Consultants lean too heavily on inbound marketing and waiting for prospects to call. Even if you have a notable brand and an inbound marketing strategy, how does "waiting for them to contact you" lead to pipeline challenges? In what ways has the correlation between sales and marketing changed in business? How can we bring value into every conversation we’re having?
On this episode, author and President of Heinz Marketing, Matt Heinz, talks about how to solve the pipeline issues that are so common in sales. He shares why waiting around for inbound leads isn’t enough to build an efficient business, and outlines the right way to approach sales and marketing.
"You can’t just sit and wait for your dream client to show up on Google. You lose all control of your pipeline, business, and margin." -Matt Heinz
The bigger we grow, the challenge we’ll have with our pipeline is not the volumes of opportunities. When it comes to inbound leads, you don’t have really have control over the quantity and quality. Your best prospects can actually be a very small percentage of the leads that come to your website. You still have to be proactive about building relationships and generating opportunities with the companies that better match your criteria of ideal clients.
Inbound has really taken off, but you have to be intentional about it. The question for a consultant becomes who is going to pay you the most for your intellectual property and the problems you know how to solve? It’s really difficult to fill the pipeline with people that will pay you the most with an inbound approach. You still need to have intentional identifying, reaching out and pursuing in your toolkit to get more business.
Most people are looking at sales and marketing as a hand-off, and not a partnership. It’s about eliminating the separation between the two so we can create a singular, unified and integrated approach to customers. The best and most efficient companies recognize that sales and marketing both have a part in the buying journey.
Just because we’ve built a good brand and reputation, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be proactive about building a pipeline. In order to sustain ourselves as professional service agency owners, we can’t expect the exact number of leads and opportunities we need every month and quarter to just fall into our laps. Not only will this give us an unstable pipeline, it also means we’ll constantly have to reinvent the wheel to work with whichever lead shows up. That would not be an efficient way to run a business, let alone grow it. That’s why our lead generation strategies shouldn’t be sales heavy or marketing heavy exclusively. In order to increase the velocity of deals in our pipeline sales and marketing have to work together.
Guest Bio-
Matt Heinz is a speaker, prolific author and nationally recognized, award-winning blogger, and the President and Founder of Heinz Marketing. He has 20 years of marketing, business development and sales experience from a variety of organizations and industries. Matt’s career focuses on consistently delivering measurable results with greater sales, revenue growth, product success and customer loyalty. Matt is a repeat winner of Top 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management and Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers. Go to https://www.heinzmarketing.com/ follow @HeinzMarketing on Twitter and email matt@heinzmarketing.com.
Read Matt’s blog about the 10 Lessons he’s learned in 10 years of marketing here.
That's all for this chapter of Beers with Max! Hope you enjoyed this week's festivities. As always, if you want to join our virtual happy hour, grab your favorite brew and click the red button below. Til next time, keep your beer chilly and your leads hot!