“I get 150 emails a day from someone I don’t know trying to sell me something,” is a shared sentiment that Ceros’ VP of Marketing Matt Wellschlager posed to kick start our 2nd annual CMO Summit.
As our power line-up of brand builders, AmEx’s Andrea Zaretsky, Siegel + Gale’s Margaret Molloy, and Jibe’s John Fernandez shared their priorities and projections for 2015 sales.
5 Sales Trends for 2015 – From the Big-brand builders themselves:
1. Story-telling with relevance: Siegel suggests every salesperson constantly asks the golden question, “What is our relevance in the markets we serve?” In other words, figure out your story, and more specifically, your relevance and how you can help them solve your clients’ pain points. “Spend time figuring out the business pain – not the technical pain – you are solving at the CMO level,” and articulate how does your solution maps back to it. “Your technology is so visionary that there is no room for it in the budget; acknowledge your instinct without having too much religion around what you call it.”
2. Employee engagement: This one’s even simple: All of your employees, particularly those that touch your customers, should know your brand story and know how to behave ‘on brand.’
3. Closing the loop of data: “We’re incredibly customer focused,” Zaretsky shared, emphasizing that AmEx’s 2015 digital partnership roadmap prioritizes truly customized data with relevant value. Similarly Fernandez, whose company Jibe helps companies hire better, notes that it’s not that we don’t have enough data, it’s that we have too much. For a company like AmEx, which has access to an insurmountable amount of customer data, the more targeted, the more this data will drive loyalty. So Zaretsky’s team looks to work with companies that make use of that data – from ad capability to target marketing companies.
4. The CMO and CTO Convergence: Molloy encourages us to ask “What’s keeping the CMO awake at night?” And with the growing reliance of marketers on their tools of efficiency, we are seeing more and more of these CMOs learn to code. As Molloy says, “Code is the new lingua franca,” so we are seeing CMOs call on Codecademy to speak the same language of their developers, engineers, and vendors.
5. The Chief Simplicity Officer: Seigel sees those in the C-Suite constantly ask themselves, “How do I get to the point of least friction?” In fact, they find themselves learning from early stage companies in order to apply that simplicity to much more established companies. The technologies that can help these Digital Decision Makers reach that point of least friction will win in 2015.
