As I have been marketing B2B propositions for several technology firms, some things have become very evident and I am sure many of the points will resonate with my sales and marketing peers:
- Complex sales with different buying influences and politics imply that as a seller, you are going to have multiple points of touch before you close the sale. I like the term ‘moments of truth’ to explain that each point of touch is your opportunity as a marketer to further establish or break the ongoing relationship amongst the universe of prospective organisations you touch.
- Decision making units in organisations go through cycles of discovery such as learning, processing and eventual vendor selection and therefore a one size fits all approach to marketing will not be as effective as recognition of the differing needs of your prospects.
- As we are in a ‘pull’ economy rather than a ‘push’ economy, prospect organisations come to us already highly informed. They are using newer collaborative and web technologies to refine their search and selection and are more knowledgeable even before we have recognised them as a lead or an opportunity.
- People are now more inclined towards self service, having information delivered to them in a manner they like and at a time to suit them.
Given the conditions above and the dynamic and ever complex changing ‘marketscape’ marketers need to think more systemically about how to plan and execute and enter into conversations with their universe of prospective buying organisations.
One thing for sure is that a single point of touch is not good enough and even less so now. As buyers go through their own lifecycle of discovery they will have differing requirements - from a recognition of a need, to how the utility of your offering will satisfy their needs. As the stages are different for every organisation then the associated messages should be too.
Single touch marketing such as an outbound calling campaign for example, in itself will provide you limited success. Organisations are leaving digital footprints everywhere and tracking such behaviours can prove highly beneficial when segmenting your leads and going through your own lead qualification process. The idea is to be able to track such footprints back to your sales and marketing automation systems and plan future actions based on such behaviours. As an example, take a prospect that attended a webinar and then scoured your website and downloaded your whitepaper. A month later you sent out an email blast and tracked that the very same prospect clicked through several of the links to landing pages. What if all those behaviours could be tracked back to a single system of record such as a CRM system so you had a more complete view of the activity against any particular prospect? Would that be valuable? What if you were now having an event with some of your key customers standing up and singing from the rooftops about your offering? Would that prospect be a candidate for an incitation? Most likely he would be.
The above is clearly a hypothetical scenario but the point I am making here is that by working out how your prospects engage and matching your outreach programs to those processes and by tracking behaviours you enter the domain of multi modal marketing and achieve better success in engaging with your universe. Think about it. Makes sense doesn’t it? None of this is pie in the sky and is all entirely possible today.
The question then is why aren’t even more companies taking a more systemic multi-modal view towards their intended target audience?
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