I know better than to answer the phone at 8:50am. But it rang. And I reached and it went like this:
“So… this is Lisa from PinkLipstick (I am making this up. I have no idea what her name was, nor did I catch the name of her company), and I wanted to tell you all about our media monitoring services.”
“Uh huh”.
“When your company is in the news, like radio or internet or magazines, we, like, let you know and you can get these really detailed reports about your media coverage.”
“Uh. Huh”.
“Also, we can put your news releases on the wire services. These are, like, these companies that publish them so, like magazine editors get them.”
“Uh. Huh.”
“Do you think you would be interested in that?”
Let’s just say she seemed a little surprised when I explained that we already have a company that does that for us, and has done for some time, and , yes, we are aware of what a wire service is and does. Only then did she think to ask who we used and her response to a well-known competitor was this: “Oh, wow, I’ve heard of them”.
Poor lamb. It’s not Lisa’s fault she blew the call; it’s whoever let that girl loose on the phone without a script and without a prospect detail.
Had someone given Lisa a script, with objections and responses and decision trees, it would have gone much, much better for her.
In the first place, she would have known she was calling a F250 publicly-traded multinational, where the odds are pretty good someone is doing some media monitoring.
Long before she started dialing, Lisa would have had the training to know to go to Google and take a look to see whether or not we might have published a few press releases lately. In not very long, she would have learned which wire services we use and a quick glance at the bottom of any of our releases would have helped her see who our agencies are. Not rocket surgery.
Imagine how much better things would have gone for me and Lisa if she had opened with questions about how our last few releases had done. How had we measured them, how satisfied were we with our PR agency? She wouldn’t have sold anything, but she wouldn’t have so utterly discredited herself and her company, and she could have dispositioned the lead with a bunch of great information and, possibly, earned the right to add me to a list, call back in a few months or follow up with a bit of content.
As it was, poor Lisa had no idea whether she was calling a start-up, a foreign government or a meth lab. Someone needed to coach her on the differences between these things and, say, established companies with incumbent suppliers. Probably, they needed to tell Lisa to avoid companies like ours and search instead among smaller companies where media monitoring is, perhaps, an opportunity.
If, for some reason, Lisa’s company believes it can make money in the upmarket segment, they needed to give Lisa some better strategies. And the “they” in question is (mostly) the marketing department.
For small company sales teams like Lisa’s there are no operations or enablement folks, or they are one and same person as the sales training, sales administration and sales management teams. So, too, the marketing department is likely one or two folks and a few freelancers, which is how the responsibility to help Lisa succeed was left, sadly, with Lisa herself.
In cases where there are all the right things to be done and not nearly enough resources to do them all, I would put my money on whatever drags revenue through the door. In the case of a company like Lisa’s this would look a lot like:
- A solid segmentation of the market
- Clear and realistic lists of target customers
- A few basic personas
- A great sales script
- Lots of sales training and role playing
- A CRM system
- A good mailing list tool
- One dead sexy piece of content
- A weekly check-in with sales
Too often, marketers skip straight to the part where they get to spray content all over the place. This is that noise-before-the-defeat thing that Sun Tzu warned us about* and it will not do anything for revenue except help you spend it.
For the price of a white paper or a couple of videos, you can hire someone to do a segmentation, persona and script exercise that will have Lisa calling the right companies with at least a small clue about what to say.
For the price of a small tradeshow exhibit, you can get someone to set up your CRM, load it with data, get your mailing list working and show Lisa and the marketing team how to use it. Plus you should be able to send Lisa for a bit of training and maybe get her a coach to help with objection handling and role playing.
As for content, small players will never out-produce their larger rivals when it comes to volume, but they can level the playing field a little bit by putting their efforts into one really, really, really great piece. It can be a killer infographic, a gorgeous e-book, a fabulous video: pick one. Then share the heck out of it and make sure Lisa knows how to use it as both bait and tackle.
Once you’ve started cranking a little revenue through the door, you get to play with content.
The final thing on the list is the most important (happily, it’s also free). You need to ask Lisa over and over again how it’s going. Is the script working? Has she made some on-the-fly edits that seem to be more effective? Were our assumptions on the segmentation correct? Do the personas hold water? What objections isn’t she feeling able to deal with? Is she using the fancy CRM system or keeping track of it all on gum wrappers? And so on and so on. In fact, the very best thing you can do is spend a lot of time listening to Lisa. It’s helpful, it’s free and if you don’t do it, nothing else will really matter.
*You probably have this on a mug someplace, but in case you don’t, here is the full quote from Art of War: Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
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BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter
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