We were approached by a customer to review our first year relationship and provide candid feedback. We shared four themes that we saw prevalent in their organization:
- A marketing team that was constantly struggling to find good data and to be more proactive? It is clear that their marketers are overtasked and not able to be proactive.
- A sales team that maneuvered new hires into current projects without a solid handoff and moved sales leaders into other positions while utilizing perhaps the wrong sales strategy and approach based upon inbound only marketing programs. Translation for your organization: Trying to catch up to demand in the market now that the economy is growing again slowly but surely will hurt companies that are not out in front of this challenge and also how do you sell to customers who aren’t calling you daily to buy your products?
- Databases that were and are insufficient and neither segmented nor aligned due to acquisition of different CRM solutions and different acquisitions of new companies has a tangled web of data that is hard to maximize. Translation: We were calling customers that we didn’t know that were existing customers and that is a disadvantage for outbound teleprospecting.
- The final key area we saw was the classic campaign based marketing and sales model. Support this area of the country with this marketing and sales tactic and then adjust as needed based upon sales bandwidth to cover that area, instead of where can we grow the fastest and most efficiently based upon our prospects throughout North America. Go where the data tells you to go versus where you think it should go.
We believed that if they can tie these four areas to be more efficient and effective with a better process there is tremendous opportunity. Hopefully this gives you some food for thought when it comes to thinking about where to make strategic adjustments in 2014.
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