Marketing has a tremendous opportunity to help their organizations develop more predictable, higher-value, and accelerated revenue streams. To do this, marketing should develop structured and measurable programs, campaigns, and tools which add value to prospects while advancing the sales cycle.
Focusing on the buyer is the key differentiator between effective and wasteful campaigns. If a salesperson’s role is to facilitate their customer’s buying process, then marketing’s role is to help sales engage new customers in buying discussions and to help keep existing prospects engaged. Focusing market development efforts on the customers buying process by design will do just that.
Too often, marketing materials go for the jugular. However, IT buyers go through a series of phases and involve different people throughout the buying process. Therefore, break down their buying process into a series of steps and create the right materials and programs for each one. For example, a program to make decision-makers aware of their problems is dramatically different than one helping them figure out how to solve that problem. Both of these are required stages before a customer will buy a solution, yet most marketing programs assume they are past these stages and ready to select a product. All that does is make them feel “sold to” and confused – and confused prospects never buy.
With the customer as the design-point being the pre-requisite, there are five (5) critical success factors to effective programmatic marketing campaigns.
1. Have a finite, specific, and measurable purpose.
As we’ve said, complex buying processes go through stages. Marketing should identify the typical stages their customers go through in making a buying decision, determine their customer’s needs throughout the process, and establish specific objectives and milestones in each stage. This allows you to create the content your customers need to achieve each key milestone and advance their buying process. Additionally, it allows you to set up performance measurements, which will help you steadily improve each program, capture performance metrics, and communicate your results internally.
2. Add value to your customers or prospects.
Many sales methodologies and training programs teach sales people that their job is not only to communicate the company’s value proposition to the prospect, but to also add value through the sales process. However few sales people have the expertise to be able to be a “value add” on their own. Rather, it should be marketing’s role to provide tools which sales can use to deliver value while interacting with prospects.
The most common way for marketing to help sales “be valuable” is to provide them resources for educating customers and prospects. If a sales rep can be seen as being thought-provoking – helping a prospect understand a complex issue and how it impacts their company – rather than “salesy”, the rep will gain more credibility with that prospect and be in a better position to facilitate the buying process.
3. Enable sales people to uncover and diagnose business problems.
Whether we care to admit it our not, people buy from people. Sales people play a key role in market development efforts. All of the emotional drivers learned in business school are secondary in a business-to-business sale. Organizations buy solutions to business problems. They do not buy software, consulting offerings, or services. They are investing in your firm to realize the benefits of your solution. The better you can equip your sales people to find business problems and bring them to your prospects attention, the shorter the sales cycle and the larger the average deal size.
4. Have tangible impact on moving accounts through stages of the sales pipeline.
The sales funnel is the lifeline of any company and should be a focal point throughout the organization. Most marketing dollars are invested to create awareness or generate leads, and focus on filling the top of the funnel. However, these investments should be more balanced across all stages of the funnel because incremental improvements in each stage of the sales process can have multiplicative effects on revenue. For example, if you have a five stage sales process and you improve the percentage of opportunities that advance from each stage to the next by 5% points, you can more than double your revenue. Plus, marketing campaigns focused on supporting later stages in the sales process serve to reduce the sales cycle time and increase close rate, which are much more likely to impact revenue than generating more low quality leads.
5. Arm your advocates inside a prospective account to sell for you.
It is estimated that up to 80% of the buying decisions about your offering are made without a representative from your company involved. With that much of the decision on the line, how are you equipping your internal champion to accurately represent the compelling business solution you are providing? Sales people, who present your offerings every day for a living, have a hard enough time incorporating all of the key selling points of your solution on each sales call. You must provide concise and topical materials that will help internal advocates make your offering relevant to that organization.
