more general page about conferences for his target market. Smart!
2. When Marketing is a Waste … Your Sales People Can’t Sell
What a post title, huh? Susan Tatum at Clicks n’ Conversions tells the horror story of doubling qualified leads for a client. The horror starts when the conversion rate drops … and gets scarier when the marketer gets blamed:
“In the end it was a leadership issue. But it was also a communications issue. Had marketing and sales really been working well together; had management been asking the right questions; maybe much of this could have been avoided.”
One wonders in this situation if the marketer was brought in to shore-up sales, but was really just a band-aid to a broken sales process. I’m sure for consultants (and even us in-the-trenches marketing managers), pushing to review or change how the sales department is a sometimes dangerous request. But obviously from this story, not doing so has its own horrors.
Hi Dave,
This situation was doubly painful for us because we’ve been advocates for tighter sales and marketing integration for over a decade. Just got blind sided. I hope this helps your readers avoid the same fate — and to do a better job for their clients or employers.
Susan
Yes, thanks for the story Susan. Glad to share it for you.
Here is another blog-post about getting blind-sided that you may enjoy and learn something from How to get fired on-stage, Steve Martin style
This is nice post share over here. trenches business managers, blame to analysis or change how the sales
administration is a sometimes alarming request. But acutely from this
story, not accomplishing so has its own horrors.
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