The “Iron Curtain” barrier to B2B Marketing

I must admit that I struggled mightily about the topic for this blog. There is so much written about improved marketing and sales processes with new ways such as social marketing, that to write something interesting is almost not feasible.
Then my son who is graduating from Southern Methodist University in Dallas repeated a question asked his class by their International Marketing Professor: “Do you prefer to communicate with your best friend via one interactive personal contact or a series of text messages”. The answer, you guessed it, was overwhelmingly in favor of text messaging – 78%!
That astounded me and gave me a topic to address.
An old and simple axiom in B2B marketing is that identifying appropriate prospects is essential to its success. In B2B markets, mass emailing is inexpensive (when you have right addresses) but is it effective?
Generally, executives whom I write or call regarding my company’s services do not have a clear idea how custom developed lists, mostly by phone, effectively compares to “cold” prospecting via mass mailing lists.
No matter what your prospecting email message is it will not be read for more than a couple of seconds by an overwhelming majority of the recipients. Identifying contacts via telephone is expensive and time consuming, but much more effective for prospecting because you can either interact directly or leave a precise voice mail allow them to determine relevancy. Today, most targeted contacts are bombarded with emails which are usually too generic for their specific business needs. As a consequence, they become immune to the mass crafted email prospecting message.
A telephone message is much more effective than email because it is adaptable and is interactive when the connection is made, but it requires both parties to shed the phone avoidance practices which have developed lately.
In short, when the interactive “free flow” access to a company’s managers is blocked by an “Iron Curtain” stance, it is hypocritical for the same company to tell their sales people to engage with their counterparts.
From my long experience in B2B marketing, I can attest that companies whose managers are open to external contact (even cold calling) prosper better than their competitors, especially when measuring organic growth. And it is no coincidence that smaller companies are usually far more open to external contact than large companies.
Companies profess that constant innovation addressing market needs, or improving internal processes, is vital to their future prosperity. However, I read studies that 1 in 3 top managers do not trust market data provided to them but, if you try to communicate to those managers an improved solution or service how to get that data, you run into the same “Iron Curtain” with slim chances of being successful.
In my opinion, innovation of any sort is mainly fostered by diversity of information garnered by employees through personal exchanges, irrespective of their nature. Personally, I find unsolicited cold calls, not of the “me too” nature, very useful because I typically learn of a new method or resource.
Similarly, if I want to make an information request, most companies will ask me to respond to an anonymous address such as sales@info.com but they will ask me a lot of information about myself, company and often including whether I have a project and budget, forgetting that there is an incubation stage and I might need information before I am ready to declare my purpose.
I understand why managers at the companies avoid unsolicited telephone contacts. More often than not, they are irrelevant, ill constructed with poor messages. On the reverse side, when you receive the right content message you can quickly ascertain whether or not there is a match with the prospect.
To illustrate the value of developing relevant contact names, let me use a real example.
Recently we were asked by a small software company with a compelling solution but no brand to develop prospective contact names that they could recruit to their various events. We used primary (telephone) research and sought the relevant needed functions, usually deeply embedded in the target organizations. The final result was impressive attendance at most of their events and development of a number of serious prospects, some well into the sales pipeline.
My message is; be open to “cold” calls as they may bring you unexpected rewards. With an “Iron Curtain” stance you might miss a solution that can make your job a lot easier.