Every year B2B Marketer have the best intention to spending more time talking to customers and prospects and yet, every year they lament on how little time they actually do this!

There are many reasons why this happens:

1. Getting in front of customers and prospects is not programatic and does not happen automatically
2. In any organizations gaining a seat at the table at major customer and prospect meetings tends to be difficult & highly political. Most organization do not have enough customer and prospect meetings to begin with. Sales professional offer those seats to their boss, the CEO or critical SMEs. Marketing is either excluded or gives up, They then become differential to sales, always asking for customer and prospect feedback. When they get it and that is not very often, it is valid from a sales perspective but not a marketing perspective
3. Very often marketing is invited but the head of sales or the CEO jumps at the last minute & says “we have too many people in the room or we are spending too much” and marketing attendance is cut. While this is a valid concern, it does not help the marketer’s goal of customer engagement.
4. Customer and prospect meeting constantly move and schedules, that works for marketing one minute does not work the next.
5. Some sales professional do not trust marketers to keep quiet in client or prospect meetings or fear that they will say something to damage deal success or derail the meeting to an “irrelevant” marketing topic
6. Finally, sales often overstates the level of their relationship with customers and prospects. When marketing asked for a marketing meeting, sales is often not able to pull it off.

Finally, when I work with marketing clients, I to run quick calendar analysis, I ask them what percentage of your time did you spend speaking to customers and prospects in December 2018, in one recent case, the answer was zero.

How can any marketing be effective if they never meet with customers or prospects, will looking at dashboards and attending internal sales planning meetings with sales give marketer’s the insights and creative context to really deliver, I say no.

If you want to stop this madness, please implement a planned & programatic approach to set up and control marketing-led customer & prospect meetings every week (include sales off course, by the way they will love you for doings this) This new approach to is called “Magnet Marketing” and it really works

Please message me at michael@gotomarketpros.com to set this up in 2019