To Push: to encourage, to cajole, to force, to coerce. Doesn’t sound very attractive when put like that, but it’s still what most marketing campaigns are all about. No surprise then that the majority of consumers – both in B2B and B2C – are becoming resistant to it. Or if they are not actively turning away, they have learned how to play the game, taking up the ‘zero percent’ offer or that attractive first year’s special discount, then jumping ship when that expires and a better one comes along in another email, sales call or mail pack. Given this pushy environment, is it any surprise that they have dropped out and tuned into Google instead?
The reaction to this trend has been to apply even more sophisticated methods in an effort to root out the timewasters and the switchers, and to drive for ever more accountable marketing. This aims to measure every aspect of a campaign in an effort to achieve even greater return next time. But while the external aspects of marketing may be shifting to seek a better mix of the push and the pull, the internal demand is often an ‘unreformed’ call for sales leads. The external measures may be moving towards greater and more accountable marketing, but sales still want leads, and it’s still the volume of leads which count not the quality.
Even more worrying, 52 per cent of marketers don’t even work with sales to define what a good lead looks like.
On one hand greater marketing accountability, and a concentration on relevancy and needs, on the other a desire to generate business to meet budgets – and meet them right now, not in six weeks time. And finally, behind it all, the CEO shaking a large and sharp machete at the marketing budget itself. What’s to be done? Not least when the traditional ‘quick win’ techniques are proving to be increasingly ineffective?
And let’s add another problem. A lead these days can come from anywhere. A card dropped into a pot on an exhibition stand, a ‘hit’ on a website, a phone call. Whatever the source, we need to be able to evaluate it and make sure that we make an appropriate and timely response. And we need to do this regardless of the path chosen by the customer. Social networks, blogs, podcasts. Mobiles – they all need to be addressed and we need to be able to measure and assess their impact – and act accordingly, moving budgets and tweaking campaigns.
To make this happen effectively will require technology – and the good news is that it is out there. We can build a push and pull model – and then bring in the necessary kit to integrate all these disconnected processes and make them work productively and quickly. Multi-channel automation is a reality right now.
But I’d sound a little note of caution. As we’ve seen, there is an almost constant pendulum motion in marketing from quick fix to longer term; from a massive drive to bring in business one minute, to a recognition that we need to address the needs of existing customers. What’s more, we haven’t even got the fundamentals right yet.
I’m not the first person to say this, and I won’t – sadly – be the last, but in all this is a need to strip things back and get right down to the basics. If we are to make push and pull techniques work, if we are to unlock the massive potential of automation, if we are to make the most of new media and digital, if we are to make effective demand generation a reality, we need to get right down into the bowels of our businesses and bring together sales and marketing.
Only when we can agree the exact criteria of just what constitutes a ‘lead’ – and develop strategies and content to address each channel and level of commitment – will we ever come near to the Nirvana that the technology promises to unlock. The fix can be quick, but mapping out the path we need to take will take time, effort and concentration. We need to build engaging content to address every level of customer interest, we need to score responses with great detail and care, we need to nurture those leads which we have identified as having the most potential. If we fail, we’ll be back in the dark days of CRM, where heavy investment in ‘systems’ failed because it didn’t address the very basic, and far less technological ‘systems’ in other areas of the ‘business process’.
We know that the existing ‘push’ model is damaged. We know that by applying a mix of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ we can start to build a new model where relevancy becomes the new targeting criteria. The demands considerable. In all likelihood it will get worse not better, but as in many things, fundamentals remain fundamentals, and provided we don’t lose sight of them, we can build systems to make the whole process more manageable and generate leads which really do convert into loyal and long term customers.