Changes to Sales Behavior and the Impact on Lead Gen

If you’ve got any say in allocating budget, I’m positive that your inbox is full of sales outreach. It comes with the territory. Everyone has the latest offering that will revolutionize our businesses.

A driver of all this outreach is the traditional lead gen campaigns that publishers run for their partners. “Attend this webinar where you’ll learn about X,” the landing page says. “Just check this mandatory box where your email will be shared with the sponsor.” Everyone checks the box, the email is shared with the sponsor, and your inbox starts getting one more sales email.

And for publishers, this can be a really good business. So long as we can continue to drive engaged email addresses, demand gen teams will continue to spend with us. A dollar goes in, a lead comes out. It’s easy.

Due to the introduction of generative AI into the sales process, the outcomes of those lead gen campaigns could be negatively impacted. For example, I use Apollo to do research on prospects for selling AMO sponsorships. And one of the tools that it has is “Apollo AI.”

One of the features is the ability to “generate hyper-personalized emails with zero typing.” For sellers, there’s something very compelling about not having to type a single email. If I can give AI a few data points about a prospect, it can create an email that sounds very unique and blast it out with very little human intervention.

The problem is that if everyone starts doing this, how many more sales emails will each of us receive? At what point will we tune out all of that outreach? And if that doesn’t happen, what about inboxes fuled by AI where it can filter out obvious sales emails? I use Superhuman and it’s already providing a one sentence synopsis on most emails that hit my inbox.

Could direct outreach becomes a less effective tool? If sellers can’t get people to respond in the inbox because they’re either overwhelmed with all of the “zero typing” outreach or because their inboxes are summarizing emails using AI, the impact of lead gen campaigns will drop.

If sales starts to struggle, the demand gen team will start to struggle. If that team struggles, they will allocate less budget to publishers. It’s a food chain.

And look, sales has been changing for a while now. According to this WSJ story from a couple of years ago:

Those tactics, some say, involve fewer trips to the golf course and more time corralling large buying teams that include senior managers, finance officials and end users at target companies. Cold calls are ceding ground to millennials’ preference to communicate via text or direct message. And just as they do as consumers, many millennial corporate buyers like to research business products online and on their own before ever talking to a salesperson.  

For veteran sales leaders like Dale Taormino, the generational shift means much less time working the phones and wooing a few executives at a prospective company—as she did in her early selling days. Instead, she operates like “more of a quarterback,” she says, coordinating large teams of players on both the seller’s and buyer’s sides.

The first bolded point is an important one. We already know that the biggest decision makers are far more likely to pick products that they know and understand. They’ve done the research long before they ever agree to talk to someone on a sales team. And so, all that cold or near-cold outreach is unlikely to help you.

And then, the second bolded part shows the importance of making far more people aware of the business. Think about a typical lead gen campaign. Publishers are told that we have to reach “decision makers.” Another way of saying that is “director level and above.” If you can promise c-suite, you’re guaranteed to have business for life. But that’s not how it works anymore. There are multiple stakeholders and the decision maker is often the user of the tool rather than just the budget holder.

How millennials want to be sold to is changing and who makes decisions is changing. Add generative AI into this where sellers are bombarding prospects—even those who have opted in via a downloadable white paper—and it’s a recipe for complete blindness to sales.

So, what does that mean for publishers?

Before I answer that…

One of the panels that we’re hosting at the AMO Summit is AI in Media. Dan Shipper, CEO of Every, and Vijay Nathan, SVP of Product of Apartment Therapy Media are joining a panel where we will discuss ways that media operators can put AI to work to help their businesses grow.

There’s a lot of good in AI, but to make it work, you need to understand the opportunities and where your business can benefit.

Get your ticket today so you don’t miss this discussion.

Okay, back to it…

I think there are a few things that we need to push our clients on to ensure they can stand out.

First, marketers should trust publishers to be a bigger part of their marketing automation. A good example is the Lead Driver product that Annex Business Media offers. Because all the marketing is coming from the publisher, it’s possible that the reader will be more likely to engage with it since they trust the publisher. The outcome here is that any sales outreach that does happen goes to legitimately engaged people. You could imagine a world where the publisher sends an email on behalf of the client asking if they’d like to chat with a seller.

Second, brand matters. Longtime AMO readers have seen this quote, but Colin Fleming, formerly at Salesforce, told the b2b institute at LinkedIn:

We found a great study on B2B buying behavior showing that two-thirds of the time, when a business decision-maker purchases software, they already have a brand in mind. And 94% of the time, the buyer ends up sticking with that brand. So if you’re not part of the original consideration set, there’s no way you’re getting bought.

The only way to build a brand is to do brand building work. That means sponsoring work in relevant topics, investing in thought leadership where the brand comes off as smart, and showing up in places even when the prospect might not be buying.

It’s funny because we know brand matters when we put our consumer hats on. We like to own brands. And yet, when marketers start working, they forget and get addicted to performance marketing. Just look at what happened with Nike. This is a great breakdown from Massimo Giunco who used to be at Nike and he writes:

What happened in 2020? Well, the brand team shifted from brand marketing to digital marketing and from brand enhancing to sales activation. All in.

…

elevation of Brand Design and demotion of Brand Communication. Basically, style over breakthrough creativity. To feed the digital marketing ecosystem, one of the historic functions of the marketing team (brand communications) was “de facto” absorbed and marginalized by the brand design team, which took the leadership in marketing content production (together with the mar-tech “scientists”). Nike didn’t need brand creativity anymore, just a polished and never stopping supply chain of branded stuff.

Well, Nike is down over 20% year-to-date because it is having trouble moving sneakers. People like to buy brand.

Publishers can help with all of that. We have content that marketers can put their brands around. We can help facilitate thought leadership that makes the company look better to their target customers. We can even blend demand gen and thought leadership with things like webinars where the client can establish expertise (we do that a lot here at AMO).

The ultimate outcome shouldn’t be a bunch of leads for the advertiser to start emailing relentlessly. Instead, it should be fewer people who are actually interested in speaking with the vendor.

Generative AI is going to result in a massive increase in the quantity of sales outreach that decision makers get. And as time goes on, quantity-based lead gen is going to suffer. Publishers that can educate their partners and help them understand there’s more to marketing than just lead gen will continue to grow. Those that can’t? Good luck.

Thanks for reading. If you have thoughts, hit reply or join the AMO Slack. Be sure to get your ticket to the AMO Summit. Have a great weekend.