ClosingtheGap-MarcomBD
Introduction
Business Development and Marketing with Communications together fall into the same category – driving revenue action. Human interaction is still and continues to be the coveted exchange when marketing your services. Human emotions do exist even in business. For businesses and c-suite: revenue/financial/operations, this means understanding buyers and the customer experience and has never been more critical, particularly for complex business transactions. In professional services in the digital ecosphere.
This whitepaper aims to challenge the silos of traditional marketing and sales approaches still in use, how these silos are disaffecting revenue gains and where the opportunities lie in quality content marketing technology with input from business development.
Who should read this? Chief Revenue Officers, Chief Sales Officers, General Managers, Managing Partners and Team Leaders.
About The Author:
Rosemary Beach is a Strategic Communications & Marketing Director – a visionary leader Marketing, communications and brand development in the professional services and b2b industries. Advancing persuasive communications and purposeful marketing planning with core digital marketing www.beachstrategic.com
The Power of Marketing with Co-Pilots: Marketing and Business Development
Marketing and sales teams' moving in harmony is the holy grail of delivering a better customer experience (CX).
Are These Two Functions Working in Unison?
Are there true roadblocks for marketing and business development teams? Why we should be asking ourselves if this is the time for a real convergence, working in harmony of these two critical functions.
Buying behavior has increasingly been focused on making sure that they have a good understanding of people’s experiences before they’re willing to purchase. Robust data, qualitative insights and forward-looking buyer personas inform on how to navigate uncertainty and natural inquisitiveness.
There is importance with your brand voice: Decisions are not always pragmatic and are emotionally connected to vendors and service providers.
Personalization of content creates meaningful connections. To gain brand trust, can we rely on organizations to start their marketing narratives with purpose and not the features? Are they choosing digital channels most preferred by their customer base that puts a selling-minded organization at an advantageous position?
A dramatic digital shift is coming in the next 5-10 years.
Do you know?
What problems are we trying to solve with customers?
If we are asking ourselves questions about our customer profiles?
What type of long-lasting relationship are we trying to create?
If we are creating a community around the services that we provide?
If we paying heed to customer feedback, first-hand and in real-time?
Or is this too familiar in an email?
“Dear Mr./Ms. Marketer, over the course of the last few weeks you have received several emails from me regarding the latest in accounting software”
“I’d really like to sit down with you over lunch and discuss our newly released program”
“You’re a busy executive, and I don’t want to waste your time, so let’s get right to the point: our accounting software management system is not like anything you’ve seen before”
One thing that is true in today’s business landscapes are customer-centric initiatives that have been largely marginalized at a time when they shouldn’t be. We are experiencing underutilized customer data platforms that potentially are connected to other digital platforms within an organization.
Are we truly interacting with our customers in a meaningful way for the revenue-driving results we want?
We are learning that marketing and communication teams bring customers early in the buyer process, on point with the vibe-check to determine if there is a level of seriousness and fit-ready for business development engagement.
The blending of content nurturing for in-person conversation.
Buyer Personas and Understanding Your Target Audiences: A Crucial Exercise
Business development/sales enablement teams have the advantage of direct personal contact with audiences and their input, working collaboratively, can give marketers an advantage. Include them in your discussions for nuanced input not necessarily had by machine-led, data-driven insights.
Difficulties arise when marketing and business development work in silos and cannot extract full value from traditional CRM systems. One-third of surveyed sales leaders reported that incomplete data was a significant problem, and another one-half said they lacked access to customer data across all parts of the business.
Buyer Personas Act as a Compass for Leaders
Buyer personas are constructed around specific customer goals and action. We learn to influence behavior versus focussing only on traits of an individual. They range in differences in industry (tech vs. manufacturing), priorities, company size and their competitive sets. This could vary by threats and demands within their industry.
Understanding how they think and what they value:
Particular pain-points
Acknowledge what they value
Challenges they face with possible solutions and outcomes
Enhanced value your company offers
Other sources of information looked at
Their relationships with their customers and evolving customer needs
Consider the positive effects — better experience, more trust, and the higher likelihood of business development having meaningful connections with customers.
Customers Feel Understood With:
Content your target customers use
Topics they are interested in
Types or formats of content they prefer
Infusing keywords they use to search, organically
Embedding anticipatory questions and answers
Channels used and where your target customers are
At a concentrated stage of the buyer journey
Business Development Teams Must Contribute
It is well known that to close deals, an organization needs content, digital tools, knowledge, and information presented in a way that captivates for veritable and authoritative buyer engagement. It is the business development action your company needs. Once on your website, consider what do you want these customers to do: download content, ask questions, subscribe to a mailing list, book a demo/meeting?
For complex business development transactions, according to Gartner research, B2B customers engaging in complex business transactions reported spending only 17% of their total buying experience interacting with business development teams. What they also said was that 27% of their time was online learning following by independent learning offline at 18%. Finally, they built consensus across company stakeholders (22% and 11%).
Business Development leaders should be concerned about the limited opportunity of direct, in-person interaction with customers. Some would say that if they were accessing a business development rep, it was for the purposes of acquiring the information necessary versus having a sales conversation.
Personalization with Quality Content That Breaks Barriers
Netflix serves as one of the most well-known examples of a brand with successful, innovative personalization. How? Netflix capitalizes on available viewer data.
Personalization is becoming a significant trend in the B2B industry. The insights derived from buyer personas help us craft tailored content and making it easier to do business with us. Personalized content is essential as it can be the difference between a potential client (lead) ending up on your landing page and signing-off, or a lead converting by scheduling a call with your sales or business development team.
It can overcome leads’ common objections.
Content that has structure and includes storytelling using an authentic voice.
It must include your brand voice with value propositions woven throughout.
Ensure click-worthy calls to action are the most direct way to influence consumer behavior.
Quick Fact: On average, a consumer of knowledge, needs 13 pieces of content before making a purchase decision.
Technology involved for personalization at scale includes:
Customer data platform (CDP): Connects first-party data across systems to create a profile customer (identity).
Data management platform (DMP): Helps segment data collected by the customer data platform as well as third-party data for digital campaigns.
Identity resolution platform (IRP): Helps supplement first-party data and build a clearer and fulsome picture of a target market.
Staying out of the status quo can become a danger point or an opportunity. Consumers of information want more that go beyond corporate events or boilerplate pitches to acquire for new information, opinion-education, or other engagement techniques.
Now, in these digital times, aim for the optimal in engaging content instead of resting on laurels that has previously led to stale messaging past its sell-by date.
Albert Einstein, said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change”.
Quality Content in Tandem with Digital Technology
Ineffective content becomes a lacklustre flimsy effort flooded with inconsistent and irregularity. Other times, when there is too much content online, we risk chaos and a disconnect in the buyer journey.
Multiple touchpoints that are not leveraged and offering just a few insights have led to a superficial understanding of their customers.
Hence the need for AI and predictive analysis tools.
B2B marketers have relied on CRM systems to manage customers and leads and harmonize efforts with business development teams. Unfortunately, they have become so hard to manage thereby contributing to the widening gap between Marketing and Business Development. In fact, just over half of 1,000 surveyed sales leaders indicated that their CRM costs them revenue, a recent survey found.
The main cause is the lack of ability to predict and prevent customer attrition and has many B2B Marketers finding new ways to tighten alignment with business development to deliver excellent customer experiences and maintain customers for retention and for the longest possible time. A modernized CRM platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can play a critical role.
Brand Loyalty and Customer Loyalty Will Break Down:
57% of sales leaders said they couldn’t predict when customers would churn.
56% reported increased customer churn in the previous 12 months.
48% reported not knowing why customers left or churned.
Just look at these pertinent facts:
“In 2021, almost 50% of executives read least 1 white paper a week. They prefer more concise takeaways, summaries, charts, and graphs” – Quartz Global Executive Study
Long form articles the most shared 84%
Charts and Graphs 47%
Videos 37%
Breaking News 36%
Seeking Information on:
Industry analysis
Insights from company experts
Exclusive Data
Information about the Product or Service Experience
Most state they are annoyed by ads that interrupt them or intercept activity but do like a high quality pre-roll ad.
Shareable Content: The Best Brand Endorsement in the Eyes of Your Peers
What could be better? And, with positive commentary – even better! It is close to ranking the same in business development success as a direct referral. It is another way of saying “I recommend.”.
Shareable content increases instances of social exchanges, a definite influencer of consumer purchase decisions.
Contains information that those leads can forward with other decision-makers in the company.
Allows for guest posts – at the google search stage with publications they trust (because that publication has credibility).
You can increase the likelihood that this happens by making your content extremely shareable. Here are some easy ways to do it:
Use statistics and facts in your content
Create popular content types like opinion-ed, studies, how-to guides, statistics.
Add relevant social media buttons to all your blog posts.
Share all blog posts on your brand’s social media accounts and website.
Include lots of visuals like images, charts, videos, and infographics.
Follow up with an email drip – You can provide and show value with additional education that relates to your company’s product or service and highly relevant.
Protect Revenue and Improve Business Growth: Align Your BD/Sales and Marketing Teams Working Together
Collaborate with your team to identify your target accounts. You should consider data from both your sales and marketing departments to identify characteristics like:
Industry
Location
Company size
Revenue
Chance of repeat purchase
Expected profit margin
Consider a Pilot Campaign for a Launch or Pivoting:
If the campaign does well these insights can be applied to the “official” launch.
Tapping into Marketing Technology
An AI-Infused CRM Platform Enables Dynamic B2B Marketing and BD/Sales Enablement:
Predictive, real-time customer journey analytics are essential to gathering and learning in customer behavioral attributes that can bring upsell opportunities and flag customers likely to churn.
For the best opportunities, we can now predict the customer lifetime value of that prospect at the start of the customer lifecycle, prioritizing leads via their historical success track record.
Furthermore, it essentially improves the marketing and sales dynamic.
Moving The Buyer to the Close: Is Your CTA Buried or Missing in Content?
Any content without a CTA is a missed opportunity – a big one.
Calls to action (CTAs) are the most direct way of influencing behavior and is made easier with quality content. An effective CTA navigates customers as to what they should do next i.e., download or read another piece of content, start a free trial be --re-navigate to another website landing page, subscribe to a newsletter, get in touch. Quick Facts: 80% of marketers describe account-based marketing as delivering higher returns than any other marketing strategy with one of the biggest challenges being attribution. It’s much easier to pinpoint where the sale came from if you are targeting buyers you already have a relationship with.
Smart and personalized CTAs should be tailored as possible to your customer, relating back to personas created around customer goals. Infusing the next logical and natural step in a storytelling way for that specific user is critical and they are more likely to follow your lead on the positive customer journey you’ve created.
Conversation rate
When evaluating leadership qualities and effective business development and marketing communication teams that are working collaboratively, ask yourself about the endless possibilities with data that likely already exists in your own digital platforms for other functions performed within your organization.
Along with quality content, the strategic placement in digital portals, channels and third-party distributors must be important criteria as a component of the campaign. Organizations must be providing the finest of quality content for the best human interaction business development conversations, which may go back and forth between in-person and digital.
New learning opportunities in a unified marketing communications planning including priority setting with business development is evolving and in 5 years, a wide world of digital support can only enhance meaningful conversations with customers.
Rosemary Beach is a Consultant and Practitioner at Beach Professional Marketing Services
Visit https://www.beachstrategic.com/knowledge-centre for more thought leadership
Contact: rosemary@beachstrategic.com to talk more about closing strategic gaps in your marketing and BD plans
Sources for this Whitepaper:
MarketingProfs
Institute Quartz
Institute
SmartBriefs.com
Forbes.com