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Marketing leader after marketing leader tells us that marketing does not work anymore.
When in fact marketing does work, but it depends what you are doing.
The world has changed
It does, but we all know life has changed. Covid19, internet, social media and mobile have all changed the way we buy.
The old ways of sales and marketing just make you look old fashioned
I know that, many of you will tell me that cold calling and email still works. The thing is, does anybody get up in the morning and say "I cannot wait for my day to be interrupted by a cold call or some templated email". Of course, nobody says that, in fact companies that still do it just look old fashioned. Personally we don't cold call or send spam emails, but I'm told the results for these have fallen through the floor.
Cold calling and email marketing is pre-pandemic thinking.
Shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic
It's become funny to watch how marketing gurus are renaming marketing to try and give it some edge. Community marketing, integrated marketing, Account-based marketing (ABM), there are probably others, which is old marketing somehow repackaged for the digital world.
The problem is this, whatever flavour of marketing you try and implement.
We need to build desire in individuals and get conversations with ideal customers.
The problem is that marketing only have a few levers to pull.
1. Advertising - We know nobody looks at advertising, which is why ad-blocker usage is so high.
2. Email - We know, Hubspot publish data (not opinion) on this after all that email marketing has a 98% failure rate.
3. Employee advocacy - Throwing brochures at strangers does not work. How do we know? Just go onto social yourself and look how many likes and comments companies get getting when they do this.
Is your business proud to be corporate spammer? - Read my analysis of a big 4 consultancy
4. Spamming people on social - I know social selling is called social selling, but it's not selling on social.
So how do we sell and market if we don't do any of that, simples.
Powerpoint presentations won't help you sales team
When I worked in the corporate world, back 7 years ago, I helped a team move to use social as part of their standard selling process. What I realized was that standing in front of a sales team with a set of powerpoints did not get the desired change.
Sales is a process
I'm also a believer that sales is a process and realised that what sales teams need is a process to follow. You do this, you do this, you do this, you get this result. We are the only company in the world to have created a social selling methodology.
We therefore built a program that is not "LinkedIn training" but it it teaches you how to be social. You can therefore take those skills and transfer them to any social platform.
This is teaching your team to "walk digital corridors".
Let's not forget this is giving people life skills, once you train them, they are trained forever!
The magic happens in the coaching
The other issue is that people learn at different speeds so we built into our program one-to-one coaching for each sales person. This is where the magic happens.
Serena Williams has a coach, so why don't your sales people?
So how has this ininvented sales and marketing?
As I mentioned above, sales and marketing above is pretty much the same, whatever you call it.
We are not advocating you sell and market like you always did, in fact we have created sales and marketing for this post-covid, internet, mobile and social media world.
It's not new, we've been doing it for 7 years now.
We give you new levels to pull. New levers which connect with the modern digital buyer.
Related: The One Skill Your Salespeople Need to Master in This Digital World