Managed Services is a term that’s familiar to the entire IT & Security channel, many of whom make a living from the benefits it delivers to their customers.
This begs the question “why not for sales, marketing and demand generation?”
Traditional ways
Even with an in-house team, many businesses already buy in or outsource key resource and skills such as creative, copywriting, telesales, digital marketing.This doesn’t save money, adds complexity and the business lacks the end to end visibility of the entire process.
More importantly, there’s no accountability for outcomes. Without an evidential point of failure, what ends up happening is there’s an overall feeling that the process hasn’t quite delivered the results that were expected. Conclusions are then drawn that it’s “marketing’s fault” or “telemarketing’s fault” or there’s “a lack of brand presence” which are entirely subjective assumptions and not based on any quantifiable fact.
This is because any systems that may be in place can’t measure the whole process to be able to make that informed calculation.
The path that leads to diminishing returns
Every time a piece of an end users’ journey becomes disconnected from centralised systems, processes and communications, bad things happen.
- Valuable insights and data analytics which offer the opportunity to leverage more revenue from individual buyer scenarios are lost
- Buyers feel they are being shoehorned into a sellers’ quarterly sales cycle with many citing they feel “dropped” if they don’t happen to fit into a brand’s engagement cycle.
- Stop-start campaigning loses momentum
- MDF funding can lose as much as 30% in value as it goes through the sales chain
Investment in Marketing Technology (Mar-tech)
Businesses that can afford them have invested in sophisticated automation platforms with huge license fees. These systems offer the ability to dissect data based on buyer behaviour, create campaigns accordingly and integrate with CRMs.
Investment is wasted when only a fraction of system functionality is used. This is because businesses lack the extreme programming skills and data analytics knowledge needed to gain full advantage of the changing dynamics in buyer behaviour.
Many others are priced out of the game because it’s all simply too expensive to license, resource and fill with enough content to make it viable.
Additionally, there’s little point in any of this if activities such as telemarketing are done off the back of a separate email platform as a silo activity – or worse – cold calling from a cold list.
Selling stuff isn’t that simple anymore
End user customers expect to self-serve through research and comparisons before they want to engage.
We hear all the time “yes, but we already have marketing/telemarketing/creative/copywriting/website/digital marketing” [delete as appropriate]
