Pipeline Marketing Helps CMOs Thrive in a Post Lead-Generation World

Is your sales team suffering from “rejection fatigue”? No matter how many times managers and supervisors spout off platitudes like “coffee’s for closers”, “always be closing”, and “sell high or die”, your sales team is continually suffering through the grinder of customer rejection.

80% of successful sales require five follow-ups. That leaves room for a lot of rejection. CMOs can partner with their sales teams by helping to lead them out of any resulting deserts of rejection fatigue.

Pipeline Marketing is Taking the Place of Traditional Lead Generation

The lead generation strategies first put into use in the 50’s and 60’s, have been obliterated by the digital revolution. This was for good reason as a tiny percentage of the leads generated using old-school strategies resulted in revenue.

Instead of trying to grab the attention of anyone and everyone that might enjoy your product or service, pipeline marketing involves multiple steps that qualify every lead. And no, it doesn’t start with “dialing for dollars”.

How does Pipeline Marketing work?

Effective pipeline marketing measures success in terms of the revenue that’s generated. Every marketing strategy that utilized is encompassed within a pipeline that allows consumers and future clients to identify themselves as qualified leads.

Sound too good to be true? Most sales teams will rejoice at this news alone but, they’re going to love the next part of the formula more.

The sales mission is changing. Instead of blindly calling people in the phonebook, or stalking leads on LinkedIn, the mission is now to engage with clients that have already placed themselves in front of the finish line. A well-timed nudge from a friendly, helpful client solutions rep (title change!) can win a customer to your platform, product or solution.

Phases of Pipeline Marketing  

1. Learn everything you can about your target customer. Ask “what matters to them?” and “how do they enjoy consuming new information?”.
2. Create advertising collateral that communicates the value of your product or service. This includes paid advertising, curated social media channels, a focus on SEO and solidifying your web presence.
3. Empower potential customers to engage with your brand on their terms. One way to do so is to offer a strong online presence that operates 24/7. Another is to allow interested clients to sign-up for email newsletters, subscribe to your YouTube channel, and dive into your site filled with product tutorials and other useful information).
4. As the new client engages with your marketing collateral, they should be encouraged to provide you with their contact details. This can be accomplished with a sign-up to access a Whitepaper or, it can attained by clicking on a “Chat Now” button on your website.
5. Let your client solution reps do their magic; give them access to data that documents what the new client has already interacted with. This will enable them to build upon previous interactions during their conversation via phone, email, or chat.

CMOs Need to Shift Their Attention

The labor aspect of old-school lead generation has shifted. Instead of a boiler room full of sales reps dialing for dollars or an investment in paid advertising, today curated content and influencer marketing is required. Doing so creates the magnet that attracts future customers.

Because 81% of consumers perform research online before making their purchase, it’s imperative that your brand’s web presence is bulletproof. To deliver an exceptional online experience, you need to offer fast, easy-to-digest answers to the questions your target audience has about your product, service, or the problems you can solve for them.

The first ingredient in a fast answer is a web platform that loads quickly, on any device. This analysis of common web hosts shows that there is a big difference in performance between different hosting providers. That’s important to understand because 40% of website visitors abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

CMOs that thrive in a post-lead-generation world use pipeline marketing to more efficiently deploy their sales teams. Expensive human capital is only spent engaging new clients that have prequalified themselves. It’s my hope that this article has helped outline what pipeline marketing is, and how you can better prepare your brand to compete, without shattering the bottom-line. To see how leading CMOs weigh in on other challenges, including how they can skillfully decipher, understand, and leverage the abundance of available data to engage with customers, download The Data-Driven CMO!

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