When we ask a client how long is their typical sales cycle we get the same replies. It’s six, nine or 12 months. Amazingly everyone experiences the same sales cycle. These folks may not be totally honest with themselves. In a down economy your sales cycles can stretch a month, two months or more depending on your industry, pipeline and go-to-market approach. If you get someone into the sales pipeline today, you’ll probably won’t realize any revenue from that opportunity until December or well into 2010. There are ways to cut weeks off your sales cycle.
Do a quick Google news search for articles about “longer sales cycles“? Once you get past the obvious holes in Google’s search algorithm you’ll see many, many companies are experiencing longer sales cycles. So what’s the answer? Get people into the sales pipeline earlier, craft messaging with surgical precession, and get into “better” conversations earlier in the relationship.
We’ve been doing direct marketing programs using interactive microsites to fill pipelines for years. These programs are great when the economy is booming. The value of getting customers into a discussion with your sales team is important, really important, now more than ever. In this economy it’s even more critical to stretch that marketing dollar by targeting and getting into conversations with great sales opportunities.
Our clients and prospects seem to consistently weigh a few specific marketing options with tight 2009 budgets. One is a focus on virtual events. They cut down on airfare, hotels, bar tabs, etc. Email can be hit or miss, but it’s cheap. Some are dipping their toes in the social media waters, which is not as cheap as you might think. Social media, if done haphazardly, can waste the time of some valuable in-house resources. Then there is our solution. We offer a hybrid direct mail slash personalized microsite that gives you the best of both worlds–targeted media like dimensional mail and variable messaging with behavior stats generated by a microsite. It’s a powerful one-two punch. It also trims time off the sales cycle by bringing quality discussions forward weeks.
We get it. Budgets are tight. Our clients get it too, which is why they are filling their sales pipelines with VLG’s Dialog Marketing campaigns. Don’t take our word for it. See for yourself.
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