Integrated Customer Engagement Strategies Front & Center At Sales & Marketing 2.0 Event
- Published in Feature Articles
As buyers continue to dictate the new terms of engagement, BtoB sales and marketing teams are tasked with answering the growing demand for personalized and relevant messaging. The new realities of the changing buyer were all prominent themes at last week’s Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, where presenters offered solutions and strategies for utilizing social networks, channeling the changing buyer and the ever-present alignment conundrum,
“Technology has changed, but human nature hasn’t,” said Peter Stewart, SVP Collaboration Technology Services at PGi, a company that brings people together through virtual meetings. In his keynote, “Collaboration 2.0,” Stewart emphasized how meetings can be a competitive differentiator and help companies drive revenue more efficiently.
Stewart’s pointed out that as the meetings market moves toward desktop-driven environments, Skype is outpacing other meeting interfaces, with 600 million users, compared to 25 million web conferencing users, or even 60 million audio conferencing users. iMeet, PGi’s meeting application, is designed to offer personal meeting rooms to give companies the ability to personalize interactions.
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Gerhard Gschwandtner joins industry insiders Miles Austin of fillthefunnel.com and Matt Heinz of heinzmarketing.com |
Kicking Social Up A Notch
Building on the notion that social networks can be a viable lead gen source, Anneke Seley, Co-Author of “Sales 2.0” and CEO at Phone Works, offered 7 factors driving customer change, including the shift in power from sales to customers and the rising cost of sales. Customers are also increasingly demanding service reps to provide support. Questions to ask within your organization:
- Who is using social media in sales or marketing? How?
- What are your measurable lead/revenue results?
- How are you tracking & measuring results?
By replacing pitches with problem-solving information, marketers can provide an online “listening & participation” forum via social networks. As the social customer 2.0 is emerging, she demands Sales & Marketing 2.0, Seley said.
Seley pointed to salesforce.com, which decreased traditional marketing spend by 69% and increased investments in social media and video, paying off with a 33% increase in lead generation.
Customer acquisition is more important than ever, as ZoomInfo found that 76% of marketers name getting higher quality leads as their number one challenge going into 2011. The same research found that sales productivity is a business imperative, as reps spend 20% of their time researching companies and people to call. As bad data stalls productivity and depletes the funnel, effectively leveraging sales intelligence can remedy this common problem.
ZoomInfo VP of Sales, Brett Wallace and Alison Shaffer, Group Manager, Marketing Operations & Analytics, Cisco/Webex, explored the evolution of data in their presentation: “Customer Acquisition: How to Effectively Leverage Sales Intelligence.”
Given data’s role in business decision-making, Wallace emphasized starting with a strong foundation to build a data strategy, determine areas where sales intelligence is needed and develop a framework to optimize processes involving collection, usage and delivery of data. Companies with highly usable data are able to drive better sales initiatives, increase the quality of program insights and measure results for success, according to the presentation. Wallace & Shaffer offered several benefits of using appended data, including the ability to verify firmographic information, add new contacts to existing leads, build your pipeline and add to your sales funnel. The presentation focused on the agreement of strategy and goals, the need to examine and determine opportunities, execute and test to measure win/loss and understanding there’s no one tool to solve all your marketing needs.