It’s widely accepted that outbound calling and cold email don’t work well to generate quality leads at the top of the funnel. Inbound content marketing arrived on the scene about 15 years ago and has largely replaced outbound lead generation. Why?
For starters, cold calls and emails are annoying. The prospect is targeted without regard to intent. They are not likely to be interested in the product. They don’t want to waste a moment of their life deleting an email or deflecting a call about some product they never wanted in the first place.
Because of the vast amount of information available on the Internet, prospects gained control over early product research. They preferred to look for product information themselves. Smart marketers figured this out and adapted by putting information online. Prospects could find the information they needed by doing a Google search, watching a webinar, downloading some white papers, or reading a website. Once prospects provided their email address and engaged with content, a lead was born.
The same transformational shift (from outbound to inbound) that happened at the top of the funnel is now happening at the mid and lower funnel. If you talk to any sales leader, the evidence is everywhere. Deals getting stuck. Qualified buyers ghosting sales reps. Email and phone calls not getting through. Why?
Buyers now have much more control over their buying process in the mid and lower funnel. They don’t get a lot of value from salespeople who just ask for the buyer to move forward and close. Buyers can get a lot of detailed information on their own. They go to review sites, check a subreddit, or watch videos of customer conferences and product roadmaps.
The only way to get the buyers to interact with sellers these days is to make it less annoying, or read another way, more valuable. And what we mean by that is to make it more efficient for the buyer.
Buyers in the mid and lower funnel demand a more efficient buying experience, and companies who give it to them will win the next innovation wave in Sales and steal business from competitors who are stuck in the early 2000’s.
Close more deals faster by making the buying experience dramatically more efficient — for buyers
What makes for a more efficient buying experience? That could mean a lot of things, but it’s easiest to think of it as giving the buyer convenient access to everything they could possibly need to figure out or know.
Broadly there are two kinds of information a buyer gets during a buying process: 1) information the salesperson sends them and 2) information they get from any person who won’t make a commission on the sale or any seemingly neutral source.
Regarding the first type, salespeople can email a lot of things to customers, and often they get lost. To help mitigate this problem and make buying more efficient, consider using a Digital Sales Room (DSR). Think of this as a proposal on steroids that lives on a web page. It has documents in it, NDAs, proposals, collateral, case studies, and more.
Digital Sales Rooms are good, and most sellers should use one if possible. Some of the companies that we’ve seen out there with DSR solutions are:
There are a lot of good reasons to put information in a convenient place for buyers. Just keep in mind that the buyer sees all of the information in the DSR as biased. Highly biased. And they can’t use it exclusively to make a decision. Buyers are in control, and their ideal buying process involves talking to people who are not earning a commission. How do they get this kind of information?
- Reviews such as those on G2 or Capterra
- Talking to other prospects and customers
- Analysts like IDC, Forrester, or Gartner
- System integrators and channel partners
- Subject matter experts
- Colleagues and friends in similar roles
- Less transactionally motivated people from the vendor (those not earning a commission) such as product managers, services delivery team members, finance leaders, marketing managers, and executives
Deliver the experience the buyer wants by bringing everyone together for them
So, how could you possibly accelerate buying cycles by enabling your buyer to get the best information about your product. From your prospects and customers. From your ecosystem.
You know how, it’s called field marketing. Some of the old tactics like Field Marketing and Trade Shows are effective. But these are incredibly expensive and not scalable. What’s needed is a way to bring buyers to sellers that is inexpensive and infinitely scalable.
Give buyers what they want at scale and without breaking the bank
Bringing together all the people the buyers want to talk with is easy on Scoot. Our experiential meeting and webinar platform captivates customers and accelerates sales. We do this by replicating the dynamics of an in-person field marketing event, but online. It’s very cost effective and also very effective at moving customers down the funnel.
If you’re interested in closing deals faster, we can help. Contact us to learn more and get a demo today.
