by gabriel_sales | Mar 5, 2014
Companies that are taking new products or services into the market, or existing products or services into new markets, have a distinct set of challenges. Solving the right pain for the right markets quickly can make all the difference between simply surviving vs. thriving.
By engaging experts to thoroughly analyze and research your space on both a qualitative and quantitative level, you can eliminate many of the obstacles companies usually face when going to market with a new product or service.
Here are three things you can learn from go-to-market strategy consulting:
1. You are targeting the wrong people/market.
Through quantitative analysis, go-to-market consultants can help you determine your overall market size. They also help you to then do market segmentation and database research to further analyze the market and determine how many people or decision makers are in each segment. These numbers help you create your ideal customer profile.
On the qualitative side, consultants can help you identify buyer pains by vertical and decision-maker and also analyze what verticals and decision-makers your competitors are going after. Using this information, consultants can help you to clearly identify your differentiators and then incorporate them into a sales story that is the basis of all of your sales and marketing content.
Going through this process gives you confidence that you aren’t just shooting in the dark and are actually targeting the people most likely to purchase.
2. Your content needs to be organized/segmented differently.
Most B2B sales are somewhat complex in nature. Many times, B2B solution sales require a well-strategized content marketing process with different pieces of marketing content for each vertical or decision-maker and each stage of the buying cycle. If you aren’t organizing your content in this way when you take your product or service to market, your buyers may end up abandoning the sale prematurely because they cannot immediately find the information they are looking for. Go-to-market consultants can help ensure your content is organized and articulated with the language of value, making it easy for your buyers to learn what they need to and make a purchase.
3. You are not meeting your audience where they are.
By going through segmentation exercises, database research and other analysis with strategy consultants, you will have a clear idea of where your buyers are looking for information on your product or service. For example, when you know the titles your prospects are most likely to have at their jobs, you can look for social communities or other online forums related to those jobs and post your content there. When you know who to look for, LinkedIn groups and Google circles can be a great place to start conversations and engage buyers.
Go-to-market consulting essentially shows you your entire landscape and everyone in it. It also allows you to better understand who you buyers are, how to talk to them, what type of content they want to consume, and where/how they want to consume it. Rather than guessing all the time about what to do, this gives your sales and marketing campaigns a well-designed and actionable strategy backed with logic and data.
To learn more about new product/service launches, visit this extensive resource page on the topic. You can also check out our Go-to-Market Strategy Consulting Page.
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Mar 3, 2014
B2B professional service companies are a rare breed. The sometimes abstract nature of the service makes for a tough sale and a longer sales cycle than most. These companies therefore need all the help they can get in terms of sales and marketing, so knowing where your buyers are evaluating your services is key to a successful sales process.
In a recent survey reported by MarketingProfs, it was found that the two most common places people go to evaluate professional services companies are the company’s website (81%) and search engines (63%). Beyond that, buyers ask friends or colleagues if they have heard of the company (62%), look to social media (60%) and ask a reference the company provides (56%). The survey also found that buyer used an average of 3.2 methods in their evaluation process.
While these findings are not surprising, there are several conclusions that can be drawn.
1. It makes sense for professional service firms to devote significant resources to their website and invest time in leveraging it as a sales tool.
If 81% of your buyers are heading straight to your website to evaluate your services, your website better be set up to allow them to do that. A homepage with a “sign up for our newsletter” link is no longer enough. Professional services companies’ websites need to include readily available content that:
2. Professional services firms need to use social media—if only for evaluation/vetting purposes.
B2B professional service firms are never going to be the most buzzed about thing on social media. But, if 60% of buyers look to social media in their buying process, it makes sense to at least have a presence there. The same survey found that LinkedIn is by far the most commonly used social platform during evaluation of professional services companies (70%). Twitter is only used 5% of the time and 25% of buyers check Facebook, Google or other social networks.
So, while posting constantly on Twitter might not be worth the time for professional services firms, setting up company profiles on LinkedIn, Google and Facebook is probably worthwhile. You may not need to post updates everyday, simply having an active company profile is sometimes enough to be seen as a credible, 21st century business.
3. For professional services companies to be most effective, one tactic is not enough.
With so many places to get information today, buyers are leveraging multiple resources over the course of their buying process. This suggests that to be most effective in their sales and marketing efforts, they need to leverage a variety of sales and marketing tactics to meet their buyers everywhere they are looking.
Because professional services buyers are looking an average of 3.2 places during their evaluation process, focusing only on your website—or only on SEO, or only on social media—is not enough. Professional services companies need to simultaneously work and monitor all spaces where prospects are engaging to produce the best results.
For more sales tips of B2B professional services sales, read 10 Sales Strategies for Professional Service Firms. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Feb 28, 2014
Marketing Automation may prove to be the way to save companies leads and money
Everybody wants more leads.
In a recent marketing survey from BuyerZone, it was found that 56% of B2B companies strongly disagree with the statement that they’re getting enough leads. The same survey found that 45% of B2B companies have been increasing their lead generation budget year after year.
There are several reasons why this is happening. The first is that cold calling is about half as effective as it used to be, with call-to-connect ratios dropping by 50% or more in recent years. Cold calling still works for lead gen, but it costs twice as much to achieve the same results. Another reason many B2B companies think they need more leads is that they don’t have a system in place to effectively work and manage the leads that they already have.
The BuyerZone survey found some interesting relationships between B2B companies’ use of technology and their perception of lead volume and quality:
“B2B marketers who agree with the statement that the leads they receive are of reasonable quality are:
- More likely to be using a CRM (89%)
- Use marketing automation (53%)
- Have an understanding that they’re getting enough leads (53%)
Compare that to those who disagree that the leads they receive are of high quality and you see that only:
- 78% use a CRM system
- 29% use marketing automation
- More than 90% are adamant that they are not getting enough leads”
Looking at the data, it seems many that companies that use a CRM in conjunction with a marketing automation system receive higher quality leads and therefore feel that they need less of them to be successful. Conversely, companies that feel they do not have the lead volume or lead quality they need are much less likely to use both a CRM and marketing automation platform in their lead generation efforts.
To us, this makes a lot of sense. If a company does not have a CRM and/or marketing automation system, they likely are not tracking their leads or nurturing them in any way. With no visibility into their leads’ web activity and engagement with their marketing content, how would these companies know whether or not they have enough leads or what quality they are?
The lesson to be learned? BuyerZone explains:
“In a nutshell, while the cost of CRM and/or Marketing Automation isn’t insignificant, it might end up saving companies money in the end.”
By leveraging the right technologies, you can eliminate the constant lead quantity problem by replacing it with a solution that improves lead quality. This way, you can stop spending more and more on lead generation and can instead focus resources on nurturing leads you actually know are interested.
To learn more about sales pipeline management and lead nurturing with the use of marketing technologies, read “An Alternative to Getting More Leads in 2014”. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Feb 21, 2014
Marketers obviously have good intentions with their content marketing strategy, but what they produce often ends up missing the mark.
For example, you may only care about the business benefits of a solution, but the content you are sent is a high level technical overview. Or, you are just trying to quickly learn the basics about something, and the only content offered is a 20-page white paper.
Experiences like this can be frustrating for the B2B buyer. To them, it seems that there is a disconnect between their needs and your solution. In this day and age, if buyers can’t find the answers they want with relative ease, they are moving on to your competitor.
To solve this problem, here are three steps to creating highly engaging B2B content that converts:
1. Build buyer persona/personas for each type of buyer you sell to.
The first step is taking the time to truly understand your buyer. In B2B sales, this often means understanding the multiple types of buyers that are now involved in the sales process. Each of these buyers may have different needs and concerns, and you need to understand these concerns completely before creating any content. For example, while the CEO may care most about P&L, the HR rep and the IT manager have entirely different concerns.
2. Map out your sales cycle into stages, and create content to match.
With your buyer personas in mind, the next step is mapping out your buying cycle. To keep things simple, break it up into three stages: education, verification and closing. Then, create content for each stage for each of your buyer personas. Ask yourself, if I were an IT manager and knew nothing about X product/service, what would I need to see to feel educated on the basics? Ask yourself the same for the CEO, the marketer or whoever else is involved in the buying process. Then move on to the verification stage, and ask yourself what each type of buyer persona would need to see to verify that you are the best choice among the many alternatives. Again, remember that verification for an executive may look entirely different than verification for someone in marketing. Finally, do the same for closing stage.
3. Use marketing automation to push content at appropriate times.
With your personas and content created, you can use your marketing automation platform to gauge what type of persona each prospect has and where he or she is in their particular buying cycle. By offering each prospect content that speaks to his or her most pressing needs at the appropriate time, your prospects will find your content genuine and valuable and will be much more likely to convert.
By following these steps, your prospects will feel like you understand them, which is the first stage in establishing trust. To learn more about creating quality B2B content, read “5 Reasons Your Content Isn’t Converting”. Please feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Feb 19, 2014
This is the second half of a blog series on B2B content ideas for ongoing or consistent content production. For Part 1, click here.
4. Conference attendance
For any type of professional event you are hosting or attending, you should create content. This could be simple blog posts or even emails letting your readers know the who, what, when, where and why of what you are attending/hosting. If you want your readers to engage with you in some way at the event (e.g. meet with you at a conference), make sure you publish/send the content far enough in advance for people to make plans.
5. Common objections
In B2B sales, you often hear the same objections over and over again during your sales process (e.g. “We don’t do SaaS products” or, “I don’t want to outsource X”). Building content around these common objections allows you to have collateral when you run into these objections on phone calls. Just imagine the conversation: the objection is raised, and your sales rep is able to say, “I totally appreciate you raising that issue. It is a fair concern that we hear all the time and to address it, could I send you this quick blog we’ve published on the topic?”.
6. New client mentions
If you have your client’s permission, you can write blogs or send updates in newsletters each time you bring on a new client successfully. A lot of online business news publications will publish these types of updates if submitted in the form of a press release, especially if the client is particularly well known or the solution is novel in some way. Along the same lines, you can also publish content when your clients achieve some type of success that you have been instrumental in creating (e.g. winning an award, surviving an IT disaster, passing an audit with flying colors, etc.).
7. Comparison matrix
For more complex sales like SaaS platforms or management consulting services, creating a comparison matrix can be very helpful. By comparing features, levels or protection, levels of maturity, pricing, etc., you can help you prospects in their decision making process while highlighting the value of your solution. For example, if your software solution has four or five features that your major competitors do not, a matrix is a great way to quickly prove that difference in a visual format.
Creating content is always going to require some work, but sometimes coming up with an idea is more than half the battle. Hopefully these ideas help you get started!
For more tips on publishing marketing content in 2014, read:
3 Things to Add to Your Blogs in 2014
Feel free to contact us with any questions or visit our services page to learn more about our B2B content development services.
