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What scares you? What challenges or obstacles from your professional life occupy your dreams (or haunt your nightmares)?
Hopefully handing over the reins for this week’s blog post won’t keep Rick up at night…
I’m Marlene Keay, and I’ve worked with Rick at Virtual Causeway for 16 years, managing hundreds of lead generation campaigns that help our clients’ sales and marketing teams achieve success!
Give this Freddy-inspired song by Dokken a listen as we share some tricks that help our team and clients sleep soundly and treat you to what the experts are saying this week.
Meeting No-Shows – The Stuff of Nightmares
Those prospects that have committed to meet with you – they look like a great lead on paper – persona, ICP, need, and pain. You’ve done your homework and are all set. You’re a pro, so you join a few minutes early and then… wait… and wait. What happened? Where are they? What do you do now?
With so many virtual meeting platforms used every day our computers just can’t seem to keep up. Use this as an opportunity to serve your potential customer and give them a call directly. We suggest waiting 5-7 minutes and then reaching out by phone.
Here are our top tips for scheduling meetings so that maybe tonight they won’t be gone:
- Schedule calls as soon as possible, preferably within 5 business days.
- Follow up if the prospect hasn’t accepted your invite within 24 hours of sending.
- Call the prospect rather than having them join a conference bridge.
- Send a reminder a few hours before the scheduled meeting time.
- Use a strong, direct, prospect-centric title in your calendar invite – not “follow-up” or “check-in.”
- Sell the meeting, not the product! Focus on the value of investing their time in meeting with you, not more product features. For example, “My colleague Don will join this call and he is an expert in companies going through similar challenges as you.”
- Avoid scheduling calls during high no-show rate times like Monday AM and Friday PM. Track your own data as there may be differences based on the industry and the role (such as avoiding meetings with finance roles at month-end).
- Develop a process for rescheduling “ghosted” meetings. In my experience, you’ll be able to reschedule 50-75% of the no-shows.
What do you think? What strategies have you found work to make your meetings stick? If you have some ideas, come my way and let me know – I’d love to hear them!
How to Scare a B2B Marketer
According to this article from MarketingWeek, the number that strikes fear into the hearts of B2B CMOs is… 16%.
The LinkedIn Customer Insights Team recently analyzed the sales and marketing overlap of 7,046 companies, and found that the average overlap between marketing and sales reach is only 16%. That means in most companies each department is talking to a different buyer.
So how do you break the spell? When sales and marketing overlap, performance booms. The data shows that buyers are much more likely to respond to sellers if they’ve been exposed to marketing within the last 30 days. In fact, on average, they’re 19% more likely to accept a LinkedIn connection request and 15% more likely to open an InMail message from sales.
Don’t leave your sales and marketing teams standing in the night alone. The LinkedIn analysis found that high alignment can increase marketing-generated revenue by 208%, increase customer retention by 36%, and reduce sales and marketing expenses. Now those numbers will help you sleep well tonight!
Horror Movie Songs to Give You a Fright
Do you have your Halloween playlist ready? Horror movies and heavy music just go together so well, don’t they? So get your speaker ready to play these horror movie songs guaranteed to scare you (and the neighbours) this Halloween!
And don’t hesitate to call me (Marlene!) to brainstorm or just say hello!
Looking forward,
Marlene
Marlene Keay, Senior Project Manager, Client Services | marlenek@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/marlenekeay