In the current scenario most marketers, salespeople, and business decision-makers have fully wrapped their minds around the power of the platform. As a species, In our history, it has never been as easy as today to create a brand and distribute it to an audience. All you have to do is get in front of a camera or microphone and hit record and there it is, you are creating.
In the past, organizations and individuals would have paid a small fortune to do what is now accessible with their phones and social media channels. No longer is it about reaching the masses, with incredible amounts of waste, but rather about getting to the people you can convert into obsessed believers of your brand. So why are we not taking advantage of this Digital marketing opportunity?
Sequential Approaches to Digital Marketing
The successful marketers of the future will be the Trollishly who understand this incredible opportunity that exists in today’s landscape. Organizations, for several times, have absolute control over their brand message! They can control the content, create it, edit it, distribute it, and put it in front of the right people for consumption. The quicker the switch to creating internal media teams within your organization, the better you will understand your WHY and what problems you solve for others.
In general, the new form of telecommunication or medium’s evolution is here, and it is starring companies in the face. If we do not recognize the shift and start acting on it now, we will soon find ourselves scratching our heads and wondering what happened. Start investing in content creation, and start looking at the incredible opportunity in front of you to build a brand with the people that will value it the most.
Digital Marketing For Better Relationships
Of course, the foundation layer of any business is human interaction: just think about the origin of the words “company” or “corporation”. The relationships that are developed and carefully nurtured over time are an essential asset of any company and are profoundly human to human.
This might sound like a “Salesperson” or a “Business Developer” topic. But the reality is that relationships are not only for salespersons: I would even tend to think that in any company, you are selling something whatever your role is. Everyone is a Salesperson. CEOs are selling their company to shareholders as much as to clients or potential partners, CFOs are selling their accounts to auditors, and production experts can be very secretive about the relationship they have with suppliers. You might want, as an HR or legal person to work more specifically with this headhunter or that lawyer because you have a long-established relationship where trust has been built. And this relationship will follow you should you change ship.
Marketers Act as Salesperson
The versatility of relationships is also what makes business interesting and can make a real difference when well understood. I have seen a client of the company that within 15 years turned into a salesperson, then into a colleague, and finally into an investor in Weave. This long-term relationship came obviously as a strong asset for us, and when thinking about it there is no doubt that I would call them MY relationship.
Nurturing these relationships should be encouraged by any company. Robert Cialdini showed that building rapport has been proven as a strong business facilitator as it creates trust. This is what makes the best Salesperson – and remember: everyone is a Salesperson -, but also creates a great threat to a company. Yes the relationship belongs to the parties involved, there is no way around it, so when an employee leaves the company, they will of course leave with their part of the relationship. So why are there some conflicts and discussions about WHO owns the relationship? Money is generally the immediate (and not subtle) reaction:
When Salespersons have individual objectives to meet, they don’t want their teammate to be dealing with “their” clients and see their quota and their year-end bonus go away altogether. When there is a team effort involved, the Salespersons also want their role to be perfectly visible and clear to their boss so that when bonus times come there is no doubt as to who did close the deal.
However, I believe that a more profound reason lies in the relationship itself, with a strong need to control what is going on. This possessive behavior is also observed when money is not at stake. It might relate to some form of jealousy: MY relationship is messing up with my teammate – ugh.
It might also simply relate to not messing up the relationship itself. A carefully nurtured relationship is a complex mesh of habits, unspoken agreements, and quid-pro-quos that might have taken years to establish. One certainly doesn’t want this delicate equilibrium to be shaken by a random outsider.
These protective trends are very natural but they are threatening the businesses. On top of putting the company at risk of losing relationships when employees are leaving, several other factors will eventually hinder the business:
Protective Salespersons tend to input as little information as possible in the company’s systems. While researching on that topic to design Weavit, it became apparent that concerns such as “ I lose all my value if I give too many details on my contacts to the CRM” were mainstream. According to SalesForce, only 10% of business interactions end up being digitized and usable for a company. This is a massive loss of opportunity to understand clients better and provide them with a better service.
Salespersons are not helping themselves by getting better traction with clients when not opening up their relationships. One Salesperson covering one contact at the client rarely works. Decision processes always involve multiple persons through the hierarchy but also laterally, for example involving procurement, compliance, or risk people. Best Salespersons know this and try to cover all key persons within a client, but a coordinated team approach involving management and teammates is likely to be more effective.
Relationships from coworkers in other parts of the company are not leveraged: there is always a high likelihood that within the company, someone has a personal or professional relationship with a key person at the clients. This is a massive untapped potential often underestimated due to lack of appropriate tools to access the network, and lack of great mindset too. According to our research, we estimate that companies with over a few hundred employees are only using 10% of their human network. Imagine if they were using the remaining 90%!