No one knows your customers more intimately than your sales team. The death of mass marketing has allowed marketers to turn their sales professionals into micromarketers.
In a recent blog by Forrester’s Nate Elliot, he shared an Open Letter to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
There are some eye-opening facts in that post about how Facebook is the least effective form of advertising on social channels (Twitter being the second least effective, in case you were wondering).
Marketers were asked to rate their sentiments and the data is fairly conclusive.
Facebook and Twitter offer the largest live and most viable audiences in the world. So what’s the problem? Why can’t marketers make this work? Every segment can be marketed to so it should work.
I believe the problem isn’t entirely the platform, but the method.
Marketers have to remember that canned and generic messages that target swathes of people don’t work anymore.
In the world of social, the individual has become the central focal point. As marketers try to group people together to deliver them messages, they miss one of the largest opportunities available. In the world of B2B, marketing to groups will have a lower ROI because they should be marketing to individuals instead. People have learned to tune out mass-marketing messages.
The solution is personalized messaging to individuals (one-to-one messaging).
But, there is a huge problem: marketing can’t deliver on this because of its cost prohibitive nature. Until now.
It’s time for marketing to let the sales team become its content distribution arm.
No one is better positioned than your sales team to deliver highly customizable, individual-focused messages that have relevance to each prospect personally. By aligning the sales and marketing teams in this manner, new conversion funnels can be created.
No one can know your customers more intimately, on a human-to-human level, than your sales team. Due to the nature of their work, they will know in most cases what a prospect is likely to find engaging. So instead of putting out generic marketing content that’s relevant to fictional audiences, why not use your sales team to distribute more personalized, one-to-one content?
Welcome to the Age of the Micromarketer
The opportunity for companies is to enable their sales professionals and help turn them into micromarketers. By finely curating the content they share with their audience, a more personal experience can be delivered.
Companies like IBM are already experimenting with microsites for their micromarketing sales reps.
Similarly, one of our clients in the telecom space has rolled out this micromarketing concept as well.
Sales professionals can now target individuals in very quick ways in a medium that resonates with buyers. Alternatively, they can provide a self-serve platform (like the screenshot above shows) that can be designed as a soft-sell conversion funnel. Either way, they are now allowing the potential buyer to dictate the speed and depth of their engagement.
Sales & Marketing Alignment
There is a real opportunity here for sales and marketing to align their efforts. As social media continues to impact the B2B buyer like never before, these two departments who are traditionally at loggerheads can finally develop a strategic ways to target the audience.
There are some great ways to achieve this, such as: building a content curation engine, creating conversion funnels, determining the campaigning strategies for sales reps, and much more. In short, have a plan before you start.
The Bottom Line
While marketing continues to experiment with social media marketing, there is an opportunity to also make your sales team a powerful content distribution arm.Social selling has never been more important. By delivering more personalized messages to potential prospects in the funnel, you’ll be able to provide a more tailored experience.
The way to achieve this is with greater alignment between sales and marketing in your social efforts. If you have any questions on how to achieve this, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’ve got oodles of data and client case studies on how to make this work within your company.
To learn more, check out 10 Steps to Becoming a Social Selling Machine or 9 Steps to a Winning LinkedIn Profile for Sales Professionals. For tips, tricks and more rants, we could always set-up a time to chat using my below schedule …
