Marketing is an ever-changing industry. Over the past few years I’ve seen the number of lead generating, automation and/or web based platform tools increase from many options, to a bazillion options (or so it seems). Every day, my clients take sales calls from companies who promise their service or tool will generate leads, save them time, and make them money. Lucky for me, I have clients who trust me, and so most of the time, they boldly tell Mr. or Ms. Salesperson, “You’ll have to talk to my marketer, she handles that.”
Now, I’m not on the phone, but I hear my clients’ side of the story and mostly they are annoyed that Mr. or Ms. Salesperson is taking up their time, the very same time Mr. or Ms. Salesperson is trying to promise their tool will save them. I also hear from my clients that Mr. and Ms. Salesperson are often shocked, insulted even, that my clients have outsourced marketing to someone with actual experience in their subject matter.
I get it, you’re in sales. The last thing you want to do is talk to someone lower on the totem pole who may not make the final decisions. But trust me, it’s changed the game for me, the marketer, too. I now get to field all these sales calls on behalf of my client. I get to research Mr. or Ms. Salesperson’s company, try to discern what it is they are selling, what results they are promising and then I get to speak with and ask them all the questions my clients aren’t informed enough to ask. Let me be clear, it’s not my clients’ fault they don’t know the proper questions, it’s their job to be good at what they do, just as my job is to be good at what I do.
What I’ve found is most of the time Mr. or Ms. Salesperson frustratingly for them can’t answer my questions. Red flag! The websites they promise exposure on are horribly outdated and unrecognizable via search engines, they don’t provide me with open rates, click rates, and they don't offer packages that even come close to meeting basic marketing standards in terms of frequency and duration. Most of the time, the promised results are sub-par, compared to what I can produce using these tools: research, strategy, and experience. (AKA, my brain.)
If you need a brand advocate, someone who has your back, who will ask the, not-so-obvious questions, who will make sure you’re spending your money at the right time and in the right places, let’s connect.
"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill