Lead me to the gravel 4.0 - Digitalization in marketing and sales

The legendary request "show me the money" from Cuba Gooding junior to his sports manager Tom Cruise (in: "Jerry Maguire - Game of Life") is for me the best description of the expectations of the corporate processes of marketing and sales. Hence the headline.

My observation over the past few years is that management and executives are actually stressing (4.0) about finding meaningful applications for networking and information generation.

If, despite a consultant and a 300-page concept paper, you really can't come up with anything, there's always Plan B: attach sensors to everything that's standing around, and with the measured values, off you go into a data lake - the oil of the future is flowing into the data warehouse.

What surprises me about this euphoria for digitization is that marketing and sales are treated more than stepmotherly here, and are even almost ignored in the area of manufacturing companies in the B2B sector. At the very least, there is a huge black spot at this point.

Side by side instead of together

The strange thing is: savings, cost efficiency and rational use of resources are often cited as reasons for 4.0 ambitions. Henry Ford is credited with a saying that half of his marketing costs are for nothing, but unfortunately he didn't know which half. In the meantime, it can be said, even quite simply - but apparently hardly anyone is really interested in saving costs or managing more efficiently at this point.

Yet: Digitization and information generation in marketing usually requires little - sometimes just a few lines of code. It's not that companies have nothing at all: CRM, newsletter tool, homepage and landing page measurement, social media connection and mail tracking are often in place. They just exist like an old married couple - side by side.

It's not that companies don't have anything: CRM, newsletter tool, (...) These just exist like an old married couple - side by side.

Moreover, these applications are mainly used for what their primary (process) purpose is: Sending newsletters, providing information to customers, etc. The information generated in the process is only used in a rudimentary way. What never actually happens, however, is the networked use of this information.

But how easy it would be - with a first example: Newsletters to larger groups inevitably deliver so-called bounces. This is an undeliverable mail because the recipient has left the company and his mail address has been deleted. With this information, 50 percent of the time nothing happens at all, because sending to dead addresses costs nothing and therefore has no influence on anything.

Another 30 percent of this information is deleted from the newsletter system, simply for hygiene reasons. Another 20 percent of this information is passed on to the CRM system, where the record is also deleted.

Information as information

But what is almost never done (in the single-digit percentage range) is to use this information as intelligence. In concrete terms, this means that a simple request against Xing or LinkedIn delivers the mail recipient's new employer in seconds. Another one delivers with high probability his successor. Both findings are sent as a telephone order (in CRM) to Tele Sales or the responsible sales department.

The fact that this does not happen is all the more surprising, as tele sales in particular is desperately looking for starting points to call people with a specific reason. What is a more qualified approach than a new job or a new position?

I was recently at a larger company, with a manageable amount of newsletter recipients. Within a year, 2000 bounces were collected and deleted in the newsletter system - in my interpretation, 4000 missed contact opportunities.

This is just one of certainly 20 standard cases where incredible potential can be realized in just a few days with simple digitization, information gathering and information use - in my view, a real treasure trove of data. And to keep the excitement going: real potential to be exploited is in the downstream discipline - in sales.