Selling in an Omni-Channel Economy

In today’s society communication tools are popping up left and right. The fact of the matter is, you can’t use a single channel of communication to effectively reach out to leads anymore. Customers are becoming more and more sensitive to personalized marketing (see ABM marketing) and we’re seeing that companies are finding more ways of doing just that: reaching out to the customer on their own grounds. This involves identifying your target leads, and their most-used methods of communication. To provide effective outbound sales routines, you must adapt to using the same channels as your constituents, otherwise you risk alienating your leads, or worse, putting content in places they’re unlikely to even see it, let alone interact with it.

To effectively throw a wide net, it requires coordination between several teams and campaigns. In order to produce the best results, first and foremost there needs to be appropriate lead management tactics in place to ensure those who you do manage to come into contact with are dealt with efficiently and effectively. Second, there needs to be ways of reacting to your lead’s behavior. Tracking their interactions with call/email/sms campaigns will let you know their level of interest and provide more clarity as to when and how you should make contact. If a lead interacts with one campaign, then that should effect the ways your other campaigns are behaving within respect to that account. For example, advertise your SMS campaigns in other mediums. Your leads might react positively, and signup through an email or webform. Maybe your leads are showing interest in an ad that offers special discounts for verifying their email, allowing you to secure their information.

Another important aspect of outbound sales/marketing in a omni-channel economy is measuring the effectiveness of your respective efforts. Which content are your teams using that produces the most transitions within the sales pipeline? Are your leads reacting to a certain campaign more than the others at a specific stage of the sale? The answers to these questions will give you the insight necessary to determine when, where, and how you should be engaging your customers to optimize your impact on the decision-making process.