Measurable marketing services for business owners ready to invest in sustainable growth
A recent Harvard Business Review article forwarded to me titled, “How to Sell New Products,” is packed full of powerful lessons for anyone wanting to launch any new B2B product. The article was based on research including one-on-one conversations and surveys of B2B sales people and early on reveals this gem of a quote: “… found that people who excel at selling new products have traits and behaviors different from those of people who [...]
One conversation that catches my attention with B2B marketers is the “why don’t we just host and promote our own webinars instead of spending all those dollars with media companies?” That’s a great question and the answer is based on a clear understanding of what a webinar “is” and “what media companies sell.” Anatomy of a webinar The first thing is to have clarity on the required properties of a successful webinar. There are [...]
B2b marketers, when you get sales leadership (or better yet, even just a few of the truly good sales people) in a room, what information should you get from them to create more success for both marketing and sales in your organization? What are the most important questions to ask sales? There are two key topic areas where your questions will serve you best — value propositions and lead quality/quantity. Value Proposition What do [...]
What is your sales team pitching: When your sales team sends an email to a prospect to pitch a product, what do they say? It’s very likely that many of you have no idea. You make an assumption that if you have given sales leadership or the sales team the right product/service brochures or other collatoral, or you have given them an approved presentation, or they have sat in a meeting where they were [...]
You wrote your messaging (some call it value propositions) for your brand and each of your products, now what do you do with that messaging? If you only use messaging in advertising or in a powerpoint or document that you want sales to share, you will miss an important step. Where messaging matters: Everything customer facing Where messaging matters: Your overall brand messaging and specific product messaging should be used in every customer facing [...]
If you have ever fished, you know that having the right bait greatly increases your chance of catching fish compared to just having a plain steel hook in the water (it’s shiny but not fooling anyone!). If marketing content is a fishing analogy, then your content is the bait. When engaging marketing prospects to respond (generate leads), there is one truth you cannot change: if you don’t have the right content, you will fail. Instead [...]
B2B Marketing Department Playbook - Chapter 4: Marketing investments you can't skip (just because you lack resources) As a one-person or small-staff B2B marketing department, there is likely a tension between executing campaigns/tactics that are visible to the rest of the company and internal marketing investments (which are foundational to delivering the quality and results for those campaigns/tactics). I get it. Your management team wants to measure every dollar you spend. However, an important [...]
Chapter 3: Defining What Success Will Look Like For a smaller marketing department, it is even more crucial to create and implement a plan quickly to inspire confidence, expand your budget, and grow your marketing investments and success for the company. You can’t hide behind much when it’s just you. Amazingly, I have discovered that in marketing groups of all sizes, one of the fundamental weaknesses has been clearly defining what success will look [...]
With your inventory scores in hand (see Pre-requisite Work), we are ready to talk about how you can examine your scores and start considering what will be a priority in hiring (as budget allows) or outsourcing to accomplish your marketing mission as you progress. The good news is that you have both internal and external sources of knowledge and skills to fill gaps for you along the way. Below we will review these source options following the inventory form categories and then discuss priorities in terms of what you might consider first as you build your team and capabilities.
As a one-person (or small staff) B2B marketing shop, the logical place to start is to map out (take inventory of) the current knowledge and skills you can competently bring to the table yourself, the knowledge and skills you believe you should learn to provide yourself, and then those that you are willing to outsource to ensure the success of your marketing efforts. Taking inventory is the first step in the B2B Marketing Playbook.