Marketing

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Capable marketing is one of several prerequisites to digital transformation in the front end of a business. Without correcting a deficiency, a firm will struggle with new customer acquisition, the low hanging fruit in the current climate which can seriously help grow the business and jump start digital transformation across the enterprise.  

B2B in industry is not about products and value as much as it’s about risk and hurdles. When your sales reps are at a new customer trying to displace an incumbent supplier, getting them to switch over to you is a high-cost proposition for the customer, fraught with hurdles like decision makers, processes, vendor assessments, comparative bids, etc. Anyone who has mapped a “customer journey” in this space understands the extraordinarily long, complex, and winding path to converting an account. You are an unknown, and the customer takes a risk by departing from their status quo. How do you convince them that the risks of their current situation are higher than their initial steps with you? The strategies to overcome these hurdles are not those of sales, but rather those of marketing.

Many B2B leaders start with a faulty impression of marketing. They tend to associate marketing with advertising. And while advertising does fall under marketing’s purview, the function stretches far broader. The job of marketing is to understand customers, what drives decisions, and how the business can better serve them with their products or services. Good marketers understand various customer groups and their values, and how the business can talk with customers in a compelling and engaging way. Good marketers can multiply the effectiveness of sales team and enable them to have better, more targeted discussions with new customers and help retain existing customers. Increasingly, good marketers understand technologies and how to amplify results through digital, both direct and via sales teams. 

Largely as a result of poor understanding, most B2B industrial product firms simply don’t place emphasis on marketing and therefore lack several prerequisites to front-end digital transformation, like a great marketing strategy, ample and organized content, and effective messaging. Without having these prerequisites in place, applying digital in areas of opportunity like lead generation or sales enablement simply won’t be effective. It's garbage in, garbage out.  

For example, marketing automation does zero good if you automate an ineffective message. The right message is one which truly reflects the company’s capabilities and uniqueness; one that can truly speak to a new prospect and is sufficiently interesting or compelling for them to make the next mouse click. This sort of activity is an art normally reserved for talented marketers. But what if the company hasn’t previously prioritized marketing as a function, but depended on sales alone to drive new business, and therefore lacks content to drive through a lead gen campaign? And who will propose, plan, source, and deliver the program as a whole if the firm lacks a strong marketing capability? 

If done right, short term investments in marketing and associated activity can yield dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of new customer conversations that otherwise wouldn’t happen. It provides a way to begin to reorient the firm’s SG&A towards forward-looking activities and capitalize on the short-term opportunities in the market. Given the conditions today, there has likely never been a better time to invest in new account acquisition, as the ROI potential has never been higher.