But, before long, your RevOps tech stack starts to creak and groan under the weight of a dozen logins, a hundred automations, and a data flow diagram that looks more like a crime scene than a strategy. 

We’ve seen it more times than we can count: what began as a neat, well-intentioned system slowly mutates into a tangled, unholy collection of parts. Ultimately, this leads to duplicated effort, missing insights, and the unsettling feeling you’re never quite sure whether that subscription you’re paying for is actually doing anything. 

If that sounds uncomfortably familiar, don’t panic. Every FrankenStack can be revived with the right tools, a steady hand, and a bit of gentle re-stitching. 

Does Your Stack Show the Classic Monster Signs? 

There’s a point when every FrankenStack starts showing its stitches. Data goes missing, contacts appear twice (or five times), and no one’s entirely sure which version of a report is the “real” one.  

If you’re seeing any of these symptoms, it might be time to call in a specialist: 

• Duplicate data. The same contact shows up in three tools but is only updated in one. 

• Clashing automations. Workflows compete for the same trigger, confusing your team. 

• Mismatched reporting. Sales, marketing, and finance all see a completely different story. 

• Shadow subscriptions. Forgotten tools quietly bill you each month, but you don’t know if you can turn them off. 

• Permission nightmares. Everyone has access to everything, yet no one knows who actually owns what. 

These are the telltale symptoms of a FrankenStack system that’s been patched together over time. But, if you’re still unsure whether these apply to your systems, you can always book a quick diagnostic from Secret Source martech specialists. 

Spotting the monster is the first step. Once you know what’s hiding under the hood, you can start making sense of it again with a FrankenStack autopsy. 

How to Perform a FrankenStack Autopsy 

Fixing a FrankenStack doesn’t start with tearing systems apart. It starts with understanding how the creature came to life in the first place. 

Begin by mapping your ideal customer journey. Your tech stack should serve this journey, not hinder it. That means that anything which doesn’t help to progress the pipeline is on the chopping block. 

To do this, list every tool in your stack and what it’s meant to do, then trace how data moves between them. Where does it start? Where does it get stuck? You’ll quickly spot where processes overlap or where a single point of failure could derail everything. 

Next, examine ownership. Who’s responsible for each platform? Are roles clear, or muddied?  

From there, test your integrations. Follow a lead or customer journey from start to finish. If it vanishes halfway through, you’ve found a weak seam. 

Finally, document your findings. Even a simple flow diagram helps you see where to trim, merge, or rebuild. You’ll know exactly which parts to keep and which are just dead weight. 

If that sounds daunting, we can help. We’ve already done this for clients dozens of times and can return a clear, no-nonsense plan for bringing your stack back to life; all you have to do is get in touch to get the ball rolling. 

Once we’ve identified the problem(s), here’s how we fix them for you. 

The Secret Source Secret to FrankenStack Surgery 

Once you’ve mapped your FrankenStack’s anatomy, it’s time to make some clean incisions. The goal isn’t to rip everything out and start again, but rather to reconnect the vital systems so they actually work together. 

Start with the redundancies. If two tools handle the same task, pick the one that integrates best with the rest of your stack and retire the other. Then move on to your data: clean it, enrich it, and make sure there’s a single repository for it so there’s a single source of truth across teams. 

With the clutter gone, rebuild your key automations. Keep them lean, well-documented, and test them thoroughly one step at a time. Every automation should have a clear purpose and a named owner. 

Finally, roll out changes gradually. Communicate what’s happening, log what’s been fixed, and make sure every team knows where their part fits in the new, healthier system. 

Of course, all that’s easier said than done. That’s why it’s best to bring in experts with a steadier hand on the scalpel to help you. 

Get Your FrankenStack Review 

If your stack’s starting to groan under its own weight, now’s the time to steady the table and take a proper look. We’ll review every moving part, spot the overlaps, and show you where a few careful cuts could bring clarity, speed, and sanity back to your marketing ops. 

You’ll get a clear summary of what’s working, what’s holding you back, and what a lean, efficient setup could look like. 

Just get in touch to get started. 

The following article discusses:

• What elements are Sales, Marketing and Business Owners needing to consider when establishing marketing budgets. 
• In a disruptive world, can sales and marketing budgets be agile enough to cope or do they need to be disruptive in their construction and execution.
• A paradigm shift in sales and marketing budgets.

Sheer necessity in most cases has resulted in a further shift in the dynamics of Sales and Marketing! Business leaders can no longer simply talk about agility, they have to demonstrate it. Most businesses have been disrupted both nationally and globally, with Executive Leaders paying closer attention to macro and micro business environments.

Despite the current conditions, leaders still need to plan for the future and this includes establishing budgets for the new world. In a world of constant flux, how should sales and marketing leaders proportioning their budgets for the coming year?

After speaking with many Sales, Marketing and Business Leaders, the typical marketing budget would include a proportion of; Salaries, Inbound and Outbound Marketing depending on the industry/sector. Since the pandemic, not unsurprisingly budgets were either cut or reallocated to predominantly digital marketing and e-commerce. Typical marketing budgets over the past 12 months have been proportioned as follows;

• 50%-70% Salaries leaving the rest of the marketing spend at 30% spread across different marketing elements including;

• 15% Digital (website/ecommerce, search engine optimisation, paid),

• 5% Content, social and PR

• 10% Marketing tech stack (CRM, Automation, tools)

  (note: These averages are taken across a wide range of B2B companies and sectors). 

With the shift to digital and a greater need for data driven marketing, where should your marketing budget allocation be spent? The following is from conversations with sales, marketing and business leaders. 

Let’s Get Digital 

According to the latest Brand Recruitment Research, which surveyed a good cross-section of sales and marketing leaders, as high as 80% of professionals said they would be investing more into digital marketing specialisms, including;

• SEO (Search Engine Marketing)
• CRM and automation tools
• Social media and content

The ability to measure marketing and its return on investment has always been a priority to business leaders, then it is no wonder why digital marketing spend is the preferred option. However, what Secret Source have witnessed is that in the clamber to switch from traditional to more digital activities, costs have also increased. Competing for good quality people, training, infrastructure and the cost to compete in a digital marketplace with companies vying for the same territory, have pushed up paid or sponsored content costs. This is not likely to subside anytime soon, which is why sales and marketing leaders will also need to think disruptively into ways they can increase their activity, whilst keeping down their overheads. Digital marketing is taking up a large proportion of the budget estimated as high as between 15%-30%

The Costs of Content

‘Content is king’ was a term being used pre-pandemic, but even more so, content marketing has become a battleground to achieve a share of voice in the marketplace. Generating good quality or engaging content is not a short term activity. If content is to be educational, engaging, and informative, able to convert your audience into customers, then careful planning, execution and budget is required. Costs attributed to Content marketing have increased with companies undecided whether to choose in-house content writers (including social media talent) or external specialists such as freelances or agencies. Good content takes time, time is money, therefore, allocation to quality content is a better investment than quantity on the whole. 

Secret Source Marketing have witnessed a definite need for content writers to become more digitally savvy and digital marketing professionals to respect the content process. Cross pollination of the ‘two brains’ has resulted in marketing teams working closer together in a world that is promoting physical social distancing. Good quality content produced by professionals who can correctly engineer effective content, time after time, is worth investing in. Having this resource in-house can take up 30% of your overall budget compared to 15% of budget working with a team of professionals in relevant sectors. 

“In a world of social distancing, has there ever been a greater need for sales and marketing teams to work together” Secret Source Marketing

Talking and moving content!

Secret Source see an increase in investment of video and media content, rather than an ad hoc, separate, non-integrated budget line. The allocation would ideally fall in line with the content marketing budget to give video/media assets’ direction and strategy. This is widely outsourced to third parties professionals but still needs careful co-ordination from internal sales and marketing personnel. While filming has been restrictive during the pandemic, there has been increased spend in many sectors for video, animation media. 

Employee Costs/Salaries

One of the highest costs of any marketing spend is marketing salaries. With marketing salaries ranging from a junior role at £18,000 to a senior marketing leader at £100,000+ costs for people, despite the pandemic are stable according to research carried out by marketing recruitment agencies. Business commentators suggest B2B organisations are to a certain extent less fragile compared to B2C environments. With the mixture of the skills required within marketing, the pressure on a small in-house marketing team to juggle general and specialist activities, then it is no wonder internal marketing professionals become overwhelmed, jaded or simply turn into project co-ordinators, with little time for strategy or creativity. Experienced B2B marketing talent costing between £30,000-£60,000, means a team required to grow a business can cost upwards of £150,000 (excluding the total lifetime costs of an employee). Businesses will spend 2/3 of their allocated budget on resources to manage the budget and external specialisms.

Secret Source believe that more long term thinking of salary budgets is required. With the ideal objective of being able to utilise top talent, as and when you need it. As a result we have witnessed an increase in many freelance platforms to help facilitate this, with varied marketing skills available. With people located around the world, allos companies to a good choice of talent. The challenge comes from knowing who to use and co-ordinating the activity. 

The alternative is to use an agency and hiring amongst agencies during the global pandemic actually increased as a result. Agencies also come with different strengths; creative, digital and public relations as a few examples. So the need to budget for a few agencies is important. Spend on agencies can therefore get expensive, running internal resource to co-ordinate specialists. 

With overall marketing spend on internal talent as high as 70%, this weighting of budget leaves little other investment on other activities. With businesses re-shaping organisational structures, there is an opportunity to re-evaluate marketing spend. 

Marketing infrastructure 

Investment in the sales and marketing tech stack also needs to be re-addressed. Different ways of working, collaboration tools, project management, digtial reporting, research capabilities (read 7 Sales & Marketing Trends), CRM and automation. In order to stay agile, continual investment within your marketing infrastructure is advisable. Reviewing reputable sales and marketing SaaS tools, like Hubspot, SFDC as examples will help track the return on investment of the rest of your marketing spend (Read ‘8 Reasons Why Using Hubspot CRM Might Be a Good Idea For Your Business’).    

The Brand Starts at Home

Allow for Sales and Marketing budget allocations for internal marketing. The coming together, albeit virtually, of work colleagues has been an important element of high performing cultures. During the pandemic, many companies have enhanced their profile by investing and communicating their internal brand positively to the outside world. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is viewed and recognised by prospective customers and business partners, who are looking for alignment with their own culture. The result of this has been strong collaboration within vertical sectors. Budgets for internal marketing often sits beneath different departments, such as Human Resources. Some businesses are lucky to have a CSR leader or internal communication teams, but for many businesses, finding time, and budget, to invest close to home is ad hoc. Assigning a proportion of your marketing budget towards internal activities is also a good investment in the short, medium and long term. 

How Should I Proportion My Budget?

What is the answer to budget allocation in 2021? While we are not going to dictate how you spend your budget. Market conditions, competitive landscape and sales targets are all dependent variables that  would need to be understood, however, a healthy marketing spend budget would focus on Inbound Marketing, generating good quality content/media/social assets that help your prospects on a journey in becoming a customer and beyond. Content marketing should look to be between 10%-20%. Digital Marketing investment is closely linkedin to the above content allocation and involves SEO, SEM and Paid channels. Getting found is important, so this should be set between 30%-40%. Infrastructure investment should be anywhere between 20%-30% depending on where you are on the journey. Your resource budget still remains high at 50%.  

Paradigm Shift In Marketing Budgets

Client-side, agency-side, we’ve been budgeting in B2B for over 20 years! Over this period we have seen some fundamental shifts in activities, processes, allocation and reporting when it comes to budgets. However, during the recent pandemic we are seeing a new paradigm in budgeting, one without physical barriers and culturally more trust in people, processes a less draconian mentality. This is a positive shift, one focussed more on results, data, the right activities, the right skills delivering the right results. The new world has suited the Secret Source Teams very well.

The suggestions to Finance Directors and Executive Leaders is a paradigm shift, one of a high proportion of budget spent on salaries who end up managing external specialists to help them execute, or the alternative of bringing it all in-house and incurring the running costs. Instead Secret Source Marketing suggests you truncate the relationship between in-house marketing, agencies, consultants, freelance and instead having a marketing outsourced team, that evolves as you grow and deploys the neccessary skills to help grow your business. With a predictable cost each quarter and measurable for results. By exchanging salary overheads and re-investing budget spend into your marketing execution could allow you to proportion marketing budgets into a far more growth orientated model. 

SSM Paradigm Shift

35% Digital 

25% Content (PR, Social and Media)

20% Infrastructure

15% Management 

5% Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

0% Salary!

The two graphs above show the shift from a traditional marketing budget, heavily weighted on the overhead of internal resource costs, to an integrated mix of marketing activities of which proportions can change to suit the need of the business, with local and global seismic shocks. The outsource model is focussed around activity, execution and measurement, with more time spent on delivery of a clearly defined strategy. Re-deploying traditional budgets typically spent on recruiting, onboarding, nurturing and retaining talent, compared to the outsource model of combining resource with agency, has become more popular for both business leaders and indeed marketing professionals over the last 12 months. The new role of the in-house marketing professional is now sat within the agency and aligned to that of the specialists as an when they are needed to grow the business. 

This shift is not a new phenomenon. Culturally it has become more acceptable as people have not been commuting, turning up to a physical place of work every day. Large and small businesses are currently using this model behind the scenes being able to utilise a blue chip marketing department whilst wanting to remain agile in how they budget for it. Emerging out of the pandemic has given Finance, Business Leaders an opportunity to break from the traditional model to a more flexible way of working for the business.

Thinking differently about budgets, the team at Secret Source Marketing work hand in glove with business leaders to help deliver on their marketing operations. If you wanted to discuss further how you disrupt your marketplace by executing at speed whilst managing costs to the business, now is a perfect time to get in contact.    

 

• Tales from a CEO: The reasons why I decided to outsource my marketing!

It’s now 10 weeks into lockdown – but, who’s counting? And it’s easy to let communication with your customers slip.

Instilling customer confidence and reassuring them that you’re still there for them when they need you is more important than ever, however.

Whether it’s business as (a new) normal for you or if you’ve had to temporarily pause operations, there are ways to keep serving your customers during these challenging times.

Here are 6 top Secret Source tips to help keep your customers engaged.

1. Host webinars

Webinars are a great way to share valuable information with your audience while demonstrating your business as an expert in its field.

Having a solid plan is key to a successful webinar.

Be clear about your purpose from the start and create an outline to follow when coming up with the perfect script.

When choosing a topic, remember to think about who your buyer personas are. In this current climate, what information would they find most helpful?

Eventbrite is a free way for people to sign up to your free webinar – and don’t forget to promote it on your socials and via email!

2. Stay connected

The worst thing you can do at this time is to stay quiet.

Let your customers know your status and what steps you’re taking to comply with government guidance. Trust us, your customers will empathise with more you if you communicate with them effectively and honestly.

Whether that’s through email, video calls or picking up the phone, your customers will appreciate that you are reaching out to them and keeping them updated.

The personal touch goes a long way. So, take the time for a quick call to find out how each of your customers are doing and if there is any way you can help them.

3. Keep teams equipped

Home working can come with a host of challenges (and advantages) for most people.

Not being able to stay properly connected with your colleagues can make things worse. Ensure your team has the right collaboration tools to stay in contact and update each other on their progress at least once a day.

Keeping your teams connected keeps things organised, simple and boosts productivity. This is key to maintaining the high level of customer service your customers have come to expect from you.

Popular tools that many businesses are using include:

• MS Team
• Zoom
• GoToMeeting
• Google Hangouts.

4. Post regular blogs

Blogging has so many business benefits, not least engaging your audience. It helps drive traffic to your website, build trust and establish your business as an industry leader. 

Post relevant blogs that focus on your customers’ needs to show them that you care about helping them develop and succeed. 

For added engagement opportunities, repurpose snippets of your content for social posts or videos, and send your latest post by email, as well as posting it on industry forums and socials – like so…

5. Get involved in specialist forums

Speaking of industry forums, engaging with others online is a great advert for your brand.

Assign some time to these channels with your own specialists and help people who are looking for the answers you can provide. Or, start your own discussions and exchange ideas with other members. You never know, you might gain valuable insights into your own business, which you might not have otherwise thought about.

Specialist forums are also a good way to find out what your target audience is searching for – an ideal way to generate ideas for engaging content!

6. Embrace social media

Social media is a sure-fire way to engage with your customers.

Post regularly with relevant, helpful and compelling content to get your audience liking and commenting on your posts.

Did you know that a social media post accompanied by a photo is ten times more likely to get engagement? So, remember to post an image with your social posts for optimum customer engagement. Canva is a great tool for creating on-brand social images for free. Here are a couple of our examples…

 

Social media is also the perfect platform to praise your hardworking staff during lockdown. Not only will your staff appreciate the recognition but acts like this really help to humanise your brand.

For more sales leader tips and engaging your audience, subscribe to our blog today.

Simple definition of Sales Enablement 

Simply put;

“The act of Sales Enablement is enabling your sales professionals and customer-facing specialists to access the right information at the right time during the sales process. This is achieved by having a combination of cleverly-engineered assets (digital and physical) at the sales professionals’ fingertips. With the aid of sales automation systems and technology, improved Sales Enablement can help a sales team become more efficient, consistent and accurate. Ultimately, providing a better experience for customers, prospects, partners and your salespeople” (Secret Source Marketing)

• A less stressful sales leadership and sales professional relationship
• A positive customer, prospect, partner and employee experience
• Sales and marketing alignment
• Improved company reputation 
• Improved employee retention.

Where to start with Sales Enablement?

Sharing some Secret Source insight;

1. No matter what size your organisation, then appoint someone responsible for continually monitoring the sales enablement process.
2. In the current climate, waiting for the master plan that may never come is not an option, you need to act now! Start off with small improvements and build from there. 

If you would like to talk ‘Sales Enablement‘, from anything including which assets to use, campaigns or technology, we’ve got you covered. Secret Source Marketing have got over 20 years’ experience and the automation, sales enablement specialists on hand to help you. 

Stay safe everyone! 

Readers also found useful:

• ‘Make More Sales Deals, Not More Admin’
• ‘Are you a confident Sales Leader?’ 
• Tales from a CEO: The reasons why I decided to outsource my marketing!

4 Reasons Why Salespeople Are Using Sales Automation Tools

Hate admin, but love winning deals? Sales Enablement is all about helping your sales teams (see article for definition) and using sales automation tools is one way of achieving this.  Sales automation tools or solutions, have been around for a while, and they keep evolving. If you are not using them, then your competition might well be! To help increase your time with the prospect, customer or business partner channel, check out four reasons why Secret Source are seeing more people switch to sales automation software.

1. More Efficient

Salespeople can have email templates ready to use at the different stages of the sales cycle. Rather than re-writing blocks of text, instead carefully scripted emails give the reader the right information, deployed at the right time. Time spent beforehand can add colour, images, icons, page breaks and calls to action, to differentiate your email from the next. A salesperson’s time is then better spent on making sure the communication talks to the recipient directly (see personalisation below). What’s more, the practice of measuring the success of communications can be shared among your colleagues. This not only helps with sales, marketing and other departmental alignment but also gets results quicker.

2. Getting Personal

• What is Sales Enablement? – Definition

• Are You A Confident Sales Leader?
  
• Tales from a CEO: The reasons why I decided to outsource my marketing!

Your organisation relies on your sales activities to help grow the business. You may be a confident person but how confident are you with the sales processes around you? We asked Sales Leaders what advice they would give to fellow Sales Professionals to help them with their confidence in the sales process. Below are four items to check. Why not download the free sales plan below?  

Boost your sales confidence by:

As a business leader, you will no doubt have been considering what you want to achieve in 2019, setting fresh objectives and keeping an eye out for new ways to improve performance and to evolve. 

To help perfect your list of resolutions, below are our top six recommendations for driving your business forward and exceeding your goals this year and beyond… 

1. Get complete customer insight 

Did you know that more than 60% of buying decisions* are made without a salesperson’s input, often in forums and specialist interest groups that you can’t easily see? 

With NLP (Natural Language Processing) Technology you get unique access to information on how your company is viewed in the market place, what your customers are really saying about you and your competition and what their key challenges are. This provides you with a complete picture on which to base strategic decisions and brand positioning, meaning you will be operating more accurately and efficiently than ever before. 

2. Automate your sales activities 

It’s no exaggeration to say that sales automation will transform the way your business works. It automates manual, recurring, repetitive tasks, dramatically reducing the amount of admin your teams are ploughing through and giving them time back to spend on actual selling.  

If you’re using different systems, automation will pull everything together so you’re only having to deal with one CRM tool, thus saving money as well as time. You will also be provided with invaluable data on what content is engaging your customers and should help to improve the often mis-aligned relationship between sales and marketing.  

3. Focus on delighting customers 

To stand out from your competition, your customer experience needs to be ten times better than they will find elsewhere. It’s no longer all about the product but about removing potential friction leading to an enjoyable, easy buyer’s journey.  

Exceeding expectations is key so that your customers stay loyal and become brand advocates, promoting you to their peers and attracting more of your target demographic. 

Some ideas to delight could include featuring promotions and discounts, but the ones that really thrill are less strategic and more spontaneous and personal, surprising and memorable.  

If a customer wants to leave, don’t block the exit, let them go. They may come back to you in the future and they will have a better opinion of you if you didn’t stop them leaving, plus, it shows real confidence in your product or service.  

4. Forget the funnel – it’s dead!  

Earlier this year, Brian Halligan, co-founder of HubSpot, announced he was retiring the famous “Funnel” and replacing it with the “Flywheel”. 

The age–old funnel lost momentum at the bottom, but with a wheel, it uses its momentum to keep spinning, keeping your business growing. 

This goes hand in hand with our previous resolution about delighting customers – the Flywheel puts them at the heart of everything and structuring your business this way should provide you with the biggest return on investment of any activity.  

5. Produce video content 

Video has rapidly become one of the most crucial pieces of marketing for grabbing your potential customers’ attention. Thanks to smartphones, creating content is way cheaper than it ever has been and generally authenticity is what counts here, way above a huge, slick production.  

Recent research~ has shown that using video on landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80% and 90% of customers have stated that videos have helped them make buying decisions. With statistics like this, you’ll need to include it within your marketing strategy if you aren’t already doing so.  

6. Introduce sales calling cards 

This is gaining popularity with some early adopting companies using video messaging to augment their use of email. Of course, many businesses are already regularly using Webex and Skype for conference calling and some have taken this a step further by using WhatsApp or Facetime for business calls.

It’s certainly easier to make an impact leaving a video message for a client than an e-mail that can easily be missed in a crowded inbox. You could even try replacing your signature on an email with a link to a short video that tells people about yourself.

This is not something that’s way off in the future, but it’s happening now – it just takes the right type of culture and shift in mindset to drive it through. If you’d like to see some examples of this in action, engage with us and we’ll demonstrate. 

To find out more about how these resolutions would work for your organisation, enter your details below and we’ll be in touch, or give us a call. 

*Source – Narrative Worx 
~Source – HubSpot 

What can you give to the person who already has everything? Secret (Source) Santa think we have the answer. It is not necessarily what you may imagine (socks, wine, golf clubs etc) but things that are a lot more useful. 

We have come up with the Top 5 most impactful presents you could get your boss this Christmas, in reverse order… 

5. A reduction in their sales and marketing budget 

Shed the pounds into the New Year, without compromising on quality but instead enhancing it. How? By working smarter and investing in the right tools that will pay dividends further down the line. No more fragmented systems, no multiple contracts and no APIs to connect everything up, looking lean and mean to take on the market in the 2019! 

4. Peace and Harmony to all

Build a happy and motivated sales and marketing team by getting them all aligned around a shared goal. Make sure each employee understands what is expected of them and works together to reach their target.  

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) to Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). Put a process in place and get a common understanding about being transparent and accountable. This is a gift that is fun the whole family can share!  

3. A frictionless business 

Moving towards a better prospect/client experience. Create a memorable and even unique approach to how clients are found, onboarded, treated and retained. Give the gift of a marketing, sales and service automation system this Christmas and make the new year a good one! 

 2. An efficient sales team  

Recent research* has found that sales people typically spend less than a third of their day actually selling. Cut out the dross, the transactional and the mundane. Allow the sales force to spend less time doing administration and repeating tasks and instead concentrating on what they love doing – selling and earning commission!  

1. Total visibility  

The holy grail of presents – Secret Source Advisory – is sure to put a smile on any boss’s face. See how the company is perceived and how it compares against the competition and get a strategy in place on how to influence this position. Unlike any other gift available on the market that they will receive this year, it has the ability to show what your audience thinks and says about your brand, product/service or relevant market topics/subjects. This not only helps with thought leadership but also strengthens your defensive strategy, by enabling you to protect your brand reputation. Thus allowing your boss to sleep a little bit better in 2019 – and lasts much longer than a cup of cocoa.  

We hope you liked our unique list. If you have any questions about any of the gifts mentioned, even all 5, get in touch on 01522 700266 or email enquiries@secretsourcemarketing.com 

(Note: all gifts are for ages 21 and up, have no loose parts to swallow, do not contain nuts, batteries not included) 

Watch out for our New Year’s Resolutions listing to come! 

*Research from The Aberdeen Group: leandatainc.com 

Do you want to learn more about Inbound Marketing? 

Does that sound familiar?    

Recent research from the Aberdeen Group* has shown that sales people spend less than a third of their working day actually selling. Time pressures have always been part of a sales environment but have been exacerbated in recent years, with increased expectations from above, financial strains and market conditions.   

Sales teams following a whack-a-mole strategy rush over to tackle one issue only to discover that three new things have cropped up in the meantime. Many sales professionals focus so strongly on handling these day-to-day tactical matters that there’s no time left for strategic thinking. With new industry trends also popping up it is no wonder that breaking free from a reactive culture can be extremely difficult.  

How to cure this condition   

You can either decide to pick up more hammers (more staff, more money, work harder) or prevent the same old tasks from popping up time after time. 

Organisations that have made the shift from reactive to proactive have done so by using sales automation solutions, using various tools to help add structure and consistency to the sales effort. Read more about this here. 

Sales automation solutions are a great way of identifying an inefficient process and targeting improvements. Rather than a linear process or a funnel, successful companies are more aligned to a wheel. 

We researched this issue with sales leaders we know and as one of our clients summed up “We are trying to create an infrastructure that allows us to scale up efficiently whilst keeping the customer at the centre of everything we do. By utilising intelligent software and understanding our customers’ needs we are trying to create a culture of effective problem solving rather than frantically troubleshooting.” 

Wouldn’t you like to work this way too? 

Find out how 

To have a chat about what we could do to help you, enter your details below and we’ll be in touch, or give us a call to find out more.    

*Research from The Aberdeen Group: leandatainc.com

Would you like to know more about Inbound Marketing?

Once you’re in the boardroom pitching your product and services, it’s equal ground. You are the subject matter expert in your arena. You have the knowledge and skills that will solve their challenges, and help them achieve their aspirations.

But you’ve got to get there.

To make it on to the shortlist, we’ve collated our three most effective tactics that will help you make it on the most important stages of the buying cycle.

1. Be visible and get found.
   Building brand awareness will be integral to getting on the shortlist. Not only do prospects need to find you, they need to notice your brand over your rivals. To gain visibility online, you will need to achieve a balance between organic search, paid promotion and third party mentions.

   Building your organic search ranking through optimisation and third party mentions such as a review strategy will promote your credibility as a brand, whilst paid promotion will surface your brand when it is most relevant, to both new and existing prospects.

   By focusing on keywords and phrases that your audience, together with social media advertising, it is possible to reach new relevant audiences using specific persona-led criteria. By employing a retargeting approach, you brand will remain visible even after your visitors have left your website.

2. Take their pain away.
   Steer away from jargon, and target the specific questions that each persona is asking. Overcome objections and take away their pain in the early stages of the buying cycle to increase your chances of making it on to their shortlist.

   Your buyers are in the market for change, so take the opportunity to show them where you add value and why they need to work with you to overcome their challenges and achieve their objectives.

3. Be relevant and timely.
   Share your content with your prospects and leads to help them through to the next stage of the buying cycle. Each communication should have a precise objective and only cover one pain point – this enables them to easily digest the information and action it appropriately. 

   You will also need to show your audience clear evidence of how you have helped other organisations like them before, and how you differ from your competitors. This will identify your brand as one to watch and give you a greater chance of making it on to the shortlist. 

Getting on to the shortlist is no small task. It is a carefully curated series of events that target multiple contacts, some of whom you may not have met yet. However, if you put a robust strategy in place that enables you to be found, be relevant and be helpful, you build on the confidence and trust that will get you there.