What If You Would Treat Every Prospect As A Customer?

Than you most likely will stop to sell. Interesting thought because within our profession of marketing it is all about not selling but building trust and mutual interest in order to help each other. ‘We inspire and enable businesses to grow’ at Exact is our promise as described in the brand guide. The question is how do we practice in daily life because that is the core of why propects will start to engage with us.

Profiling, big data

About every single well respected marketer understands the reason why having proper prospect data is key. Because if you want to build trust and want to serve some valuable relevant content in order to engage you need to know what works for that person. Being utmost relevant is the name of the game because with only one click they are gone. Sounds like a simple principle which it is, but practicing in daily life is a hell of a job. So how do we build a proper profiles, how do we determine who we have at the other side of the (mobile) screen? And how do we than determine what content to serve?

Kill the webforms

By asking you will get answers. But people by nature won’t answer questions of strangers so in order to build some trust you need to offer a candy. If people think it is relevant to them they are more likely to give you some data in exchange. But building a profile and try to understand your prospect in such a way is slightly outdated and with the current state of technology not required anymore. The question is how do we practice in daily life because that is the core of why propects will start to engage with us. We try to solve with (intelligent) webforms but the amount data which is required to truly understand your prospect is massive. Trying to capture this data with webforms is undoable. In fact we have hard times to understand which data is required.

Chief Marketing Technologist

More and more you read about marketers becoming technologists. Marketers being the ones within organizations spending the most on technology which requires full engagement by the IT department. State of tecnology today and how this can support our marketing efforts changed dramatically over the last couple of years. It is really exciting to be in the middle of this. The last couple of weeks I was inspired by many with regrads to the topic data. Our new owner Apax, Google and companies like Monetate showed their visions and roadmaps which makes you realize what we need to adopt in the next few years of we want to become that global top 3 player in cloud business software. It is quite simple, today without even asking you should be able to recognize who is on the other side of that (mobile) screen. Based on this data we are able not only to serve relevant content but a complete experience which goed beyond that piece of content only.

Kill the webforms

From selling to helping

So adding all these thiungs up. What if we would treat every prospect as a customer, how would we help that person to… If you fill in here the promise of your company than ask yourself: how? In our case of Exact it is: inspire and help business to grow. Ok, so I already consider this contact as a customer, what kind of experience I believe I need to offer in order to live up to my promise? Think about that! Probably my shortest blog post ever, but has the potential of becoming the marker of a major shift.