How Can Marketers Adapt in Tough Times?
How Can Marketers Adapt in Tough Times?
You meticulously crafted a robust 2020 Marketing strategy that displays your capacity to contribute to pipeline and revenue goals. You’ve made a significant investment in tradeshows and events as part of your entire marketing strategy, and you’re ready to shake hands and sign contracts.
Uncontrollable occurrences, such as the coronavirus (COVID-19), have now put a stop to many of those eagerly anticipated activities, resulting in the cancellation of Adobe Summit, F8, GDC, Mobile World Congress, SXSW, and other events vital to you and your business. You watch the news with bated breath as more events are canceled, as well as headlines regarding global economic effect.
You immediately adjust your plans and tactics from in-person meet-and-greets to digital ways of pipeline growth, determined to sustain your momentum. You devote more time and resources to webinars, content syndication, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. You run a report to determine if your recycled or DQed MQLs can be resurrected.
Despite your best efforts, you instinctively roll your eyes, knowing that your Salespeople aren’t interested in pursuing “those kind of leads,” even if you nail your ideal customer profile (ICP) to a tee.
What options do you have? How should you adjust your strategy and safeguard your numbers in these trying times?
These are topics I need to consider as SimpSocial’s Chief Marketing Officer. Not only do I want to safeguard the health and safety of my staff, but I also want to help my organization’s financial well-being and business continuity. I’m not the only one that feels this way. The same idea is on the minds of marketing executives all across the world.
Even in these difficult economic times, marketers can adapt by utilizing an augmented workforce to increase pipeline, qualify leads, and maintain strong marketing-sales communication.
Developing a Digital-First Mentality
To maintain staff productivity and business continuity, firms are already transitioning to digital-first solutions, such as revised work-from-home guidelines, using video conferencing, and presenting streaming events for customers and prospects.
A change to digital-first marketing entails re-allocating marketing budgets to digital programs and campaigns for marketing executives. Naturally, your sales team will be concerned about the quality of leads in your pipeline.
Marketers would do well to implement a digital-first solution that ensures attentive lead follow-up, regardless of the source, to alleviate concerns about lead quality. Lead interaction with Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) helps to elevate sales-ready leads at scale. IVAs engage and qualify new and existing leads by asking, “Are you interested in setting up a Sales meeting?” in a human-like discussion by email or SMS until a response is received or the next best step is understood. Because the lead told your IVA whether or not they are ready for a talk, Sales teams may be confident that the lead is interested.
Using a SimpSocial Sales AI Assistant to work leads in natural, two-way conversations to ascertain intent, you can demonstrate value in your digitally sourced leads by uncovering hand-raisers sooner, even if you’re facing widespread event cancellations or other economic issues.
What Can an Augmented Workforce Do for You?
Driving team productivity and performance while accelerating revenue creation and top-line growth are among the advantages of an Augmented Workforce, in which people and IVAs work together toward the same goals. Salespeople are allowed to focus on creating trusting connections and closing agreements by allowing the IVA to chase registrations and meetings on its own.
Intelligent Virtual Assistants can be used in the following scenarios:
Increasing registrations for your digital events, such as webinars and virtual conferences, as well as post-event follow-up to keep attendees engaged. After all, as digital-first solutions become the standard, digital events may become your most important events.
Low-scoring leads and pre-MQLs generated by content syndication or digital PPC must be qualified. You’ve already put money into these assets. Working on these things will help you live your life to the fullest.
Dormant or cold lines can be reactivated. Don’t let leads who have showed interest sit dormant. Reengage them to check whether they are still interested and willing to discuss.
Consider the following Talend example. When the next-generation leader in big data and cloud integration software added SimpSocial Intelligent Virtual Assistants to their workforce, they increased lead coverage and conversion rates. Talend’s Sales AI Assistant was created with the goal of recovering recycled or DQed leads. The SimpSocial Sales AI Assistant helped Talend win approximately $1 million in bookings, which was incredible.
As you can see, even seemingly low-scoring, digitally sourced leads have actual worth, and IVAs are a valuable resource for Marketers wanting to maximize every opportunity.
When You Need Optimal Lead Coverage
Marketers should implement a system that interacts, identifies, and qualifies prospects at scale in order to demonstrate the value of digitally sourced leads to their maybe hesitant Salespeople. After all, qualifying that your leads are Sales-ready is the finest safeguard against Sales apathy.
With economic uncertainty and fewer opportunities to meet prospects in person, it’s more vital than ever to maximize lead engagement and follow-up. With an IVA on your team, you’ll always have a devoted and dependable team member ready to pick up those leads and work them to their maximum potential.
Concern, but not panic, is warranted in light of the current economic scenario. Now is the time to act and prepare your business to weather the storm and maintain momentum.
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