“…The old lead generation machine of cold mass contacting via phone or mail is dying. Fast. Buyers increasingly prefer to go educate themselves via digital channels, and the average B2B buyer only reaches out to a vendor after completing almost 2/3 of the buying process”
Buyers educate themselves differently
It takes on average 18 calls to connect to a B2B buyer and the call-back rates are below 1%. Cold emails do not fare better. The old lead generation machine of cold mass contacting via phone or mail is dying. Fast. Buyers increasingly prefer to go educate themselves via digital channels, and the average B2B buyer only reaches out to a vendor after completing almost 2/3 of the buying process. The customer is buying through the first 2/3 but the question is whether you are selling? The answer to that depends on whether you expose the right buyers to the right content at the right time. And through that particular buyers preferred channels of content consumption. Are you influencing the customer in these earlier parts of the buying process? That is digital demand creation and that creates 3x more leads, compared to traditional methods and at 62% of the cost. However, the majority of B2B companies are not taking full advantage of the potential of the digital demand creation machine, with poor marketing automation adoption rates and lack of clear digital demand creation strategies.
“Buyers increasingly prefer to go educate themselves via digital channels, and the average B2B buyers only reaches out to a vendor after completing almost 2/3 of the buying process. The customer is buying through those first 2/3´s but the question is whether you are selling?”
Quadruple down on content marketing and automation
Commercial success in the 21st century is about sales and marketing taking advantage of the possibilities that technology is placing right in front of them. Quadrupling down on content marketing and automation will place you well ahead of your competitors in terms of influencing specifications and buying decisions. This will give your reps a serious advantage when time is right for spending your scarce resources on real life customer conversations.