Persuading Scientists: Marketing to the World's Most Skeptical Audience by Hamid Ghanadan

Author:Hamid Ghanadan [Ghanadan, Hamid]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781605440125
Publisher: Linus Press
Published: 2019-01-19T16:00:00+00:00

Opportunity

Marketing efforts should be measured by the total opportunity generated, in financial terms. I define opportunity as the culmination of creating awareness and preference and nurturing the audience over time so that the company may identify qualified prospective buyers on a regular, ongoing basis.

Opportunity encompasses much more than lead generation, which is merely one step in the process of cultivating highly qualified prospects. Lead generation as a single practice is wasteful—typically producing 1 percent response—and is generally divisive between the sales and marketing teams, which do not agree on the quality of leads. How many times have sales and marketing management had the following exchange? Marketing claims to have run a successful campaign, producing hundreds of leads, and blames sales for lack of follow-up, while sales insists that marketing simply turned up worthless leads. Such contentions are unfortunately too common and extremely wasteful for the company. The problem is that both sides are right.

The job of the sales team is to strive toward revenue targets. In so doing, salespeople constantly prioritize their efforts toward the most promising prospects and do not engage in “cold leads.” Cultivating and nurturing cold leads into hot prospects is not the responsibility of the sales team. I believe that marketing needs to retain ownership of audiences and nurture them until they are well-qualified opportunities. True opportunity-generating marketing strategies build tactics based on the audience’s own buying journey and create appropriate content to generate awareness, build long-term preference through engaging two-way dialog, and cultivate qualified prospects.

To inspire collaboration and to break the age-old sales/marketing divide, the opportunity objective for marketing should be jointly defined and measured in two directions: It should forecast opportunities generated by marketing as the number of qualified prospects with the need, money, and authority to purchase, and it should retroactively analyze opportunities that actually led to sales.

With opportunity as the main objective of marketing programs, marketers can systematically create campaigns based on quantifiable milestones that encourage the audience through their own buying journey as well as through the company’s revenue funnel.

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