Customers expect more than ever before. So marketing and sales specialists outsmart each other and engineer new approaches to their clients.
To help your business cut through the noise, Timothy Partasevitch, CMO of Smart IT, suggested tested formulas while being hosted at A SEAT at THE TABLE podcast. Timothy held a conversation with the host of the episode Jane Singer who is also a managing director of Inside Fashion – the platform for the apparel industry supply chain.
KEY POINTS:
– How B2B businesses can create a marketing strategy that drives sales.
– Why marketing and sales should be one department – not two.
– The value of building a marketing process.
– Why sales engineering should be your primary strategy.
The effect of synergy
Sales and marketing departments frequently argue with each other. Unfortunately, not all business leaders connect the dots and realize that both processes are linked very tightly. Let’s see their points of contact.
For example, to create high-converting content, a marketer has to understand how the sales cycle works in their company. And the dependency works the other way around.
If you turn off the faucet of marketing and cut down the cost, a couple of months later your sales also start to slow down. Even if managers don’t see the instant impact of ads on revenue, frequently it’s a marketing team that generates cold prospects.
Usually, the lag can take more than just a week or two. More often it takes months and months to finally hear the echo of marketing campaigns.
That’s why both marketing and sales departments should strategically go in one direction. To sync the departments’ efforts, you can merge them (as we did in Smart IT). Thus, both units would be on the same page.
Apart from that, you can utilize more figures in your communication with customers.
Consider the numbers
Like any business, your clients count money. Considering this simple fact, sales and marketing people inevitably have to utilize key business metrics when conveying their message (especially in B2B). Here’re the most instrumental parameters:
1.Revenue
Can you increase clients’ revenue?
2.Costs
Can you decrease clients’ costs?
3.Risks
Can you help a client mitigate risks?
If you can answer those questions, you can convince a person to make a purchase. But if you’re just talking about your product and how you are great, you’ve chosen the wrong way.
Next, things get more interesting.
Observe swinging pendulum
If you turn to sales or marketing guidelines, you’ll notice how quickly they become obsolete. Personalized emails yesterday were a gold mine, today they’re perceived dry as dust. To impress your clients with a compelling message, it’s worth sometimes going out of the hamster wheel and noticing patterns in the timeline.
Let’s take a recent couple of years as an example. During the severe lockdown, people could communicate only virtually. As a result, they overused social media channels.
Today, we see a swing of the pendulum to the other side. Customers are tired of digital engagement. Having been bombarded by sales messages from multiple brands, now consumers tend to ignore any inbound campaign.
During the meetings with clients, Smart IT team admitted that people rather would prefer to see each other in real life than to share a Zoom room.
So just like the pendulum swings both ways, we see the shift back to offline interaction. And as usual, the pendulum stops somewhere in the middle, we have to harness both online and offline engagement.
For example, to engage with B2B prospects, we make the first step, and it’s digital. We find them online, connect, and schedule a meeting. Then we shift to offline communication, if possible. But to reach the prospect, we have to cut through the noise.
Cut through the noise
Before you present yourself to your future customer, you should carry out thorough research, exploring their business problems and wants. Adding some pain points in the first email will show that you really care. However, now everyone does personalization.
Everyone was doing digital advertising for the past three years. So, you should do more than ever to distinguish yourself from competitors. Having seen tons of equal sales emails in their inboxes, clients will keep ignoring new letters. So what can you do?
You don’t need to speak that professional business ton-of-voice or be that kind of a person who’s wearing a suit all the time. To grab people’s attention, you can add a simple and intriguing thing. For example, send a photo of you and your cat and say, “This is me, this is my cat, and we are waiting for your reply.” We, at Smart IT, tested such an approach and it worked out definitely well.
To find more tips, check out the full podcast episode here.
07 March 2023
WRITTEN BY
Nadia specializes in writing data-driven long-form content for technology and business niches. She showcases modern-day digital stories for B2B audiences and turns up the volume on experts' voices [email protected]
