Revenue Disruption: Game-Changing Sales and Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

Chapter 16

“Seed Nurturing”—Helping Your Buyers Find You

The awareness that the buyer is in control means that you must change the way you think about finding prospective buyers. A marketing demand generation professional’s job is no longer to find buyers; it is to help buyers find you. And since you never know when any individual buyer is going to be looking for you or considering a purchase, your task is to build a pervasive and easy-to-find presence across multiple digital and traditional channels. This way, your brand and product information are easily accessible the moment the prospective buyer begins to look.

Not so long ago, information about your company and its offerings was not readily available, online or offline. Beyond reading an advertisement, analyst review, or printed catalog, the only way a buyer could learn more about your products or services was to meet with a sales representative. As a result, prospective buyers were willing to talk to a salesperson early in their evaluation and research process, well before getting serious about buying anything. For the sales team, it was a necessary evil to spend time with such early stage buyers.

As we saw in Chapter 4, the traditional marketing demand generation approaches that evolved during this era grew up with a hunting mentality. Tactics such as telemarketing, direct mail, trade shows, and other forms of mass advertising evolved to help marketers find buyers and push their messages on to them. However, all these tactics ...