Sales Shebang: Reading Your Buyer's Online Behavior

Jill Rowley, Director of Key Accounts for Eloqua, presented an insightful workshop about Reading the Buyer's New Body Language today at the Sales Shebang.

Jill opened her presentation with a quote from Thomas Stewart, editor of the Harvard Business Review about how the world has evolved into instant, ubiquitous communications but, "...selling processes have for the most part stayed the same." She followed the quote with a recounting of a conversation she'd had with a few inside sales reps who told her they didn't need to come to her workshop because they don't work in the field with the buyers.

Come again? This really brought the quote home. The way people buy is changing and if you can't decipher what 91% of them who turn to the web first are doing when they're researching your product online, you're passing up a huge opportunity to connect with relevant communications. I'm still scratching my head over that one.

But, I digress. Jill showed us how marketing used to only play a role at the beginning of the sales cycle by gathering contact information, passing that off as leads and leaving the bulk of the heavy lifting to sales. Because of the shift in buying behavior, it's now imperative for marketing to move much farther into the cycle and provide valuable insights to sales to help them make optimal connections with their sales activities.

She defines a lead as a company who has a reason to buy what you sell. Which I thought was a very simple way to put a working definition around lead generation that definitively shows the stretch marketing needs to make. This includes collecting information, scoring leads to determine interest levels and nurturing longer horizon leads. The more information marketing can provide to sales, the better they can determine specific revenue opportunities before the sales call.

These efforts, she says, can produce larger deal sizes because there is less discounting being sought due to higher value delivery.

Additionally, she cited research from Sirius Decisions that shows that only 20% of most leads produced by marketing are followed up on by sales. Of those, sales qualifies 30% and rejects 70%. Further research shows that 70% of leads who say "no thanks" to your first efforts buy within 2 years. If you drop them from your nurturing programs, they won't be buying from your company.

Jill concluded that, given how much can be learned about each lead through their online behavior or body language "Marketing holds the key to understanding the buyer."

The other Shebang Posts thus far are on Talent Types and Crystal Ball Research.

More to come...stay tuned.