Email
Marketing and Your Sales Team
Much has been made of the kinship
between email marketing and direct mail. But email marketing also
resembles the sales process.
Imagine a business-to-business (B2B)
email campaign unfolding in this way. A message with a
can't-pass-up offer (say a free seminar with an industry expert as the
speaker) is sent. What happens next? You send out a round of
messages thanking each recipient for signing up. And then a message
after that signed by your area sales rep and including that person's
direct telephone number.
Get the picture?
Once the marketing director gets a B2B
campaign under way, the recipients should fall pretty quickly into the
hands of the sales team. If they don't, you're probably not running a
successful campaign.
So why is this significant?
When you plan a B2B email marketing
program, you should have a business objective in mind. Ask yourself how
your campaign can result in a specific number of sales of a high-end
technology product, for example.
Hang out with your salespeople as much
as possible to find out how they interact with prospects and customers.
Find out what steps they go through and what questions they ask,
particularly when it's a complex, high-end product for which it may take
six to nine months or longer to close the sale.
The sales process, or
"buying" process as we should call it in our customer-centered
approach, has some recognizable steps.
Find
out what your prospect's pain is, determine whether she has the budget
and authority to fix it, and ask what the timeline is (how urgent is
it?).
These are broad questions that even a
good salesperson may take weeks to get answers to. They should sound
familiar to email marketers.
For
example, is the person who receives your email message the decision
maker? If not, can you coax him into passing along your carefully
crafted message to others in the department or company?
The point is to think of your email
marketing campaign as just that -- a campaign that's staged in a
carefully thought-out sequence over a long period of time.
