I talked to a business owner this morning who has decided to put all of his marketing budget into web advertising, SEO, banner ads and the like. In order to sell to big companies, he believes, that prospects will have to find him. He has lost faith in the ability of his sales force to find, cultivate and close new business.  

 

Let’s take this apart. He is a digital printer who can produce individually relevant print communication and add personalized landing pages to each piece. He is not a marketing strategist. His firm just executes what his clients bring to him and they sprinkle a little value on top based on what they learned over the years doing this for others.

 

They are not selling ideas, they are selling the service of executing projects dreamed up by others. The hard part of figuring out who to target, what to say, what channels to use and what the results tell you is being done by the client. 

 

The benefits of a properly implemented cross channel campaign are numerous. In addition to automating the execution of the campaign’s relevant components, subsequent nurture messaging, and freeing up valuable human capital for other pursuits, organizations earn quantum increases in response.  Opening up a dialog with prospects via a landing page means that organizations can continue the conversation with additional relevant messaging, shorten sales cycles and improve retention rates. 

 

Analyzing response data collected provides a methodology to validate messaging, offers, calls to action within segments and at the individual respondent level.  Looking at groups or individuals who don’t respond and gleaning valuable insight about messaging and the delivery channels used can provide further benefit. 

 

Streamlining the delivery of a qualified lead to the sales force is yet another outstanding benefit of a cross channel campaign. Either because of hubris surrounding the technical implementation of all this marketing power or just plain neglect, the execution of the sales follow-up often ends in anything but the maximum ROI. Sales reps are given the marching order to follow up quickly once they receive a lead via text or email in order to have the best chance of reaching a decision maker and qualifying the opportunity. But unfortunately, they do so with no instruction on what to say. So this well orchestrated strategy that has succeeded in uncovering a viable opportunity ends with an unprepared sales rep announcing to the “gatekeeper” something unremarkable like: “Ms. Executive just downloaded a whitepaper and I’m calling to see if she has any questions.”