They may not be the ones you think I mean. No not the internal customers or your bosses boss like the CEO, CFO or COO. I mean real customers of marketing. Let me explain –
If you are like me working to drive thought leadership out of our organization and into the hands of would-be prospects, then you know the first place that this phenomena of Marketing’s Customers happens is online.
A person who downloads the paper and opts into our database becomes a lead start (notice I didn’t say lead). And with the lead nurturing system we have in place we can then develop a lead to the point that they are willing to talk to someone from our sales organization.
In a recent meeting with Forrester analyst Peter Burris he pointed out to me that this customer is not a customer of sales but a “customer of marketing”! Which is an interesting notion if you stop and think about it?
Perhaps this accounts for some of the Not Invented Here feeling we can sometimes get from our sales team on these leads. But love them or not they are still interest and much warmer than any cold call a sales person could ever have.
How are you bringing in new customers?
Tags: Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing
Back in the day we called them all “prospects”, graded as more or less “qualified” based on the data we had, and the actions they took. Isn’t that more simple and direct? “Customers of Marketing” are clients of consultants.
Pete
Interesting point – but I feel it isn’t granular enough and transparent enough these days for marketing
Sales may run off with your qualified prospects leaving marketing back doing “influence” marketing rather than winning over its own Marketing Customers with lead nurturing and marketing tactics