Illumineto and our customer (the Sales Professional)
As we continue to grow our business, we keep discovering new things and getting asked (or asking ourselves) questions— like:
“Why do sales reps think that a prospect wants to be inundated with content because their using our product vs an email?”
“How does a rep react, when using our campaigns, when they send out a Spark page to 500 people and have 20% of them open an asset?”
“Marketing loves Illumineto — especially because they can now use it to confirm that sales reps have received the content (and opened it) — so why don’t they use it for their own marketing campaigns when qualifying leads?”
“Sales professionals who don’t follow the norm use us (with much success!) — so why don’t the normal reps use us?”
Let’s dissect each of these (briefly!).
The first one continues to baffle us — overwhelming prospects with content. As all of us at Illumineto are former sales reps ourselves, we never sent more than three pieces of content when we sent an email. Usually we would just send one piece. But now, with Illumineto and how a sales rep can lay out the content to tell their story, we believe they get carried away with a couple of things.
- The technology. Reps quickly discover that we are building a website for their prospects — and, as their only experience with websites are ones that obviously have a lot of content on them (like their corporate site), they try to “recreate” that experience.
- The resources. Because we integrate with every content library they have access to, we believe that after doing search for a subject, they see so many results that they add them all.
- One shot. Maybe because they are so excited in using us, they get carried away and just keep adding content to try and convince the prospect that because they have more content, they are a better fit/purchase? I’m sure our customers can answer this more easily, but, when we ask, they all say “Oh, I don’t think that that’s too much content”, even after we ask them “Did you put 12 pieces of content in the old way you called on a lead with an email?”
As far as the second one — reaction when 20% or even 40% of their prospects open up and view their content — this one is short and sweet. They are excited, then floored, then overwhelmed because they want to contact each and every one immediately (can you imagine trying to answer 100 emails from leads/prospects in one day?). They quickly learn that because Illumineto is so effective, they don’t sent out to 500 people in a day, but 20–50 a day.
The third one — marketing loving us but not using it for themselves. Well, that goes back to our mission and belief. We did not build Illumineto to go after the MailChimps of the world. We built it for sales professionals, at the individual level. But, marketing quickly realized that they could use us to send communications to their sales reps and get verification that a) they received the email and b) that they viewed the content. Sales professionals could no longer say “I didn’t get that” or “I didn’t see that”.
And lastly, why is it that our power users are all sales professionals who sell abnormally. They don’t follow the “rules” that have been set out for millennia, they do things in an unorthodox manner, and, well, they don’t follow anothers footsteps, but make their own. In other words, from the reports we see, they are the users that have dozens of published pages, are emailing a page to less than 10 prospects a day, and have increased their sales another 10–20%. After speaking with the majority of them, it comes down to one thing (that we can’t control), and that is research. The power users that use Illumineto do the research before hand and of course, listen to the prospect, and then build the page, each one, individually. They may have, when they were young, sent out hundreds of emails to hundreds of leads, and of course, maybe, MAYBE, got a 1% response rate. Our power users do the research and then answer the questions of their prospect by laying out a page that not only answers questions, but also tells a story as to why their service/product is the best. To them, we are grateful — as they continuously validate our product and that we built something for sales professionals who want to make more money.
Of course, if you have questions, feel free to put in the comments or write us directly. (You will have to go to www.illumineto.com and sign up if you want to write us, lol.)
Good luck selling!
