For a startup chief marketing officer (CMO), one of your first assignments will be to help drive more prospects into the sales pipeline.

One option is to build an internal business development representative (BDR) team, but that takes time. It also requires a skilled professional to onboard, manage and motivate the team.

Another option is to outsource. There are a lot of good agencies to choose from. They can be onboarded quickly and are already skilled at booking a lot of high-quality discovery meetings with prospects in the right job roles at a list of target companies or companies matching your ideal customer profile (ICP).

The problem is, they can be expensive. Based on my experience, for a team of two BDRs, you’ll typically pay in the neighborhood of $20,000-$25,000 per month, plus a cost per meeting held or a percentage of the closed/won annual contract value (ACV). That can add up pretty fast.

So, for marketing as with carpentry, it’s important to “measure twice and cut once” to ensure that you’re getting a positive return on your investment. Make sure that you’re not overpaying by managing your program to a target customer acquisition cost (CAC).

They don’t just talk the talk – they walk the walk.

Two years ago, Gartner predicted that by 2020, 25% of customer service operations will have adopted virtual agents, which use natural language to automate routine (and increasingly complex) customer interactions over voice and chat. Recent trends certainly support this prediction, as Siri and Alexa bring conversational artificial intelligence (AI) experiences increasingly mainstream, and service managers seek solutions to support a growing number of customers across a growing number of channels.

A look at key trends that emerged at NRF’s Big Show

As customers demand more sophisticated self-service options, contact center providers are finding value in virtual agents

A look at why businesses are adopting natural language for customer self-service at such a rapid pace.

Intelligent Virtual Agents are self-service applications that BroadSoft service providers license and re-sell to their customers. Virtual Agents offer capabilities that are similar to human service and support agents -- they just never rest or take a vacation -- and they’re substantially cheaper.

Computer Telephony Integration merges your CRM and your phone system to manage inbound and outbound calls, improving sales and service. Find out how it works.

In my last post, I described some of the most common reasons that brands often fail to respond to customer questions and complaints on social media. One of the main reasons is confusion over whose responsibility it is to respond.

Historically, responsibility for social media has fallen to marketing, PR or corporate communications. That made good sense because social was used primarily as way to build brand awareness and encourage word-of-mouth marketing.

However, brands have realized that social media is not just a promotional tool, but also a channel for customer care. It has become crucial to ensure that the right department (or person) can respond accurately and effectively. In many cases, that’s not a marketer, but rather someone in sales, billing, tech support or customer service.

(This article was originally posted on Social Times)

If you’ve ever used social media to ask a question, look for information or vent your frustration about a product or service, you may have wondered why your post was met with silence. Maybe another consumer responded with a suggestion, but where was the brand that was the subject of your ire? Why didn’t they reach out to help solve your problem? Given that so many people now use social media to discuss products and services, why aren’t brands tripping over themselves to offer help?