Right Channel: How do I stay agile and reach my buyer in a meaningful and relevant way?

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook

Key levers

• One-to-one sequences (phone, social, email)
• Paid media, social, SEO, events, syndication
• Demand generation and nurture email campaigns

For every buyer, there may be a channel where they hang out more often. So it’s important to approach each channel, not as a single entity with its own goals, but as part of an experience where the channels work harmoniously together, where marketing and sales all have access to the same information on buyer behavior and are perfectly equipped to provide the right message at the right time to each buyer.

One-to-one sequences

A Sales Development Representative (SDR) follows a bespoke, pre-defined sequence combining one-to-one outreach via phone, social and email to engage target personas. The SDR personalises the approach with a message tailored to individual pain points of the target persona.

Paid media, social, SEO, events, air cover

Test and optimise different approaches using different media messaging to drive the right buyers to your website, microsite, or landing pages and convert them to ‘known’ via gated content or contact forms. Simultaneously, launch air cover such as targeted ads on social media to bring in unknown contacts within the same segment, building awareness of your offering at the same time as the SDR is reaching out.

Contacts identified at face-to-face events can be uploaded directly to a (SEP) for follow-up by the SDR team.

What is a sales engagement platform?

A sales engagement platform (SEP) bridges the gap between marketing automation programs and a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. While automation helps to feed leads into the system and the CRM imports leads and stores customer and company details, a sales engagement platform is important in allowing individual sales reps to actively engage with prospects and leads one-on-one.

An SEP can help to book sales meetings, automate a cross channel sales cadence of calls, cold emails, social media messages etc, personalize sales messages at scale and measure the effectiveness of these touchpoints. In a nutshell, a SEP helps to qualify leads and transfer them into a sales pipeline, allowing personalized targeting of the right market or segment.

Demand generation and nurture email

Where relevant, for example when targeting an installed base (existing customers who are already using your offering and more likely to buy), use marketing emails to warm-up your contact database with campaign messaging before feeding all new opt-ins into relevant nurture programmes to score and identify those ready to pass to the SDR team for one-to-one follow-up and final qualification.

1. Crawl

If limited by budget or resources, start with the resources you already use to drive traffic, generate engagement and test channels: SEO, organic social, and email are a given, and one-to-one sales activities will support these, even if managed without sequences or via a manual approach.

2. Walk

If the basics are established, add in paid elements, to provide ‘air cover’ for your campaigns and drive additional targeted inbound traffic. Paid social and events enable you to define the target audience for your messaging.

3. Run

Incorporate all possible channels and manage them via a Sales Engagement Platform (SEP) in order to co-ordinate and measure performance.