• If a sales opportunity came into your company’s orbit, wouldn’t you want to know about it?

• If you could gain even a little intelligence on your prospect’s pain points before picking up the phone, wouldn’t you want to have it?

Today’s buyers are ghosts.

Only 29% want to actually speak with a salesperson to learn more about a product or service, while a majority, 62%, will consult a search engine first (source: hubspot.com/marketing-statistics). Some of that buyer research is definitely happening on your website—unfortunately you’ll never know about it unless they choose to reach out to you first. If knowledge is power, then the absence of knowledge is surely weakness—and that weakness is costing you potential revenue.

In a battle where buyers are armed with access to endless information—and the ability to access that information largely undetected—the key to your success, is better visibility. Better visibility that tells you:

• who your site visitors are
• what their pain points are, and
• where in the buy-cycle they are

And then you need to arm your salespeople to the teeth with that information.

Here’s where a smart CRM and Marketing Automation solution (like HubSpot), coupled with an intelligently built content strategy, can fill in these visibility gaps. With a smarter marketing approach, not only do you gain insight into potential projects and opportunities—ones you may never otherwise find out about—it gives your salespeople the edge they need to win more deals, faster.

The Cost of Not Knowing

If you’re a savvy marketer (or have a savvy marketing team), you no doubt have a slick website and SEO-optimized content that gets your brand “out there.” Even savvier marketers will carefully track site stats that show that they’re getting found on search engines and how long visitors are sticking around. You know they’re coming—so why aren’t your phones ringing? Why isn’t your inbox full?

Buyers have “WebMD-ified” the buying process–researching, self-diagnosing and solving their problems without you.

Unfortunately, the buying process has become “WebMD-ified”. Buyers are trying to solve their own pain points—researching and self-diagnosing their problems, independently discovering possible cures, polling friends and colleagues, and whittling down their short list of considered solutions—all before they’ve ever picked up the phone to talk with you. How can you compete if you don’t know you’re competing?

Think about this. How many opportunities have you lost because you never knew they existed? How many more deals could your salespeople have closed if they would have had just a little more information on a potential customer’s problems?

You can’t influence decisions if you’re not part of the discussion.

If your job–as an executive, marketer, or salesperson–is to influence decision makers (or more often, a team of them) that you’re worth keeping in their consideration set, you need to be in on the conversation. To get there, you need insight. Insight that tells you who is coming to your site, what their pain points are, and where they are in the buy-cycle. Armed with that intel, your sales teams are better equipped to qualify and get to the close in less time. At StitchDX, we offer a 60-day prospectLAB that leverages a stack of advanced marketing tools and our proven methodology to deliver a tactical marketing plan designed to get your business growing fast.

In the next segment, we’ll dig into the toolset you need to get that insight, and in part three, we’ll see how all of this looks in action.