In March we wrote “For Now Focus on Those Ready to Buy”. Just five months later not only have smart companies been doing this, marketing has plainly shifted toward this idea of greater focus.

By the time a salesperson makes a call now, the prospect could easily and quickly have learned your company’s history and reputation, what differentiates your product offerings, your relative pricing position and read through a number of case studies describing what it might be like to work with your company. Then they will likely check your LinkedIn profile to see where you went to school and what kind of experience you have. All of this establishes a baseline of trust, before the salesperson even meets the prospect. Because of all this, a sales person is much closer (or farther) to closing a sale on the first call than ever. It will still likely take more than one call because of proposals, approvals, budgeting and so on, but the actual decision to work with your company is largely pre-sold now with more effective, highly focused, well-messaged, targeted marketing.

I think this is an exciting environment to outperform the competition and represents a major opportunity for forward thinking B2B companies. Research on the cost of sales calls by Reed Business Information finds that the average cost of a business-to-business in-person sales call is almost $400. The same research said that it takes an average of 5 in-person sales calls to close a sale. So the total cost of sales visits required to close an average B2B sale is about $2,000. That cost can be lowered by more efficient integration of marketing with sales.

Several of the five in-person sales calls can be easily and more effectively replaced. For example, integrate within your sales process several lower cost-per-contact marketing tactics such as direct mail, e-mail, case studies, RSS feeds from your blog, an integrated social media strategy, or even highly targeted pay-per-click advertising.

Due to all these cost effective alternatives to five sales calls, the role of the salesperson has changed and so has the fundamental role of marketing. Markets are now clearly engaged in the selling process in a way that was not so 30 years ago, three years ago and in some cases three months ago depending on how savvy a company has been with Twitter.

This is moving very fast. Companies that don’t respond to the changes in marketing will put their sales people at a major disadvantage and watch the competition move pass them, not in a simple evolution of deteriorating market share, but rather a rapid disintegration of market share. Content is the new driver of marketing, and content is becoming an equally important component of sales. I think we will start to see leaders much more quickly become followers and close followers will much more aggressively dethrone the previous champ. Whoever slices the new larger marketing pie into the most strategic, integrated slivers will win.

The environment for marketing to contribute meaningfully to the sales process has never been better and never as potentially efficient. This could be a golden era for marketing and I believe we will see marketing’s influence in product and sales driven companies rise dramatically. It is becoming obvious even to sales driven companies, that marketing can do much more than ever with ROI that is measurable and compelling. The smart ones have already started to make a major shift in that direction.

-Patrick Strother

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