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Given that drip marketing and nurturing is at the forefront at organizations, do salespeople need to be pushy? Prospects are raising their hand.
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4 Answers
There is this conflict brewing being driven by the marketing blogo-media that somehow marketing will "handle everything" until the end when the buyer walks in the store and wants to buy your solution. Under this scenario dreamers feel like they can have this "never-never land" where the sales people have huge grins on their face and ask "what can help you with today" and when the buyer says "Just browsing", they answer "no problem, let me know when I can help you". It's just not realistic.
The question of whether sales needs to be "pushy" is a separate question. Pushy sounds annoying but you do need sales to be persuasive.
I love Inbound Marketing too, who doesn't want someone walking in their store! But you still have to have sales people and they need to be great. Here is an example: Hubspot is the "crown jewel" example of what inbound marketing should look like. What you need to know: they have sales people, who are highly trained, who call people more than twice, who convince people to move forward, and have to step up and ask for orders from people. They are not a call-center taking orders over the phone. More on Hupspot's sales team from VP of Sales Mark Roberge: http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/hubspot-saas-inside-sales/.
I like the way Craig puts it above in terms of sales responsibility. Also, drip marketing and nurturing is hard to do well and I don't believe it's at the forefront of organizations. From research we know that best in class organization have implemented marketing automation, but only 25% of those organization fully utilize it. It requires know how, integrated technology, internal alignment and content to do well.
I think marketing automation (and specifically nurturing capabilities) help Marketing and Sales potentially work better together. Both need to adapt how they do their jobs. Marketing should be communicating much more with Sales to understand the buying process, create effective nurturing paths together and discuss how/when to initiate them. There should be paths prior to handing off the lead and paths that salespeople can kick off from their CRM system when they see people exiting the sales process.
Nurturing is an easy concept to understand, but a hard one to execute on.
Keep in mind that in best in class organizations, the marketing sourced pipeline is 32%. As Craig puts it, your salesforce better be "persuasive" and actually doing sourcing on their own if they want to be successful. Best in class organizations also see 82% of their pipelines influenced by marketing. That doesn't happen without the right content and nurturing, as well as marketing stepping up their game.
I'm not sure that I would agree that drip marketing and nurturing is at the forefront of organizations. Even for those organizations that do this, for drip marketing and nurturing to be meaningful, the customer has to have recognized a need and opted into the process.
The issue is, how do we get customers to recognize a need? Too often, customers are so busy dealing with day to day challenges, they don't recognize opportunities to change and improve their businesses---they don't have a need.
Sales plays a critical role in initiating that entire drip/nurturing process. Sales can light the fire under the customer getting them to think about their needs and then pulling on the company for meaningful content.
You're absolutely right, when the prospect raises their hand, pull works very well. But what about those that aren't and should be? A healthy balance of push and pull is critical to really serving the customer.
Holy cow! Dave and Craig … you mean we not only CAN proactively approach, influence, advance, and sell … we actually HAVE to! Huzzah! Let us honor Jan. 20 as a day of marketing/sales reality and sanity … a day when the “if we Tweet it they will come” silliness met its match. Thank you, guys! Good stuff you wrote.
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