We get as many enquiries from Digital Marketing Agencies to generate new opportunities and meetings for them as we do from other commercial businesses. I’ve just had another one this morning which has prompted the post.
What does this mean? It means that even Digital Agencies understand that they cannot rely solely on digital marketing to fill and close their sales funnel, they too need real salespeople to get clients over the line or open new doors. To be fair, if you have a pretty low-ticket or really straightforward product that doesn’t need any explaining or human intervention you can probably get away with just digital sales through a website but you still probably need a human for customer services if something goes wrong or the customer has some ‘nonstandard’ requirements.
Most prospects want to talk with someone real at one point in their buying journey. Whether it’s something basic like delivery instructions or lead times (I’m thinking more b2c) or maybe technical specifications, service benefits, or commercials terms on a b2b sale for example.
Sales Outsourcing is rarely just about outbound cold calling prospects either. Sales Outsourcing can be any intervention in the sales and marketing process/journey that will help things along – or in sales terminology, move your prospect through the funnel faster. There’s as much value in ‘qualifying prospects out’ (that are clogging up your funnel) as there is in ‘qualifying them in’ and moving them through faster.
And… please don’t forget, for all of those inbound digital leads you create from SEO/PPC and LinkedIn etc., someone will still need to qualify them. The irony can be with digital marketing, the more successful you are at it (i.e. top google ranking for example) the leads you will receive but the more inappropriate leads too and unless you have a really smart and sophisticated automated qualifying process that doesn’t allow certain low quality or inappropriate leads through the funnel – they will still need a human to qualify them. So, the more inbound leads you create, the more qualification time you will need.
Dealing with 10-15 leads a day is very different from dealing with one or two a week. Think one new FTE.
Sales Outsourcing isn’t just about prospects either, we are regularly calling our clients’ existing customers for account management, database cleansing, and even market research for example.
So in summary, and IMHO, you need both digital (we use an agency for SEO) and real ‘human’ salespeople to really get your pipeline firing. Question is “do you have the time, experience, space, patience, and motivation to manage all of these channels in-house?”
Need any advice on boosting your pipeline? Please get in touch for a free consultation.
Have a great day and do keep that funnel firing before the summer kicks in!
Andrew Smart – Solutions Director
