We’ve all made some bad choices in our lives, some worse than others. For me, my biggest regret was buying a pair of Crocs. Marketers have a history of making poor decisions too. I don’t think there’s a single marketer out there who hasn’t resorted to a “batch-and-blast” technique, including yours truly. But the crappy marketing needs to stop. Justin Keller, VP of Marketing at Terminus, has a few ideas on how to change your strategy during his episode of the Real Marketers podcast.
Stop Asking for Leads
What would you rather have, a large amount of mediocre pizza or a medium amount of great pizza? I think most people would choose the second option. Now ask yourself the same question, but apply it to lead generation.
Leads is a hot topic here; we’ve even had an entire Real Marketers episode dedicated to this subject. Marketing should not be judged based on leads because it can lead to some pretty poor choices.
When marketing is focused on hitting a number, we start to focus on quantity rather than quality. We spam harder and yell louder. And if that doesn’t work, we go into panic-mode and ramp up these efforts. But when has this ever been successful? Answer: NEVER ❌
“That email address isn’t someone that your sales team can spam. That’s a human being that cares about things and is interested in and has a sense of humor. And I think that because we think about them as a line on a spreadsheet, we kind of dehumanize them,” shares Justin.
Focusing solely on leads poisons the well for other marketers. In return, we have to work all the harder to gain consumers’ trust back.
What’s the Solution?
Getting your organization to think differently about marketing won’t happen overnight. But you might get there quicker with account-based marketing (ABM). When you’re focused on a select number of people rather than trying to boil the ocean, you have more time to create highly-personalized experiences. Trust us, they work. 👍
“It frees you up to do so much more fun stuff because you’re not trying to grind through as many leads as you can. You can spend that time that you would have been putting together nurture tracks and trying to optimize your click-through rates on your ads to do really cool things,” Justin reveals.
Justin recommends writing down the accounts you want to go after on a whiteboard so it’s constantly top of mind. Pretty soon, you can start to have fun with marketing again. And your relationship with sales will be stronger than ever.
Good things take time and so does ABM. It can be easy to get discouraged if you aren’t seeing immediate results but don’t be tempted to slip back into bad habits, but a Real Marketer knows marketing is a long game. Take a listen to Justin’s full episode to learn more about how to do ABM the right way. ✅
Meet with one of our experts to see how easy it is to centralize your product data, manage digital assets, and create digital product experiences. Trust us…you’re going to be wowed.