- Build an experience sharing platform: It’s amazing to see how much information and experience stays underutilized and leaves the company with former employees. An experience sharing platform, ideally, managed my marketing is pivotal to leverage, study and optimize the best practices. Sales-marketing alignment is the immediate result. The platform consists of a small set of sales-ready deliverables which are kept up to date per segment and key-contact in the buying process of prospects and customers. Regular sales meetings with best practice sharing and assisted by marketing are the starting point. Ask your sales to send a blackberry style email with the summary of meetings (especially on pains, challenges and capabilities) and make sure marketing has access to that information in order to keep the best practice up to date.
- Facilitate market ready innovation: The information gathered during the visits by marketing (see post with must do’s 1-5) and aforementioned internal meetings will deliver a wealth of information to help inform and educate R&D and product management on market needs and what they should be capable of doing. I’m still surprised to see how R&D, product- marketing and management are limited in their view and understanding of the market because sales is translating customer needs in features themselves leading to the battle of prioritizing development on the product roadmap. On the contrary of what they think at a first glance, R&D and product marketing/management will be able to be creative and innovative to an unprecedented level because they will understand the native customer environment.
- Educate your internal customers: Increase the value of the marketing department by playing a pivotal role in all communication from and to the market. Keep the following up to date:
- win/loss reasons by calling key decision makers per deal yourself a couple of weeks after a decision has been taken. Assemble those winning and losing buying criteria per supplier;
- best practice per segment and key-contact and use it as a base platform to streamline interdepartmental communication;
- prioritised market pain/capability area’s for which the product should be upgraded.
- This will enable you to monitor proposed product upgrades and new versions in terms of competitiveness and hit-rate thanks to a better coverage of market needs.
- It will also enable you to focus your external market education to a group of prospects who are seeking your leadership.
- Implement a lead nurturing program: You main mission next to the management of the experience sharing platform deliverables and educating internal customers is to deliver ‘real’ sales ready leads. The only ROI based approach is to start communicating with your targeted market on a continuous basis with ‘role-based’ messaging. Meaning language adapted to the specific role in the company of each of the different contacts involved in the decision making process. also see: necessity of lead nurturing
- Measure and communicate: Make sure you can measure most if not all of the marketing activities. It will help you to communicate progress on all these area’s. Some of the mentioned points might be quit heavy change projects and thus will take time, patience and continuous improvement. This is the best way to ensure a large enough budget to accomplish all of the 10 must do’s.
Have fun implemeting the 10 rules to be a topnotch B2B marketer and keep me posted on experience and/or challenges.