Why fill in an assessment and get nothing out of it?

Customers are increasingly aware of sales and marketing techniques to generate new business leads and are correspondigly reticent to invite unwanted email spam or cold calls while they’re in the fact finding stage of the buying cycle. This makes prospects reluctant to share their personal details with an organisation they don’t know. However, there are very good reasons why customers should take a little time to engage with assessments as they provide a key source of value exchange for both the customer and the company. They might want your services; you might want them as a new company, but until somebody gives something the relationship can’t move foreward.

What is value exchange and what are the different types?

Value exchange between clients and companies is one of the most basic concepts of 21^st Century marketing. The deal on the table is a straight swap of a customers’ cash, time, or key information for a preferential customer experience.
It makes sense to view value as a trade-off between what a customer stands to receive from the exchange and what a customer is expected to provide your company with. The most effective type of exchange is one that gives the most benefit to your customers in exchange for the smallest amount of data, personal information, or whatever else you are expecting to gain from the exchange.
It’s generally regarded that there are three types of value exchange which benefit both parties as follows:

1. The Cash Exchange

The oldest form of exchange in sales and marketing, quite simply this is an exchange of cash for products or services.

2. The Data Exchange

The exchange of client data for a gift, reward or benefit. This is a highly effective way of facilitating business transactions and continuing customer loyalty and engagement.

3. The Promise Exchange

The customer provides data or feedback through a range of assessment methods such as, online or paper surveys, social media exchanges or apps, in exchange for the promise that their assessment data will help to develop strategies for improved customer service.
We’re going to focus on The Promise Exchange, as in the past, the promise exchange has largely been an afterthought – something it would be valuable for an organisation to obtain, but not essential. However, the promise exchange is becoming increasingly important and is currently one of the major goals in modern selling practices.

So what can The Promise Exchange do for the client and the company?

The promise exchange enables a company to facilitate deeper relationships and develop lasting client engagement. Information harvested during the promise exchange through surveys, feedback assessments and the like instils higher expertise in your staff, using customer intelligence to inform future customer practice, which in turn can help to ensure longevity of client to business relationships.

How can The Promise Exchange be facilitated?

The Promise Exchange isn’t always easy to facilitate, let alone sustain. In order for the exchange to be successful, customers are going to need to shift ingrained perceptions of how companies may use information provided through assessments, and begin to trust that the data they're sharing is going to be used in a manner that will be advantageous to them in the future.
Fortunately, the advent of the web and social media offers innovative new ways to gather and analyse client data – data that may be more valuable than you think in improving customer to business relationships in the future. What’s more, customers are now much more willing to engage with companies using these methods as opposed to traditional marketing methods such as tele-marketing Consumers have a growing appreciation and understanding of the role they have to play in unlocking higher expertise from companies, and so are more likely to engage than in the past.

And lastly….

If you’re using assessments as a source of lead generation, remember to keep the company’s side of the bargain by delivering on your promise – provide meaningful insight in exchange for their participation, use the information sensitively to tailor your approach to the prospect, adapt and personalise your strategy so the customer knows you have valued the time they took to fill out the assessment, otherwise you risk losing valuable customers before you really get started. The Promise Exchange, like any promise, needs to be kept in order that trust is not broken and longer term relationships can endure.

What Are Outbound Marketing Methods, and do they Still Work?

These days, we hear so much about the importance of inbound marketing it can be too easy to forget that there are any other options.

Whilst it’s most certainly true that in 2016 inbound is unequivocally reigning supreme, it’s important for all marketers to take all approaches into account. So let’s today consider outbound marketing and whether or not it still has a place in the modern world.

What Are Outbound Marketing Methods?

Outbound marketing, aka “traditional marketing”, refers to the old ways that companies went about making connections with customers.
Perhaps it’s best to contrast outbound marketing with inbound marketing – the latter being what most of us are more familiar with these days.
Inbound marketing is the process of creating various content, usually for the web – blogs, eBooks, videos, whitepapers, even websites themselves – in order that your potential customers may find you.
Outbound marketing, by contrast, is all about a company initiating customer connections and conversations itself, sending messages directly to a targeted audience.
Examples of outbound marketing include:

TV commercials
Radio commercials
Trade shows
Print advertisements – i.e. newspaper and magazine ads, brochures, flyers, posters and printed catalogues
Email blasts
Cold calls

In short, outbound marketing tries to reach potential customers through traditional media advertising and in-person contact. The purpose is to generate sales leads, which are then passed across to internal sales representatives.
When compared to inbound marketing, outbound marketing is very much the aggressive approach – but does it still work?

Does Outbound Marketing Still Work?

Outbound marketing, generally speaking, is being increasingly regarded with more and more caution by many modern-day marketers – not least over concerns about its costs.
TV commercials, trade show stalls, newspaper ads, cold call initiatives – all of these things are highly expensive endeavors, and require huge amounts of resources to complete.
The other problem with outbound marketing initiatives is that they often have only a short shelf-life. A TV commercial may last 90 seconds, and then it vanishes into the past. Newspaper ads suffer from the same problem – nobody reads yesterday’s papers, let alone last week’s. Cold calls very often end up with the prospect slamming the phone down or the door shut. Emails are very easily deleted – that’s if they don’t end up in spam folders in the first place.
By contrast, most inbound content lasts forever on the web. If you write a blog post, create a video for YouTube, or craft a whitepaper for your website – that content will still be there to be discovered perhaps years after you first published it.
Brian Halligan from HubSpot talks about the difficulties of outbound marketing:
“I think outbound marketing techniques are getting less and less effective over time for two reasons.  First, your average human today is inundated with over 2000 outbound marketing interruptions per day and is figuring out more and more creative ways to block them out, including caller ID, spam filtering, TiVo, and Sirius satellite radio.  Second, the cost of coordination around learning about something new or shopping for something new using the internet (search engines, blogs, and social media) is now much lower than going to a seminar at the Marriott or flying to a trade show in Las Vegas.”

So, Is Outbound Marketing Dead?

Well, frankly, it all depends on your target customer.
Generally speaking, if you’ve got a product that’s aimed at an older demographic, then writing inbound blogs and posting links to them on Facebook and Twitter might not have much of an impact. By contrast, outbound marketing methods – such as TV commercials and newspaper advertisements – are the types of marketing material that the older generations are already comfortable with. Indeed, many people still make a point of scanning newspaper advertisements when considering a purchase.
In the B2B realm, in-person events such as trade shows have been rated as the most effective marketing tactic for B2B marketers for the past six years running, with a 75% effectiveness rating being cited in 2016, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s yearly B2B marketing report.
And in truth, although inbound marketing is the most cost-effective option – particularly for emerging SMEs with small budgets and tight margins to contend with – there is still a place for outbound marketing in the Digital Age.
And this is something that I want to explore in greater detail next time, where we will be discussing how to combine inbound and outbound marketing to best effect. Look forward to catching you there!

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Cold Call Reluctance

Cold calling is possibly the most dreaded and avoided task in any sales office. As a rule, it involves lots of failure and a significant dose of rejection. However, it is an essential part of the sales process and therefore needs to be given the investment it needs to succeed.

Professionalism and confidence breed success in cold calling. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true. Lack of confidence leads to mistakes and vice versa. Body language and tone of voice can convey to the prospect on the other end of the line and undermine everything that is actually said. So, it’s important that whenever a sales person conducts their cold calling, they do it with the right attitude, training, preparation and support.

Add value

The recipients of cold calls aren’t necessarily that keen on them either. You’re interrupting their day with something that’s on your agenda, not necessarily theirs, no matter how well profiled your data is. If the output of the call is something tangible which requires nothing of the audience – such as a report based on the information they give you – then there’s a reason for them to stay on the line. Having this clear goal, that has obvious benefits and value to the prospect, at the start of the call will help both parties – either they immediately turn off or give permission to continue. Either way it is a clear signal to follow.

Know your stuff

We are all human. Sometimes the mind goes blank, sometimes we are asked questions we don’t have a clue how to answer or sometimes we end up going into a topic that we don’t really understand. Preparation is key here – knowing your subject matter is a given, but also knowing something about who you are calling if previous calls or engagement have been tracked in a CRM or marketing automation tool.

Strike the balance

Having clear structure and next steps can provide massive support to a cold caller, but scripting can have the effect of making the caller come across as amateur. What’s needed is a blend of natural style, a structured approach and clarity of direction.

Cold call scripting tools which allow for this flexibility in conversation enable sales training to be put into practice in a “safe” way, signposting what to ask next and building caller confidence. Confidence will, in turn, encourage the prospects’ trust as the caller demonstrates knowledge about potential solutions to their problems. Ultimately, the more the prospect trusts what is being said, the better the chances of them engaging on next steps down the sales funnel.