Micro-Marketers in Micro-Territories
We’ve all heard this — most likely as separate words used in separate sentences over separate times.
It’s starting to finally be used together (besides what I wrote above).
Let’s break each down. Micro-Marketers. I wrote about this previously but let’s look at it again.
Micro-Marketing is now becoming a “favorite” term used in sales to describe what sales professionals have to become. I’m sure it first started with marketing people saying that sales guys have to start marketing on their own and sales leadership pushing back saying “We don’t have the budgets like you guys in marketing do, how can we market like you do?”
Well, there are many ways, as we are discovering every day. From sending emails (or InMails) with LinkedIn to prospects or to sales professionals using Twitter or Facebook to push their product or services. Yes, corporate has them, but, unfortunately, their message is usually to general for a sale pro to piggy-back on. (As an aside, I worked for a company that had over 50 products and the product I was responsible for was number 50 in priority — I never got support from Marketing and HAD to rely on myself to get the message out.)
Back to Micro-Marketing. We all have to pick up some new skills on how to market our product or service — be it through social media or direct mail or even through cold-calling (ohhh, the horror!!!). But once that is done, we have to continue with our marketing efforts, from nurturing them to moving them down the funnel. Yes, it’s exhausting at times, but, hey, that’s the business we chose to put ourselves in, because, as we all know, the rewards far outweigh the effort.
And there’s Micro-Territories. Yes, some of us work for a “global” sales organization, but, 99% of us still don’t call on “global” clients. The location of that client’s headquarters is the responsibility of the local or regional sales rep. Most of us have a territory that we are responsible for — it could be as large as a continent or as small as a section of a city.
Now, put both of those together and you will see how you have to micro-market for your micro-territory. Yes, there may be a lot of noise in your territory — especially if it’s a city that has three or more other sales reps responsible for it. Can get pretty confusing for a prospect if the sales organization that has this overlap (or nearness) don’t work together.
In fact, we have a group of sales reps in a territory (New York City) that used to step on each others toes, sending out newsletters, tweeting about their products, and pretty much confusing the territory not only with who a prospect should call, but, what services that they offered. That group of sales reps, when they discovered Illumineto, have taken micro-marketing to a whole new level, by putting a generic Illumineto Spark page together about the company and its basic services and products and then modifying that page to the exact product and service that each individual sales rep is offering. It’s a win-win for the company, as their brand and solution are marketed the same by all the sales people and it’s a win for the sales professionals, as they now have a basis that they can all launch their programs from. In short, they have seen a 20% increase in sales because they cleaned up their messaging.
That’s it. Hope you continue to use Spark in new and unique ways.
Good luck selling!
