I’m writing this column from an airport this month while a flight is delayed.
I’m about to fly for 7 hours to join 25,000 other marketing nerds from around the globe for a massive marketing tech fest in America to look at some of the latest developments in marketing automation and inbound marketing.
While I wait, I’m reflecting on just how much sales and marketing has changed over the last ten years.
Around ten years ago a significant change was imminent. The business world was about to change. The new dawn would see buyers empowered by access to online information and unwary sellers disenfranchised. In this new world people self-educated at the point of purchase – to the extent that they no longer needed or wanted to talk to sales people.
That situation is a reality today. According to Dan Tyre and Todd Hockenberry’s book ‘Inbound Organisation’:
- 97% of consumers now use online media to research products and services in their local markets
- 93% of all B2B purchases start with an Internet search
- 84% of buyers engage in online information consumption and education
- By a factor of 3:1, B2B buyers say that gathering information online on their own is superior to interacting with a sales representative
- 59% of buyers explicitly indicate that that they do not want to interact with a salesperson as their primary source of research.
Many businesses will tell you that cold-calling “doesn’t work like it used to”, lead generation tactics are not working “like they used to” and “our salespeople still do well when they get in front of qualified prospects, but it doesn’t happen as often as it used to…”
Those businesses are often still failing to recognise that power has irrevocably shifted from the seller to the buyer as a variety of internet-connected devices made product information, educational videos and online reviews easy and instant to access.
The role of the salesperson is forever diminished (in all but the highest value and most technical fields of sales) and the rise of the content marketer is complete.
Over time the switch from outbound to inbound marketing has been profound.
Inbound (‘content’) marketing is about understanding your customers, their aspirations and their challenges. The key is to understand exactly how customers research their purchases and then to invest in creating engaging, helpful and educational content which is very easy for them to find.
Inbound Marketing effectively eliminates the most time consuming and low value activity in the sales process (cold-calling and prospecting) and replaces it with an investment in content creation. The medium-term result is warmer inbound enquiries from better-educated prospects.
It’s not magic. There is a process for creating a predictable flow of inbound enquiries from content. Vendors are providing toolkits for managing and automating that marketing process.
The most important thing is to recognise that a consistent commitment to creating high-quality, helpful content is now essential to building a predictable, systemised approach to lead generation and sales.
A new generation of AI tools is poised to augment what is already an exciting new chapter in sales and marketing automation and I’m off to America to find out more about that…