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”
Dirk Verhaeghe, a recent new colleague, asked me the following question: How did you come to the conclusion that growth maximization is only achievable if you “design for scalability”?
People that work(ed) with me know and experience my passion to find ways to maximize the market potential of an organization at any given moment in time. But always taking the human factor into account and knowing that innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit are key to success.
Challenges such as:
- The right business model
- Aligning the whole value chain and not only sales and marketing
- Understanding customer needs
- Selling value not price
- Aligning the product road-map to market readiness
- Organizational change and structure
- Creating continued competitive differentiation
- And many more
are all part of the day to day life of people working in B2B environments.
The common denominator is the fact that each of above mentioned challenges has a tremendous impact on the business results, profit and the company growth. This both in terms of top-line and bottom-line results.
The fact that I summarize all these business and commercial aspects as “scalability” issues is far from surprising if you know my ICT background where scalable solutions, databases etc are part of the day to day vocabulary. That’s how the concept of “design for scalability” was born as a foundation for the methodology which I co-developed.
Underneath is a picture representing the ”design for scalability” concept.
Wikipedia is also referring to commercial scalability in above described way.
Feel free to start discussing how we can make companies more scalable in a pro-active way.
