Is Your Marketing Process Working Hard, Or Hardly Working?

How many B2B marketing teams eat what they cook? Perhaps not as many as you’d expect.

I visit lots of company websites, including technology vendors, consulting firms, and service providers of various types. And I often register to access content that I need for research purposes – whitepapers, webinars and the like.

I’m always up front about who I am and where I’m from. It should be obvious, based upon the information I provide and the things I do (like browsing a company’s “About Us” and “News” sections) that I’m as far as you can get from being a hot prospect.dead end sign

So why do I end up on so many of these companies’ email lists, being pitched products and services that I’m clearly not qualified to buy?

One of the worst examples of this was – say it ain’t so! – a marketing software vendor that shall remain nameless. When I registered as an editor for DemandGen Report, and made it clear that I have no plans to buy anything – ever – you’d think their lead scoring system would finger me as a loser and dump me in the “don’t waste your time” file.

But that’s not what happened.

Instead, I got dropped into a lead nurturing campaign. Actually, it might have been more than just nurturing; some of the email was quite insistent that I could benefit from the company’s solutions, and it urged me to contact them immediately.

Then the phone calls started. I couldn’t tell if it was a teleprospecting call, or whether I had somehow made it all the way to their sales pipeline. Either way, I was amazed that someone like me – the very definition of a dead-end prospect – could end up wasting so much of this company’s time and bandwidth.

This is a simple problem for any company to fix: Test your processes. Craft a few dead-end profiles, turn them loose on your site, and see what comes out the other end. If your marketing automation, content marketing and other processes are working properly, you can rest easier at night.

If not, you can fix the problem – and quit wasting your marketing efforts on deadbeats like me.

-Matthew McKenzie

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