I'm having a bad day.
I set out at the start of the day to do sales calls, but there is a battle going on in my head between Sales John and Marketing John and they have reached stalemate. You see it's like this: I struggle with the value of B2B cold calls. I don't have a problem with doing it, I'm just not sure its the best use of my very limited time, when I could be positioning myself in front of many more people through emarketing, my blog, Twitter, etc.
And anyway hasn't this sweaty-palmed, Rottweiler gatekeeper avoiding, voicemail message leaving approach to marketing ( because don't forget sales is just part of your marketing mix) something that was left behind in the 80s and 90s when we didn't have the wonderful world of social media and the ability to engage with our audience and communicate with them one to one.
I think that part of the problem is that I used to sit on the client side and had to deal with being bombarded with these types of sales call, and quite frankly they were a pain in the arse. Every now and then I would be seduced by a particular approach and concede to a credentials pitch. This was very rare.
I've also never been this accountable to the sales performance of the business - my business , until now and there is also no one challenging my sales pipeline on a daily basis, a sort of virtual sales director asking me on the progress of each lead I have.
Perhaps there is something about the tangible nature of this sales approach that makes you feel good. It also makes those awkward "so what did you do today dear" conversations much easier to have." I spoke to 6 people about our services, caught up with some old contacts, had some positive feedback, left 12 voice mail messages, scheduled 4 meetings etc etc " This sounds much more butch, and go-getting than " I wrote a blog post - Ah-hem - , designed an email template, posted some witty remarks on Twitter, Followed several key people etc etc " you get the picture. However, when quantifying the value of each approach it might be that they are both as important in ultimately getting the sale.
The whole "build it and they will come" approach to B2B marketing where you just put ourself out there and hope that the people with budgets and a need see you and get in touch is all well and good , but you are relinquishing control of your sales and marketing process. The "traditional" sales call however, just seems outdated and irrelevant.
I need to sit down and revise my marketing strategy , but for now I will continue to test and re-test approaches to market, oh and write a few more blog posts along the way.
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