The Other Side of the Desk
Full-service lead management advice

During the past two weeks, we’ve had three meetings with companies who I consider to be niche players in larger industries.  According to the marketers we’re working with, they are finding that now is the time to move ahead and expand their reach (and market share). 

For instance, there is an ag-related equipment manufacturer who is not a name player relative to the market leaders in that industry.  However, as the economy struggles to figure itself out, this company’s very segmented approach to what they consider to be their sweet spot has allowed them to flourish even in tough times.  They are now approaching 2009 with a “let’s strike while the iron is hot” mentality.  Historically, their marketing efforts were not necessarily geared toward driving lots of sales leads - but they are going to do exactly that in the next 12 months.  They feel that while their primary (and much larger) competitors are scaling back and riding out the storm, they can actually expand their reach and improve their brand awareness. 

This thinking is very much in line with our Director of Marketing Communications’ (Judy Baldwin) thoughts while comparing this downturn with those in the early 90’s and 80’s.  Many large brands took huge steps backward because they got conservative when things were tough while little known competitors made bold moves to grow at a time when, relatively speaking, advertising was cheap.  By the end of those downturns, several industries experienced a major shuffling of the deck as far as who the “players” were as the economy picked up.

A mid-1980s McGraw-Hill/Northwestern University study of companies that aggressively advertised during the early 1980s recession increased their sales over 256% as compared to companies that cut back spending during that recession. *

It will be fun to work with these clients and find out how high they can climb in their respective markets.

* Source: Innovating through a Recession by Professor Andrew J. Razeghi at the Kellogg School of Management/Northwestern University and the McGraw-Hill Research Study of over 600 businesses.

If you read the blog from a few weeks ago regarding sales cycles, consider this a “PS”.

Despite the economy, we have had more prospective client presentations in the last four weeks than any other similar span of time this year.  Marketers continue to explore ways to deliver better leads to their sales teams as well as capture metrics to make sure they are measuring every activity.  As we have discovered, demonstrating AdTrack’s ability to do this has been the singular focus of these presentations.  And in some cases, we’ve been re-demonstrating these capabilities over and over because, as you might guess, clients are putting partners through the ringer. Why? It’s budget season for most companies. Read more…

I had a couple of interesting conversations this week that almost made me feel like a marriage counselor. 

Two completely different companies, two different marketing managers, but both in the same boat. They knew they needed a lead management solution, but both were afraid to start the process of investigation with their own IT departments! That certainly makes for an interesting conversation starter. Do you empathize with these marketing managers and gang up on their IT teammates or do you focus on jumping in to “save the day” with your own solution? Read more…

Sales cycles are sometimes hard to figure. Our own sales cycle here at AdTrack has historically gone something like this:  

·          First Quarter – Lots of prospecting activity and getting to know marketing leaders at a variety of companies. However, this is generally tradeshow season so getting in front of people for in depth discussions is challenging.

·          Second Quarter – A little slow as marketing managers are either scrambling to process their tradeshow leads and distribute them to the sales team or they are scrambling to send information to the prospects they met at these shows. (A third possibility is that they have taken a month long vacation to recover and/or hide).

·          Third Quarter – Discovery and needs analysis meetings occur daily.  Marketing departments are hustling to either line up their marketing programs for the following year or put their budgets together.

·          Fourth Quarter - Clients are signing on and solutions are being implemented to be ready for all of those New Year kick off events and tradeshows.

  Read more…