For as long as I can remember, Marketing professionals have been in the business of growing the contacts in their Marketing Automation Platform and converting those contacts into actionable leads. But that job is getting A LOT harder. I wrote a blog post highlighting 6 reasons why getting the attention of the decision maker is so challenging, but the math is easy to understand. There are more people with more access to mass communication tools contacting the same people. A cold email is almost never returned and that is the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that a cold email can get you black-listed by a private company or reported to a public official for violating privacy laws – yikes.
Now GDPR is not shutting down Sales and Marketing – but it is making your existing database that much more of a priority. Smart marketers are getting to know their prospects better by appending information to their records that allows for micro-campaigns; show me you know me campaigns if you will. They are also redefining what a lead actually is so that an inside sales team can reach out earlier in the sales process to set an appointment.
Marketers are using different lead scoring techniques such as what pages a prospect may go to on a website and buyer intent from companies like Bombora to recognize when a prospect is in the market. This data is fed to a BDR or Seller to make a phone call to set up an appointment. This is the traditional Call to Action of a form completion or email reply – but it is what smart companies are doing to get above the noise. They are also appending a direct dial phone number to this data as they pass it to sales.
Sellers are 147% more likely to set an appointment if they call their prospect directly. That is why it is almost a wasted lead to send it over without direct dial data. Too often, the seller will get lost in the phone tree or redirected from a gatekeeper to even leave a voice mail – much less connect with the prospect. The average lead costs a B2B company over $1,000 and far less than 50% of those convert. Smart marketers are increasing their odds with direct dials phone numbers.