One of my favorite lines from a rock song is “You can be what they’ve made you into, or you can make your own luck,” which was written more than 30 years ago by the under-appreciated songwriter Jules Shear. Many other artists have recorded the song, such as an unforgettable version by Roger McGuinn that has his signature Rickenbacker 12-string chiming all over it. That line, in the last verse of the song, is incredibly powerful. Making your own luck is the story here.

The sales cycle, or the time it takes for a B2B sales organization to close a sales deal, can be extremely lengthy. The more complex the deal, the longer the sales cycle. Contact center outsourcing deals are complex (often involving multiple services, multiple delivery geographies, even many languages), multi-year agreements that can be millions of dollars per year, so the prospect’s CEO often needs to sign off on the deal. They can take more than a year to close. What does a salesperson do while they are shepherding their deal through the sales cycle?

The short answer is to find some new prospects. Outbound activities such as emails and calls can help uncover when a prospect is in the market for products or services, but that is relying on luck to open doors. It was all too common to learn about an RFP or real interest during a call with a prospect or as an offhand comment at a trade show. As I put it to our sales leader, “It was pure luck. I wanted something to help us make our own luck.” Not only make our own luck but help me reach targets who seemed to be allergic to phone calls and cold emails.

Tooting my own horn (it’s my blog, after all 😊), here is an illustration of ‘making our own luck’ in action…

I designed and executed an omni-channel marketing campaign that involved earned media (a published article), targeted advertising (to 100 health insurance plans that the US government deemed worthy to sell Medicare and Medicaid), retargeting to the article, and tightly scripted phone calls.

First, the earned media. My PR firm secured placement of an article about how health insurance plans could identify the sickest of the sick and the poorest of the poor in their populations. Since my then-employer had an accountability index that did just that, one of our subject matter experts graciously partnered on authoring the article. The publication loved it.

Next up, retargeting. You’ve probably been retargeted and don’t know it. Have you ever done a lot of online research on a product, and then you start seeing them pop up in subsequent browser sessions? Congratulations, you have been retargeted! Retargeting looks at your browsing behavior and serves up what you’ve indicated as an interest. To complete the retargeting, I fed the key words from the article, along with the web domains of the targeted companies, into an amazing tool named Demandbase. Whenever someone from the prospect companies fed a key word into their friendly neighborhood search engine or consumed content with those key words, they were shown the ads that pointed to the article.

The result: 40% of the targeted audience clicked on the article and visited the company’s website for the first time. Although all of the companies had been in the database for at least a year, none of them had taken any action with the company until clicking on the article. And 10 of those companies moved from unknowns to real prospects, adding about $15 million to the pipeline. The sales cycle was significantly shortened. You can make your own luck.