Inbound marketing will not fill your pipeline.
Inbound marketing might seem like the magic formula for easy sales, but it’s not. It doesn’t close deals. It doesn’t qualify our prospects, and it certainly doesn’t set us up to make quota. Why?
Buyers don’t take action because we “drip” on them. They don’t take action because we offer compelling content or happen to email them at just the right time. Buyers take action when salespeople engage them in conversation, help them find the right solutions for their problems, and accelerate the buying process.
Marketing can only take us so far. It’s our job to make the sale.
In his article, “Selling—We’re Going Back to AIDA and You Should Be Scared,” Dave Kurlan writes:
When we ignore [what really motivates people to buy], we turn back the clocks by about 50 years, and return to the purely transactional sale. The acronym was AIDA–Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. That’s where the inbound marketing folks are taking it and it’s not a good thing.
Read the rest of this article to learn why AIDA is obsolete, and why salespeople who depend on it are doomed to fail.
For more on how relationships drive sales, get your copy of my new book, Pick Up the Damn Phone!: How People, Not Technology, Seal the Deal—now available on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble. Or get the digital version for your Kindle or Nook.
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How much do you rely on inbound marketing to score leads? What kind of results are you getting?
