Last week kicked off this topic, and culminated with the question about what this internal BDM would/should/could look like in the Australian B2B sales organisation environment.  To help me paint the picture, first a tad of context.

We have all seen the indefatigable rise of e-commerce, social media and new age content marketing.  No B2B sales organisation can ignore this phenomenon in the way it considers how to marshal sales and marketing resources to go-to-market.  The challenging question for many of us is to define the degree to which our target audience accesses or avails themselves to these internet based communication channels.  For many of us, the answer is …………. well …………..maybe not as much as we think or possibly would like.

I see many blogs these days raising the question about whether cold calling is dead.  Dead is a very unalterable state.  I prefer to say that it is just plain not smart anymore.  From a number of perspectives.  Including the spectre of anti-spamming, permission marketing, the difficulty getting past well drilled gatekeepers.  Not to mention the poor conversion rates and cost effectiveness.

Fact of the matter is that for many of us selling into mature, industrial, semi –commoditised, consumption based, frequent re-order type markets, the newer forms of reaching out alluded to above, in terms of the appetite of our target markets to access and avail themselves, will not hit the mark anywhere near enough to satisfy our sales growth budgets.

Thus the business case for the “internal BDM”.  Come back again next week to indulge me to finish “painting you this picture” of what this function looks like.