Yesterday, we caught up with Inbound Marketing Summit (IMS) speaker Patrick Cahill, who is Founder and Principal at beep! Directed Voicemail. We discussed inbound marketing trends and predictions, as well as how beep! is helping its clients adopt these practices strategically and efficiently. Here is Part Two of our discussion with Patrick, who had such great content, we couldn’t fit it all into just one post!
In the first part of our talk, you told us how beep! allows its clients to make a lot of calls without having to pick up the phone. IMS stressed the need for creating personal connections; let’s talk about the importance of coming across as genuine and friendly in these pre-recorded voicemails.
Of course there are the tactical considerations in terms of recording the voicemail to sound casual and friendly, but there’s also the question of, “What’s really behind how I sound?” One thing I like about working with our clients is they get the idea that if they’re going to be doing outreach, they need to be offering something of value. They are taking a premise of inbound marketing even though it is still calling, so it’s a little bit of outbound as well.
The biggest factor is making the message convey that you’re committed to providing value. And if your prospects return the call or reply to the email, they should be getting something that’s relevant and targeted to them that will help them to better run their business or be better in their role. That’s the number one key and that’s what has lead to our clients to see a lot of success from our campaigns.
With the increased inbound marketing activity in the industry, how does your service fall into place with these new strategies?
The increased use of inbound marketing has been great for beep!, so it’s a wave we’re enjoying riding. Usually sales teams are really focused on the prospects already in their pipeline, so when marketing hands over thousands of people they expect them to call, it’s a lot of work. A lot of organizations have been finding a way to respect their sales team’s time and get them to buy into the idea of content marketing. It saves them time on the front end in terms of calling, but they are expected to step up and have a few more conversations with people that might be a bit more “long term” than they’re used to.
The sales team is really going to see the results in the end as they get a whole lot of conversation, start building influence and have a list of people that are interested, even if they must be nurtured for a while. So we have been finding that our service is a good complement to the increased use of inbound marketing.
Based on your work at beep!, how important is sales and marketing integration?
Inbound reflects an increased need of what was already important, which is the communication between sales and marketing. What I’ve been finding is content marketing and inbound marketing have provided an opportunity for the teams to actually have something they can talk about. When two teams aren’t really communicating well, talk to the sales team and tell them marketing is going to host webinars and white papers. So if someone is going to be filling out a registration form or downloading a white paper, marketing should know what information the sales team needs to know about each person or organization. Sales needs to provide insight for marketing when they create form fields to registration pages.
Another great thing for the teams to coordinate is content. It makes sense to use content that the sales team can more easily leverage or pivot into a sales-oriented conversation. Marketing needs to ask sales what types of content would make their lives easier when following up on these events, and what type of content (other than demos) would generate more qualified leads. It’s small steps like these that the departments can take to start seeing how they can work together and actually build a relationship that will provide a feedback loop to help each other and generate more downloads, and ultimately drive sales-oriented conversations.