Do you consider yourself to be a sales coupon? I didn’t think so.
What does your business email inbox look like? If it is anything like mine, it is filled with corporate subscription newsletters I never signed up for. It’s filled with marketing automation email letters of solicitation from people I don’t know.
My personal email inbox is filled with daily B2C coupons for 20% off whatever that store is selling. It is one, constant sales barrage.
Think about it. My business and personal email boxes are filled with the same stuff as far as I am concerned.
Your customers are connecting those dots, too. It’s not positive. To them, it is all a bunch of commoditized sales noise. You become nothing more than another sales coupon.
Will they delete you before they even open your email or take your phone call? (You already know the answer to my question.)
You may feel that your company isn’t the equivalent of (yet) another 20% sales coupon. However, your company’s approach to business acquisition comes across just like that.
Your company’s drip marketing strategy can sabotage your own individual selling efforts. If it’s a one-message-fits-all format, you become nothing more than another sales coupon.
Perhaps that’s why the average amount of each sale you close is much lower than you were anticipating. Perhaps that’s why your company experiences an unpredictable revenue stream.
Automated marketing messaging may not sound anything like you. At all.
Here’s something to think about as well. I save up some of those online and paper 20% circulars from specific stores I shop at regularly. “Just in case” I run out of some commodity I need to replace.
Your potential customers aren’t saving your marketing automation emails. There is no “just in case.”
Your company has invested in a marketing automation tool to keep their brand in front of current and potential customers. Make sure that your sales and marketing efforts, as a real live human being, aren’t being minimized and commoditized as a result.
After all, you have a personal brand of your own to maintain.
Your company’s marketing automation platform should function as an extension of your own sales efforts, as a business and sales person of worth. Not vice versa.
Are your inbound and outbound marketing campaigns making you look like a Sales Coupon?
Here are your Action Items:
- Spend some time reading all of the marketing automation messaging your company sends out. It’s high time you did.
- Send yourself a copy of everything automated that your company is sending out to customers. Read it, wearing your customers’ shoes.
- What’s your next move? Delete the message? Engage with a salesperson for more information? Relegate to commodity choices “just in case?”
Something to chew on this month.
Babette N. Ten Haken, President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, is a management consultant and business coach. She catalyzes startups and remodels small-to-medium manufacturing and service companies who have difficulty with unpredictable revenue streams. Learn more about how today’s B2B buyers think like B2C consumers right here.
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