Jon asks, “Any thoughts on how to quantify online social media interactions at a conference versus those that happen in hallways and bars?” I’m not sure you could without either highly intrusive surveillance or robust individual tracking. Self-reporting would probably be the only reasonable way to gather and analyze this data that wouldn’t be unethical
Stephanie asks, “The pandemic has led to the cancellation of many conferences. If in-person events are a cornerstone touchpoint for a brand, how should marketers pivot? What can they do now to drive pipeline activity?” It depends on how you got your pipeline from shows. Was it as a sponsor and you got the list?
Kate asks, “When you write proposals, do you spell out everything or do you try to keep things simple/streamlined?” It depends on what the proposal is, but we start with a template because otherwise we’ll forget things. Ours are typically 4 parts – strategy, tactics, execution, and payment, or STEP for short. The most detail
Megan asks, “My company recently had to layoff their canvassing department so now they are trying anything to get leads for virtual consultations for solar sales. Right now they’re aimlessly boosting Facebook posts, and I was hoping to get some insight to lead them in the right direction. Any suggestions?” The real question is, who
Jackie asks, “How does all this fancy data science kung fu hubbub help us, we’re a traditional sales company that only makes phone sales cold calls?” Data science is a methodology that can be applied to any data you happen to have. In the case of cold calling, as long as you have data about
Mallory asks, “In your honest opinion, what is the difference in marketing and sales?” The short answer: creation of demand versus fulfillment of demand. We see this most in examples where demand exists – sales are effectively order-takers and marketing is minimal. On the other hand, if demand doesn’t exist (but the product is ultimately
Maria asks, “I need to create a zip code territory map with each area represented by a different color (that I can pick). It will be exported as a graphic file. Are there any free/low cost options for this that are easy to use?” Download all the ZIP codes from the USPS/Data.gov and then code
In this special edition of Do Something With Your Marketing, I interview sales expert Ian Altman about the second edition of his book, Same Side Selling. Same Side Selling teaches a different mindset for selling complex transactions: instead of thinking of the buyer as someone you have to win over, or someone you have to
Denis asks, “How will AI help marketers with retargeting and sales conversion?” The greatest challenge most marketers face is too much data. At any given time, we could be looking at hundreds, thousands, or even millions of data points, from retweets to bounce rates. No human can compute these, and even if we could, it
According to Gartner, 30% of all B2B companies will employ AI to augment at least one of their primary sales processes by 2020. Don’t wait for the future – start implementing now, with today’s technologies. Driver Analysis Prospect and lead qualification Better sales analytics Time-Series Forecasting Sales enablement Sales forecasting Revenue forecasting Text Mining/Natural Language
