A few weeks ago I tuned in to one of the many conferences that moved online. This one focused on SaaS in EMEA. Especially on product marketing and business development. I was surprised to see the GDPR topic so prominently on the agenda.
Didn’t we move on from this? In the end, GDPR is not going away. This doesn’t mean that everything is crystal clear. Far from it.
Firstly, it’s different for every country. This means that one-size-fits-all outbound approaches will not work for EMEA teams. ZoomInfo have created a nice overview that gives you an idea of what your business development, sales and marketing teams need to deal with every day: https://www.zoominfo.com/gdpr.
Secondly - as the chat questions at the conference showed - there’s uncertainty around the term “legitimate interest”. A prerequisite to legally use contact data for reaching out to people commercially. What does “legitimate interest” mean anyway? Here’s a link to the official definition by the European Commission. Enjoy:
With this in mind, sales teams are still looking for loopholes or workarounds in their outbound marketing and prospecting. As it seems, many vendors are still preoccupied with this and with trying to find tactics for the different markets. But how would that look like in a localised and scalable way?
The effort to create a consistent and localised content strategy is immense and not included in the sales plans. Therefore many are trying to adapt and polish what they have and then run with it as long as possible.
Just like there’s no holy grail of sales cadences, there isn’t any content or conversation that is relevant at the same time, for every prospect in all European countries.
Account based marketing (ABM) is a good approach. At least for enterprise sales. It isn’t, however, very effective to scale higher velocity sales and to hit volume KPIs. Basic personalisation of messages will not cut it. You need to cut through the noise. You are competing for the reader's attention in today’s infodemic. Google’s Zero Moment of Truth report states that “the average buyer engages with more than 10 pieces of content before making a purchase”.
Repeated and relevant exposure is the key for sales teams today.
What’s your GDPR loophole in EMEA?
In our next blog post, we will discuss how to:
Build consistent, relevant and localised sales cadences/sequences
Maximise the contacts you already have
Get content referrals with conversation starters
Leverage your team members as ambassadors and build their thought leader profiles
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