It’s a very human thing to do what is comfortable and thus “feels better”. Let’s take a look at one scenario which is crafted for the sole purpose of illustrating a point. Let’s assume there are 50 organizations and each have a total CLV(customer lifetime value) potential of 1M €. For this example, let’s assume that each sales meeting has a 5% chance of realizing the full potential.

This means one meeting has an expected value of 50 000 EUR. Then let us assume that sending an SMS after making an unsuccessful attempt at reaching the decision-maker has a 5% chance of leading to a meeting. This puts the single SMS at 2 500 EUR in terms of expected value. A fair assumption would be that sending 50 text messages with some nice tailored words might take the person three hours. This puts the session at the expected value of 125 000 EUR. 

Let’s leave that behind for a moment and zoom back to strategy meetings and marketing plans. Now, one might argue that what was illustrated before has nothing to do with marketing and is simply a good sales practice. The trouble with this statement is that companies have limited resources in terms of time and money which makes it a huge strategic blunder to invest for example in Google ads or SEO if you can invest the same money and create scenarios where three hours of work will have an expected value of 125 000 EUR.

The point is not to make definitive statements on what companies should do but rather to illustrate the need for assessing the entire growth budget and making decisions that are based on the relevant market data. To put it in simple terms, the more CLV potential organizations have the greater are the chances of making poor decisions because traditional sales & marketing methods rarely start from qualified organization data.