Taking credit for the sale
Published on 09/09/1996 under Accountability
For more than twenty years, I've operated under the misconception that advertising people don't "make sales." As a profession, we've brainwashed ourselves into thinking that advertising is for building awareness, changing attitudes, stimulating interest, even distributing product samples -- but not for actually making sales. The Sales Department does that.
For this reason, I believe many marketing managers have come to view advertising as a non-essential activity. If they need to increase sales, they add more sales people or invest in better sales training or sales automation systems.
And how do they find money to pay for this? Cut the ad budget, of course!
The mental image is one of a tennis player lobbing up a nice, high toss only to have another player step in and smash the serve to the opposite court.
How much demand can there be for "serve toss lobbers"? We're slowly, but surely, working ourselves out of important roles in the marketing process.
So it hit me with a blinding flash of the obvious as I was attending a Business Marketing Association conference recently in St. Louis that something different has to be done, and quick.
One of the speakers, Carolyn Dixon, vice president of Inquiry Handling Systems in San Fernando, California, actually titled her presentation, "Isn't it about time marcom takes credit for the sale?" But virtually every speaker during the first day of the conference addressed some aspect of the subject, from closing inquiry processing loops, to knowing prospective buyers better, to increasing the perceived value of marketing communications through improved accountability systems.
What they were all saying to marketing communicators is, "if you want to make yourself obsolete, fine, but don't take the rest of us with you."
Part of the problem has to do with strategic versus tactical thinking, something I've been harping on for years. The tactical person is concerned with ways to produce a better brochure, tradeshow display, or even an interactive sales presentation on CD ROM. The strategic person wants to understand why you think one of those will solve your problem. Maybe there's a better solution that hasn't been considered.
It's important that marcom people force themselves to look above the daily routine of getting things produced in order to see the bigger picture. Which leads us to the other part of the problem.
The traditional mindset of the marcom practitioner is that we do brochures, ads, direct mailers, you know, promotional stuff. We don't get involved in sales discussions that have to do with pricing, product line, distribution and territory assignments. That's somebody else's job. Right?
Wrong! It's time we re-defined the box we've drawn around ourselves, otherwise we are more like a graphics design firm than we are marketing communications professionals.
Making sales is what it's all about, and we not only need to show an interest in how and when sales are made, but we need to conclusively link our activities to the closing of sales. No longer is it acceptable for us to say, "advertising doesn't actually make sales."
What this really means is that advertising doesn't close sales, and for most products and services, this is true. However, it is totally incorrect to say that advertising has no effect whatsoever on sales of products and services. Even the most hardened disbeliever would have difficulty saying that with a straight face.
If we accept the premise that advertising has "some effect" on sales, our job then is to measure that effect and to improve on it with future efforts.
Many companies are attempting to measure the contribution of advertising programs through inquiry qualification systems. The least expensive method is a bounce-back card or questionnaire, usually sent along with a cover letter and brochure. Unfortunately, most prospects don't take the time to return one of these cards, so your data is limited.
NEW EQUIPMENT DIGEST Magazine, in its very helpful book, "Profiting From Industrial Advertising Sales Leads" (1991), says you can double responses by sending a second request. But the information is still sketchy because you're relying on the motivation of the prospect to fill out the card and mail it back. This limits you to easy, fill-in-the-blank or pick-one type questions, and not too many, at that.
Much more effective is telephone qualification of sales leads. You can do it yourself or use an outside service, but don't assume it is easy. Or cheap.
It was never easy, and voice mail has made it much more difficult to reach busy, downsized and over-stressed decision makers. They didn't have much time before this downsizing mania began, and the few survivors have even less now. Either that, or they're so new and green that they're glad to talk, but have no idea what you're talking about.
I am convinced, however, that telephone qualification of sales leads is a bargain if you do it properly. We recently surveyed companies that perform this service for business-to-business clients and found the cost to be less than $20 per lead to contact prospects as follows:
Locate telephone number (if missing)
Conduct a brief telephone interview
Enter the results in a database
Rank the lead (hot/warm/cool/cold)
Send fulfillment package (by mail)
Notify sales personnel
Issue monthly reports to management
Some of these telephone qualification companies will take it several steps further, setting up sales appointments and initiating a "relationship marketing" phase for prospects who are not ready for an appointment, but might be at some future time. These firms maintain interactive databases that can be accessed by the sales force 24-hours a day, 7-days a week.
So not only is it impossible for a sales rep to deny the contribution that advertising makes, but it becomes totally unnecessary. When advertising is viewed as an integral part of the selling process, you wouldn't minimize or put it on hiatus for six months, any more than you would furlough your sales staff.
Three years ago I suggested in a column that we should have a law requiring managers to invest a certain amount of their corporate resources in advertising, but this sales lead qualification thing is even better.
In fact, it's one of my favorite daydreams these days: a new manager, unsure and frightened about the high cost of advertising, decides to save money and kill the program for the balance of the year. The sales force then discovers their steady stream of qualified leads has dried up and rises up in mass protest, causing reassignment of the cowardly manager to a clerical job in West Texas.
He's never heard from again. Not even by people in San Angelo.