Part II of my blogpost on how to be a topnotch B2B marketer.
It’s amazing how time flies when I see how long it took to find the time to finalize the second part.
Yet it was worth waiting since I’ve been involved in 2 change projects at the same time where I could practice my previous blog and can deliver this post with 2 recent cases incorporated.
10 must do’s: (Part II, 6 -10): post with must do’s 1-5
- 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.
In today’s world people are using the Internet to research and get smart even before they are willing to see a sales rep.
It is therefore of the utmost importance that a B2B marketer is using all tools at his/her disposal to educate the market in the early stages of the buying cycle. Doing so, should enable you to influence your target market based on your strengths. The prospect should seek your leadership by the time they’re willing to see a sales rep.
Being top of mind and perceived as being ‘different’ requires lead nurturing in which the Internet plays an important role.
Your website needs to combine the following:
- of course the traditional features and benefits but also deliver pain-based an educational content
- explain the impact of your solution and the capabilities it will enable for the customer
- explain the problem and capabilities looked from the different impacted roles in a organization. Have a look at the Protime (HR solution) website to see an example of role-based information
- the ‘about us’ should include the value proposition to your specific targeted market
- use compelling personalized landing pages in combination with email marketing in order to attract traffic to your website.
People will stay longer on your website, visit more pages and support your queeste to be perceived as a thought leader.
2 final notes:
- Use search engine optimization in order for prospects to find your content via search engines
- Make sure you balance the goal of capturing contact information and the risk of capturing up to 75% less registrations. So ask only the ‘really’ necessary information. You should also give the basic information without registration in order to allow search engines to find your content.
B2B Marketing, something very little people really understands and everybody thinks they know better than you do.
I’ve seen some hardworking marketing people over the last few months trying about everything to get more qualified leads and have a better view on the market. Indeed 2 critical elements during a recession. These are extremely important KPI’s in order to improve the sales effectiveness.
Looking back on my days in the states and some best practices build over the course of time, I learned a number of lessons that I think contribute to being a successful B2B marketer. It asks for a lot of discipline and hard work but the result will be measurable ROI and appreciation from your colleagues
10 must do’s: (Part I, 1 – 5)
- Visit your customers: The best way to know your market is visiting customers and prospects. Research done by Micheal Treacy shows that “Watching what the customers actually do is more reliable than listening to what they say”. Don’t rely on market research.
- Talk to the users
- Understand what problems they were faced with prior to be enabled by your solution
- Be able to quantify the situation before and after
- Write a half-page pain-based reference story in bullet format from the perspective of each impacted “role” in the company to be used by sales when they speak to these people.
- Segment the market based on your differentiation:you can read more on segmentation in a previous blogpost: Segmentation: increase the hit-rate and lower the cost of sales
- Educate the market: Building content deliverables such as white-papers, case studies, etc.. are the best tools in the quest to become top of mind. These deliverables should use the valuable information gathered during your prospect and customer visits. Don’t talk about your product/services or their benefits but rather explain a recognizable situation as is and a situation to be.
- Support Sales:One of your key roles is to facilitate sales’ ability to sell with the highest possible margin at the lowest possible cost of sales. Above mentioned deliverables are also key in helping your sales collegues to better understand their market. Work with them to build face2face best practices that work. You’re in the pivotal position to create and maintain an experience sharing platform.
- Study your competitors:Focus on their strengths not on their weaknesses and make sure you educate your internal and external customers on your differentiation not on your competitors. I see to many competitive reports and presentations leading to: ” We can do what they do and even better”. This makes your strategy to become defensive and positions you as a follower rather then a leader.
Don’t miss Part II, must-do’s 6-10 on “How to be a topnotch B2B marketer”
Companies have been doing their segmentation based on industry verticals for several decades. Vertical knowledge as a key differentiator has been added into the equation in a more recent history. Yet not all companies in a vertical are faced with the same problems and priorities at the same time. All of this has led to some important inefficiencies.
- People had to be trained on specific vertical knowledge and product knowledge leading to long ramp up times for people in a multi offering company
- Sales & Marketing facing difficulty to match specific needs in a vertical to the product offering
- Sub optimal Product/technology innovation due to conflicts in priorities
- Product releases not adapted to market readiness leading to a high cost of sales and low hit-rate
- A frustrated sales force and an unhealthy tension between departments because their concerns are left unanswered by management
- Sales loosing a lot of time in finding the “needle in a haystack” prospects
A lack of “scalability” throughout the entire value chain is the root cause . The impact on scalability of an organization should be taken into account in each decision you take.
Let me propose how to use segmentation as a way to better align marketing and sales thus improving the scalability of your organization:
- Get to “really’ know your customers by understanding the problems their faced with.
- Define KPI-level pains a prospect should be confronted with in order to seek your leadership. (i.e. VP-Sales- not meeting sales target or too high cost-of-sales)
- Map your differentiators and delivered capabilities to those pains.
- You will now be able to create a set of “pain-based segments”
- Plot your segments in terms of size, solution awareness in the market and level of differentiation.
- You will now be able to prioritize your pain-based segments
- Identify the impacted people in their organization as high as possible on the org-chart which could or will be involved in a buying cycle (key-contacts)
- Map above information for each of them and rank them in terms of impact. The most impacted person will become key in your marketing and sales approach
- You should now be able to write a value proposition for each of the targeted segments. This value proposition is the foundation for all buyer-aligned deliverables such as white papers, solution briefs, case studies, product collateral etc.
- Build a sales kit per segment covering the quantified pains, their causes, needed capabilities, quantified results, ideal buying criteria, benefits and unique features per key-contact
- Populate and qualify your database with suspects based on their pains and readiness to buy and launch a lead generation and/or lead nurturing program to start generating qualified leads for sales.
Above will result in an increased focus:
- More engaged employees
- A lower time to productivity as low as 6 to 7 months for complex solutions
- Increased hit-rate up to 75% and more depending on the level of differentiation you can proof
- Decreased cost of sales by at least 22%
Above shows how segmentation can have an important impact in terms of a better sales and marketing alignment.
Write a comment or question to dig deeper into this improved way of segmentation.
