Show me the money 4.0 - Digitisation in marketing and sales

While digitisation and networking for the application in production and logistics have already found their way into the minds of decision-makers, marketing and sales still skilfully manage to avoid digitisation and hence (yet again) measurability.

The legendary line “show me the money” Cuba Gooding Junior says to his sports manager Tom Cruise (in: Jerry Maguire) for me best describes the attitude towards business processes in marketing and sales. Hence the caption.

Over the last few years, I have observed how management and executive staff actually make an effort (4.0) to find meaningful applications for networking and information generation. If, despite the help of an advisor and a 300-page concept paper, they really cannot come up with anything, there is always plan B: attaching sensors to anything and dropping the collected data into a data lake – the oil of the future flows into the data warehouse.

What surprises me most about this digitisation and networking euphoria is that marketing and sales are quite neglected here. In B2B manufacturing companies it feels like they are almost ignored completely. At least there is an enormous black hole. The strange thing is that often cost savings, cost efficiency and rational allocation of resources are given as reasons for 4.0 ambitions.

Henry Ford is said to have made the observation that half of the money he spent on marketing was wasted, but unfortunately he did not know which half. These days, we can detect inefficient measures in marketing and sales (in fact, this is pretty easy), but apparently nobody is particularly interested in saving costs or stepping up efficiency there. There are often fears of this again leading to the introduction of new, complicated systems. And the thing is, digitisation and information generation in marketing mostly requires very little code, sometimes only a couple of lines.

Many companies already use some marketing tools. Applications like CRM, newsletter tools, homepage and landing page evaluation, links to social media and e-mail tracking are often in place. But they only coexist side by side, like an elderly married couple. Moreover, these applications are above all used to fulfil their primary (process) purpose: sending newsletters, providing customer information, etc. The information thereby generated is only exploited in a very rudimentary way. What practically never occurs is the networked application of this information.

Newsletters to larger groups inevitably generate so-called “bounce messages”. These are e-mails which cannot be delivered because the intended recipient has left the company and his/her e-mail address has been deleted.

In 50 per cent of the cases, nothing happens with this information because e-mail transmission to deactivated addresses costs nothing and hence has no impact on anything else. In a further 30 per cent of cases, this information is deleted in the newsletter system, simply for reasons of good IT hygiene. In yet further 20 per cent of cases, this information is passed to the CRM system and the dataset is deleted there as well. However, what almost never happens (in less than 10 per cent of cases) is that this information is used as valuable intelligence.

In concrete terms: A simple request to Xing or LinkedIn will provide the name of the intended e-mail recipient’s new employer in a matter of seconds. Another simple request will, in all probability, also provide the name of that person’s successor. Both pieces of intelligence find their way to telesales or the relevant sales people as a telephone job (in the CRM system).

The fact that this does not happen is all the more astonishing since telesales is desperately looking for excuses to call people with a particular purpose in mind. What better approach is there than a new job or a new position?

I recently visited a larger company with a manageable number of newsletter recipients. In the space of a year, 2,000 bounce messages were received and deleted from the newsletter system – 4,000 lost contact opportunities when considered from my point of view.

And this is only one of at least 20 standard cases where, based on simple digitisation, information gathering and proper utilization of information, an unbelievable potential can be tapped into within a few days – a true treasure of data in my opinion. And to sustain the excitement: The true potential can be exploited in the downstream discipline – namely in sales.

Also published in e-3 magazine.