A while ago I bet!
Customers no longer need you, the information you have, and the products you sell, simply because they can easily find many alternatives.
The traditional sales funnel, starting with awareness, moving through familiarity, to intent and action, is dead. The model of a marketing function producing ideas and collateral, which is thrown over the organisational silo wall to sales to use for everything from the cold call to take the order is also dead.
In its place is a flywheel with has customers at its centre.
This simply means you have to know your customers intimately, not just their demographics, their circumstances and behavioural patterns. This in turn implies a great deal of work has been done in defining who is your ideal customer, and being able to reach out to them at a time when they are in ‘buying mode’, with a solution to the problem they are facing, that you can solve better, in some way, than anyone else.
There are no magic bullets to any of this, it takes hard work, experimentation, and persistence, and most importantly, the assistance of those customers you do know well, to tell you what you need to do to keep them. When you enhance your levels of service, then they will be your sales force, spreading the word, one by one.
The Buyers journey is also an old fashioned cliché, usually represented by a linear process. These days it is no such thing, it is more a series of many interdependent decision points, whose order is often changed as your ideal customer drops in an out of a decision cycle that is independent of you, the seller.
No longer should you see Sales and Marketing as separate functions, one feeding the other. Both are part of a highly variable non-linear Revenue Generation process over which you may have some influence, but no control.
The day of the functional silo being efficient is over, thrown out the window by the power of the buyer!
