Customers call all the shots

Lead management - striking a balance between marketing and sales

Reinhard Janning

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783739281520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Companies, just like people, trawl the Internet for information before they make purchasing decisionsand they buy at a time that suits them. If companies want to grow successfully, they need to find ways of identifying prospective buyers promptly online and to provide them with precisely the information they need to make that purchasing decision.However, they will only manage to do so if there is close collaboration between marketing and sales. We all know that up to now rather than working together, marketing and sales have been more inclined to peek over the fence at each other. Marketing's task involves much more than contacting prospects, marketing also needs to help sales identify prospective buyers. Sales therefore needs to reach agreement with marketing on what information it needs about buyers and above all when marketing should provide sales with the necessary information about leads.

Chapter 1

Explaining the need for marketing and sales alignment

Let me take you on a journey back to the early 1980s in Germany. I had successfully completed my secondary school education and was considering what to do with my life. I wondered if I should study history. Yet I was also interested in computers. Perhaps I should do an apprenticeship in this area? Or would I be better off studying history first and then doing an apprenticeship in the field of computer science? Somewhere along the line I reached a decision and applied to a number of companies that seemed to fit the bill. And lo and behold, Nixdorf Computer AG, the most innovative computer manufacturer at the time, was willing to take me on! I was over the moon!

However, it didn’t take long to wipe the smile off my face on my first day at work as a trainee data processing clerk: I was assigned to the sales department. Sales! What on earth would I be doing in sales? I had no intention of becoming a salesman, my aim was to learn about programming! When my boss said “I am taking you with me to visit a customer and I will teach you a thing or two about sales!”, my initial scepticism began to fade and it virtually vanished when I clapped eyes on his company car, a shiny white Ford Escort convertible with alloy rims! Perhaps I should consider sales after all, I thought to myself.

One week and many customer visits later, when I had begun thinking sales wasn’t so bad after all, my boss said to me: “So, now I am going to show you the other side to sales!” What did he mean, I wondered, was there more to sales than making business trips in a white convertible, filling sales pipelines and drawing up annual investment budgets? You bet there is! My boss placed a large stack of the Yellow Pages from the most important cities in the surrounding area on my desk. “Now son, I want you to call transport companies and make appointments you can pass on to the sales team” he said.

This was the beginning of what turned out to be the three most boring weeks of my working life. I sat at my desk day in day out, phoning my way through the never-ending lists of transport companies I had found in the Yellow Pages. I got to speak to secretaries who fobbed me off or was put through to decision-makers; I did my best to get them interested in our systems and products and to arrange appointments to pass on to the sales team. Now and then I managed to do so, but in the majority of cases I did not. I certainly didn’t feel I was making any real progress or was accomplishing my goal of arranging sales talks for my boss. If nothing else, this experience taught me one lesson. I wanted to be the one driving the Ford convertible – even if this meant making boring and frustrating calls in the early days.

And then along came the Internet …

By this time, my aim was clear, I wanted to move into sales as soon as I had completed my apprenticeship. I was fortunate enough to have had excellent instructors who taught me from scratch what sales meant in this day and age. It was all about providing customers with comprehensive, personal support, conducting sales negotiations, guiding planning talks about annual budgets and looking presentable at major customer events, even though, as a younger and more inexperienced person, I sometimes felt out of place among all these executives and decision-makers.

This was the beginning of my passion for my job, something that continues to drive me today. It would be fair to say that I put my heart and soul into sales, won a large number of awards and was always one of the youngest to climb the career ladder. After my time at Nixdorf, I became sales manager and then CEO of the German branch of an American software company where I continued to focus on sales, just as I had done at Nixdorf. Sales was the name of the game. At the very least within the corporate hierarchy. And nothing came after that for a long time... Not even marketing. It was considered to be more or less superfluous. Marketing – were they not the people who produced colourful images and came up with catchy headlines for image brochures? In those days, the term “marketing” was rarely used at Nixdorf either. The buzz word at the time was “sales promotion”. And in my opinion, this hit the nail on the head. After all, we were the ones selling!

But then something happened: The Internet came along and with it a whole new type of communication. All of a sudden we were corresponding with our customers via e-mail for which we needed neither an office nor a secretary and things such as e-mail marketing emerged. At the same time, it became acceptable to call customers on a mobile. I quickly realised that it had become much easier to reach customers than it had been in the days of my apprenticeship. Unthinkable now to have to work your way through lists of phone numbers in the Yellow Pages? This really had well and truly become a thing of the past. And what is now common practise began to emerge, albeit tentatively at first. Prospective customers began searching the Internet for information about products and services, comparing prices and offers and taking their decision to purchase independently and for reasons that were not quite clear to us salespeople.

The Internet and changes in buying patterns were the two trends that inspired me to establish my own company DemandGen AG in 2003. I set up the company together with my business partner. Our aim was to combine state-of-the-art online marketing with selling efforts and to offer this to our customers as a service, moving away from cold-calling and from working one’s way through lists of telephone numbers. We only wanted to call people who had, for instance, shown their interest by clicking on a link. We referred to this as “teleprospecting”. In addition to qualifying leads through e-mail marketing and landing pages, it was the first service we provided and expanded over time.

The beautiful new world of sales

This highlighted the fact that the general sales environment had changed thoroughly since I had been an apprentice. Cold-calling or having a salesperson provide customers with comprehensive, personal support is just as much a thing of the past as the annual budget negotiations with key accounts, the expensive customer events, the big, fat company cars and high expense accounts. Things had begun to move much faster, companies began planning quarterly rather than annually, were taking decisions much faster and were much more confident in their approach.

It had also become possible to strike huge deals without ever having met the decision-maker – something that was unheard of in the past! As a service provider, there was no longer any need to make several visits to customers in order to obtain a decision. Of course we continued to communicate with our customers, but we did so more and more over the phone, via videoconferences or using other tools. Despite all of the above, one thing was clear: If customers saw a certain benefit in a product or service they were buying, having personal contact with the salesperson became less and less necessary and important. Customers had of course looked up all information they needed both about the product or service and about the company selling them. But there was no longer any need to provide these customers with comprehensive, personal service. The world of selling had changed forever. As sales experts, we were now providing our customers with a completely different service.

The most obvious symbol of sales rep is a suit and tie which to me will always be the typical image of a sales rep. I personally stopped wearing a suit and tie in 2001 when I started my own business. This was about me being true to myself and about my changed role as a sales consultant. Or perhaps it would be more apt to say it was about the changed appreciation I began experiencing as a salesperson. I am no longer the person who annoys other people by cold calling them. My aim is to solve the challenges my customers encounter with their own customer acquisition.

I did not have that eureka moment in my career until DemandGen had been up and running for quite some time. I was visiting a customer and was advising him how to launch a new sales process when he introduced me to a tool the US branch of his company was already using. In addition to integrated e-mail marketing, this tool was using cookies to follow the surfing behaviour of visitors to this company’s website. It mapped the entire campaign management on an integrated software platform and evaluated how effective the company’s marketing was. With a simple click of the mouse, website operators learned what their customers were interested in, what information they had downloaded and what marketing-e-mails they had actually opened. Using this information as a basis, they were then able to develop workflows enabling them to send e-mails to specific customers and to supply them with precisely the information they needed. And this all happened automatically at the precise time the ­prospective customer needed this information.

I couldn’t wait to call my colleague and partner with whom I had set up the business. “I saw something today that will revolutionise our business in the next few years!”, I said to him excitedly when I finally managed to get hold of him on his mobile. One thing I realised immediately was that this software platform provided the answers to many questions that had arisen for me on a daily basis. How could one see and analyse what topics were of interest to customers, what information they needed, what stage of the decision to buy customers were at? And how could we see and analyse, all of the above precisely when they were trawling the Internet for the information they needed – before making a decision to buy anonymously and without the involvement of salespeople?

Marketing automation was the answer. It involves software platforms which supply this very type of information, naturally only after the customer has given his consent to his visit to a website being interpreted and analysed. Marketing automation brought the breakthrough for our company, DemandGen AG. Since we familiarised ourselves with these systems, began using them ourselves, but above all since we began installing them for our customers, we have grown from a German marketing and sales agency into a multinational consultancy and systems integration company.

Decisions to buy are made online

Don’t get me wrong. This is not about a fashion, a trend or about selling another kind of complicated software which is supposed to make life easier and more pleasant. It is about something I have observed and experienced in sales and marketing in many many companies over the past 25 years and which I have full confidence in. Only companies that acknowledge the changed buying behaviour of their customers, regardless of whether they are B2C or B2B customers, will be successful in future. Only companies, that acknowledge and accept, that in this day and age customers conduct nearly all their search for information about products and services online, and usually only contact a company, when they have already formed their own opinion, and have a pretty exact idea of what they want to buy, only those will generate enough revenue.

Yet the bizarre thing about it is – when I talk to marketing people about this, they all agree with me to begin with. After all, they adopt the same approach – if they, for instance, are buying a new fridge, are inquiring about mobile phone rates or are looking for the perfect all-in-one holiday deal. They too compare offers, providers and service features on the Internet, read studies, carefully consider test results and search for other buyer ratings in online forums. And somewhere along the line, they decide which product to buy. This is run of the mill stuff.

Yet when it involves the day-to-day work of their own company, it is a whole different kettle of fish for these marketing people. They prefer to use their standard repertoire comprising print advertisements in trade magazines, pompous stands at trade fairs, sending out advertising mailings followed up by a telephone call rather than giving prospective customers exactly what they are looking for on their website, namely in-depth information in the form of studies, e-books, videos of presentations etc.

And incidentally, with uncanny regularity, these marketing people argue that their own customers behave in a completely different way than they themselves do. After all, they say they are dealing with the B2B environment, are not selling to B2C customers, but to other companies. And with equal regularity I respond by saying “It is completely irrelevant whether you are targeting B2C customers or B2B customers. Whether somebody is buying a fridge for their kitchen or new ERP software for their company, the sales process follows very similar rules. B2C and B2B customers start off by looking for the information they need on the Internet, they take a decision and only then do they contact the provider.”

To sum this up: Nowadays 84 percent of decisions to purchase are influenced by, if not made, on the Internet. Only companies that rise to this challenge and who respond to changed customer wishes will be able to hold their own in the marketplace.

Customers do as they please

So it is important for companies to identify people who are interested in their products at the earliest possible stage ...