Being cool to cold calling

Ruth Stevens, who consults on customer acquisition and retention, teaches marketing at Columbia Business School and blogs at HBR.org. She is past chair of the DMA Business-to-Business Council and has also held senior marketing positions at IBM and Time Warner. We got her take on some of the major issues now facing b-to-b sales and marketing executives.

Follow the Lead: What’s the role of the ‘cold call’ in an increasingly digital age?

Stevens:  The cold call is never going to go away altogether.  But it’s so inefficient, that it’s simply bad use of the constrained resource that a sales force represents.  Smart companies don’t let their expensive, highly skilled sales people cold call.  Instead, they use marketing campaigns to identify and stimulate demand in target audiences, and then qualify that interest before involving a sales person.  Digital media are assisting greatly in the lead-generation process by creating awareness and providing useful information that helps prospects figure out how to solve their business’ problems.

FTL: Should b-to-b marketing more like direct marketing?

Stevens:  We business sellers are all about relationships.  We want to identify prospective buyers, and keep in touch with them as they move along their own buying process.  Unless we use direct response techniques—motivating and capturing responses, recording the inbound and outbound communications in a database, and tracking the marketing investments throughout the sales cycle to conclude at a measurable ROI, then we are not doing the right thing by our shareholders.

FTL: Do you think b-to-b companies are missing out in making their databases more of a corporate asset?

Stevens:  I do.  The database is arguably the least glamorous element of the b-to-b marketing toolkit, but it is certainly the most important.  Without correct and complete information about customers and prospects, we cannot segment, select campaign targets, calculate results or manage ongoing customer relationships with any efficiency. Bernice Grossman and I have been conducting on ongoing program of research into the power of b-to-b database marketing, producing a series of white papers on data hygiene, data uses, database outsourcing and, most recently, on the quality and completeness of the compiled data available to b-to-b marketers.

For a link to the research material, click here.