B2B

Focus on Single Market & Media

B2B, Focus, lead generation, Marketing, single target market

Today I was watching a video on YouTube about productising a service offering, to make it scalable. This video is an interaction between Chris Do and Greg Hickman.

I keep talking about a Single Target Market for your offering and how you need to focus all your attention to being able to dominate that market before moving into a different market. Getting all your learning whether its about the social media platform you want to use or the message you want to convey for this one focused market.

At the beginning of the video Greg talks about focusing for one year, with one offering using one media if you want to scale up. He talks about a couple of other “ones” also.

But these stuck to me, because while I only emphasize the idea of one market, this gentleman is going a step further, to also ensure your focus on the media.

I fully agree to the idea of focus to achieve your objectives. Once you have tested the media which is getting you the most traction in the Single Target Market of your choice , then you should only keep using that medium and see how you can reduce the cost, increase the traffic and increase the conversions.

If you do this with focused attention for a year, you would have created a huge “top of the funnel” to keep you busy for a long time. In case of B2B this focus from your marketing team will ensure that your sales teams have leads coming their way.

I am going to explore this idea and will keep you posted.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Nurturing leads

B2B, lead generation, Marketing, Sales

When you are capturing leads or getting opt-ins, you need to be patient with them. Like nurturing a seed, it takes time for the plant to come out, so it is with leads.

Most leads in the B2B space could take weeks if not months, to mature, to a stage that they actually give you a requirement. During this stage you need to keep following-up with your prospect, educating them and being top of the mind so that when they have a requirement, they reach out to you. While marketing nurtures a large universe, the moment they get a lead to qualify, they hand it over to sales.

Now most sales people only follow-up for 3-4 times and then don’t bother because they want leads which can help them meet their quarterly targets. Most of them are always behind targets because they don’t nurture the leads which can help meet the quota two quarters down the line.

As the value of the orders increase the amount of lead time goes up even further. For a million dollar kind of deal, we have had to even keep nurturing the prospect for around a year.

Due to the complexity of the corporate environment, by the time a requirement is recognised and then budgeted and then a RFP raised, its quite easily a 6-8 month cycle.For a B2B process, for high value kind of business, I would advice nurturing a lead for upto 18 months at least before discarding them.

Different companies have different priorities, so its like a moving parade, some may take longer and some may immediately feel the need for your kind of service. So after a lead comes in, you need to be patiently educating them and nurturing them. You need to look at them as assets which will give returns over a long period of time.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

The B2B sales person’s tight rope walk

B2B, Sales

The sales person is the face of the company but she is also the interface of the customer. So while the company pays the salary, its the customer who gives the business, because of which the company earns revenue and can pay salaries.

So whose orders should the sales person take…..this is a very big dilemma. When I was young and new in sales , I actually ended up offending a few customers, because I literally took my boss’s orders on some issues.

Luckily I was able to salvage the situation and some of those customers gave me business for a long time after that. This situation could have happened with any sales person not only in B2B.

In B2B the challenges are that we are a looking at more than one person with whom you deal. In addition there’s long term business at stake because B2B buyers don’t change suppliers quickly. So if you offend one person, the news may spread and you may also lose business with the other buyers over time.

There’s another peculiar situation in B2B. You may be doing business with one buyer, let’s call him Sam. You may try to explore business with another buyer in the same company, let’s call him Tom. Now Tom is even willing to talk to you, but Sam wants you to route all your interactions through him and if you try bypassing him, he gets upset and holds your payment or other such issues.

You later find out that Tom and Sam are actually not on speaking terms and therefore Sam is penalizing you for talking with Tom.

This is a very delicate situation. You want to expand the business because that’s what your company and you want, but if you offend Sam you may actually even lose the business that you presently have.

If you think, I have an answer that can solve this problem for you….no I don’t. Each situation is different and has to be handled carefully, it really is a tight rope walk.

However one tool which I tell my team members to use is to “make me the bad guy” . Meaning for this situation, my team could tell Sam,’ you know my boss is such a jerk , he wants me to get the business from Tom at any cost, what do you think I should do’ . This works in a lot of situations for my team members because the sales person now earns sympathy of Sam.

See if this works for you and let me know. Also let me know in the comments below if you have come across some other things which have worked.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Lead Generation for B2B – 5

B2B, campaign, lead generation, Marketing, media

Not all social media platforms are created equal. So while I have been talking about using social media over the last 3 posts, you have to choose which of those is appropriate for you. You figure that also through testing.

Each social media platform has certain specialities. For example LinkedIn is very good with professional networks. On the other hand Facebook may have the largest set of general population. YouTube gives you the ability to hold long form videos with an algorithm which recommends videos (much like Netflix) , which means your content could be valuable for years to come. Most other platforms to my knowledge don’t have this kind of facility.

So based on the market you want to focus on, you figure out , which platform will have the best traffic for your requirements, that converts, and at what cost.

Selecting the wrong medium can make your campaigns fail.

There’s however another way of looking at this. How can you repurpose content for different media such that you can exploit the best features of all networks.

There was a time when Facebook was considered good for consumer facing businesses. It still is, I believe. But today you will also see a lot of B2B companies utilizing this media. So you will need to test different media, to see if your audience exists there.

Don’t think that if you’re a B2B company, you should only look at LinkedIn.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

P.S: If you are interested in getting a free copy of my “7 point checklist for B2B markets”, you can ask for it, by filling in your details below.

Go back

Your message has been sent