When modern marketing started back in the 1980s you only had a few “tools” available to us. Advertising, using the phone, so cold calling and the emergence of email.

The way these tools worked was simple. You interrupt me and you pitch to me your products and services. Sometimes the sales pitch is called broadcast.  In fact most businesses, websites and most sales and marketing is built in this manner.  You interrupt me and then broadcast at me.  There is a problem with this.

The more and more companies used interrupt marketing (cold calling, email marketing and advertising) the more people who were targeted by these interrupts got more and more pissed off.

There is a whole industry that had grown up around stopping these interruptions.  There is legislation such as GDPR, and CCPA. There is tech been created to stop these interruptions such as ad-blockers, even Apple and Android have cold calling blockers on their operating systems. 

So how is sales and marketing going to market  if they cannot shove their message in front of you? Easy, enter Martech.

The job of Martech is to interrupt you, in other words piss you off, faster and faster. Marketing automation after all is an emailing platform. 

I’ve attended Marketing conferences where Sky TV presented with Adobe presented how they were able to hunt down people who had opted out of interruptions.  They proudly said they were able to hunt them down on social and interrupt them. It’s clear that there is no moral compass at these organisations or any organisation that follows this policy. 

While there is a massive global industry of vested interest to keep these old ideas in play. You can understand it, teaching people how to increase your open rate or send more and more interruptions puts food on people’s tables. But when you talk to people at a micro level, we all know it’s over. It’s over for this old style of marketing and we know it’s over for Martech.

Martech is heading for a bust. 

So what can you do? 

It’s time to switch your budget from interruption to permission. 

Look at this data — The latest data on internet use, social media use, mobile use, and ... https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2020-global-digital-overview 

To quote the report

“More than 4.5 billion people are using the internet at the start of 2020, while social media users have passed the 3.8 billion mark. Nearly 60 percent of the world’s population is already online, and the latest trends suggest that more than half of the world’s total population will use social media by the middle of this year.”

The thought that your customers are not on social media or your deal influencers are not on social media is utter ridiculous.  Our buyers are on social media.

Now social media is not about using interruption techniques, so none the techniques of the 1980s on social please. In fact interruption techniques on social has a name for it. It’s called spam.

This means what got us here won’t get us there. But, deep down, we really, really knew this. So time for a new start based on permission.

Social media is not a glitch or a fad in business it is now strategic to the way business works. 

What companies are looking at social?

It seems to be early adopters and the early majority.  We are seeing change makers in companies coming to us and saying “marketing is working anymore”.  It takes a brave person to say that. But many, many marketers can see that the old ways of interruption and broadcast (advertising, cold call and email) no longer work. Or you have to spend more and more money to get the same or less results. Where we see clients getting 30% increases in revenue with social. No other marketing method can give you that sort of transformational ROI today.

These agents of change know that pulling the same old, same old levers won’t get the results that management teams want.  Sales and Marketing are in a rut! And you need to get out of it. 

Get a piece of paper out and write down your company name and your competitors. Then write down your and your competitors marketing budget. You may need to estimate this. The write down the number of salespeople who and your competitors have. These are your levers. To win more business you need to spend more on Marketing than your competitors. Significantly more. 

To grow faster than your competitors, you need more sales people than the completion.  There is also a finite market, in other words only so many people making a decision in any one year.  That means you need to win EVERY deal.  To gain market share will require you to drop your price, which might drop you in the middle of a price way. This will hit margins and certainly not something you want if are increasing your spend on marketing and sales.

These are the levers you have. 

But.

You could disrupt! 

Our changemaker clients know they have to do things radically different to win. 

Maybe it’s time to be an agent of change yourself and get ready to disrupt your market with social selling? 

If you are that agent of change, get in touch!