by Tom Fedro
Hope looks forward. Faith knows it has already received and acts accordingly. – Florence Shinn
The benefits of maintaining the client relationship after everything’s done and implemented are many. You’ll get feedback on your solutions to drive innovation in your own company. Getting credible suggestions for new products is a massive win for maintaining a productive client relationship. Customers become a great source of information on industry trends and events that can affect ongoing and new business for your company. You want to have conversations with them about what they see coming in the next year. What are the big problems? What issues are they faced with that you can use in your approach to the marketplace? The time spent in the growth and renewal phase is time well invested and will pay huge dividends over time.
Case study: Top 3 tablet manufacturer
The Testers
A large public company that is diversified in eCommerce, cloud computing and consumer devices (just to name a few industries) wanted to become a tablet provider and create a device like an iPad. The trick was to do that at a very low cost (less than $100). They wanted to have something that could provide a similar experience to the one people were having on tablets that cost more than $1,000 (or 10 time their target price).
There was much pain for them in building such a thing. One of the keys to keeping the cost down was to ship the tablet with just a bare minimum of on-board storage and allow the customer to buy additional storage for the device separately, via a small storage card that could be purchased online or at a Best Buy, Walmart or any number of brick-and-mortar stores. They designed the tablet with an empty slot for a consumer to buy storage whenever they wanted, which had never been done before. It was an exciting concept and they had very ambitious goals.
The money was confirmed as this was going to be a product launch for the holiday season. The prospect needed to get it done, and they were ready to spend the money once the solution was proven effective. Their aggressive goals included launching a tablet product line from scratch and zoom existing offerings to become the No.3 provider of tablets in the world (as measured by numbers of units shipped) — and they wanted to do it in less than 12 months. To go from zero to No.3 out of probably 25 to 30 tablet manufacturers was quite aggressive.
The pain manifested in how to make this tiny storage card work in all kinds of configurations — with incompatible operating systems and storage file systems — and how to make it work every single time. Our solution did this. We established the authority by confirming who the senior VP of Product Management was that had responsibility for the launch. In his charge were dozens of product testers who planned take this tablet with our solution on it, and try to break it with test after test after test, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in offices all over the world.
How did we win this deal? It was in giving those testers (the real authority) robust technology that they could put through the paces. When they found something wrong or identified an issue, we were on hand to fix it immediately. We were on the phone or Skype or email with their teams in China, Europe and the United States. Whenever a problem was encountered, we proved time and again that our responsiveness and technical expertise was far superior to that of the competition.
We built tight relationships with their key evaluators, and gained their trust on a personal and professional level through very long days and nights. These strong relationships combined with reliable technology were the keys to our success. Our competitors had good technology too, but nobody had a team as aggressive as we were in making necessary changes in real time to fit the prospect’s needs. After months of these marathon sessions, we ultimately prevailed and won the business.
Lessons learned
Nothing beats true collaboration in new and difficult technical evaluations. Be available! Being on site is best when the crap hits the fan, as it almost always does; if that’s not possible, phone, Skype or other real-time tools should be quickly and efficiently deployed. Take the opportunity to show your expertise and capacity to fix things in real time (or near real time), demonstrating your reliability as a partner. This company has shipped tens of millions of these units now. Of course, the value to us is in the multiple millions of dollars in revenue, but also in the experience of performing under pressure and delivering rock-solid code in record time. This was an excellent deal that’s helped us win similar opportunities worldwide.
There are eight critical steps to finding PAM and building long-term relationships — and those steps make up what we call a million-dollar framework.
Identify the ideal customer profile.
Engage the prospect.
Ask quality questions to establish the pain.
Establish the authority.
Ensure the money is there.
Create a compelling proposal.
Implementation
Growth and renewal
CHAPTER 3
THE ROLE OF MARKETING
Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Wishing is not enough; we must do.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Newer companies won’t necessarily have the funds for a designated marketing person, let alone a fully-fledged marketing department. Indeed, the ‘marketing department’ could be you — and you may also be the CEO, accountant and salesperson. Keeping this in mind, I’ll describe an ideal marketing scenario with a well-funded corporation with plenty of bandwidth for spend and research, and you can pick and choose functions — regardless of where you and your company are in the growth process.
Marketing and the sales team must fit like hand in glove.
Why? Down in the trenches, it’s teamwork between a well-tuned marketing department that efficiently positions the sales department that win those seven-figure deals. Sales and marketing alignment has never been more important as the buying journey continues. With the right marketing people asking the right questions of the analysts and collecting survey data, they develop the right analytics to identify the right prospects. Armed with the proper information, even a mildly-skilled salesperson increases their chance to get in a prospect’s door.
I wouldn’t venture to say that the sales department is only as strong as the marketing department in a given company. Why not? In my experience, most of my sales teams have operated with light marketing resources! I’ve worked with many small startup companies that didn’t have excess cash to spend on marketing. What the sales team lacked, however, in multi-leveled information, they made up for in skill and perseverance.
We know that the marketing department’s primary goal is to develop the ICP and provide specific metrics that will show the potential pain points in the accounts that your particular solution can eliminate. Then they lob these golden nuggets over the wall to the sales department — and all come together to help the sales department close the deal. Let’s do this!
First, within the identified prospects, marketing strives to answer critical questions and dial in on the contacts that will be the most receptive to your message.
Who is experiencing that pain?
What are the possible messaging vehicles they will be receptive to?
What are the best methods to deliver that message — social media, direct mail, calls, texts, webinars, public relations?
Ideally, marketing is out in the field with an ear to the ground, as well as peering down from the 50,000-foot level in order to identify the dynamics most likely to impact their ICP/prospects. In a perfect world, they are contracted to speak with top industry analysts and haul information in from the field to sharpen their content and approaches. All of this happens before the salesperson engages with the prospect to ensure the most effective use of company sales time is with the most qualified prospects who want, need, and can buy your product.
Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough. – Og Mandino
→The specific components of a well-armed
marketing department↓
The basics include the creation of infographics and data sheets for products and client testimonials. I suggest some of this information be gated content behind a firewall so the only way to get to it is by providing a name and contact information (which will create a warm lead). This type of information can include industry analyst reports that you’ve paid for or detailed white papers that are more than what you might give away to just any taker.
Access to data providers
There are many good data providers out there that can be of great assistance once you’ve identified your ICP. Companies such as DiscoverOrg, InsideView, Lead411, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Nimble and ZoomInfo are dependable potential data providers for your research and ICP database development activities.
Website
A website is critical to the success of any firm selling high-value technology or products running from $500,000 to more than $1 million. Your site is where you actively provide rich, compelling content that’s easy to access by the people interested in buying your goods, services or products. You need an analytics platform, such as Google Analytics, to monitor your traffic and tell you who your visitors are, how many there are, where they’re coming from, how they found you, what they view and where they spend their time on your website. That information will continually help you maximize and optimize the resources on your site, so you will know what to provide.
Video
Video has become the go-to format for promoting messaging on every medium available, including blogs and all the different social media platforms. Use video as a content component for product reviews, demos, tutorials and testimonials.
ROI calculators
These are powerful tools intended for industry pros who want to understand how their solution is going to impact their bottom line. The prospect can plug their numbers into your high-level calculator and see real values. This can lead to the next step where they contact you, download a white paper or request a demonstration.
Paid-for leads
Another component is to pay for leads from sites such as Slashdot, Spiceworks and TechTarget, where your content will be placed in front of their audience. This can include hundreds or thousands or millions of technology enthusiasts, such as tech buyers, recommenders and evaluators. If your product fits in this category, this is a recommended resource for you.
Webinars
Webinars are critical tools to have, especially for a company without a large marketing budget. It doesn’t take much to put a webinar together and throw them up on your site. A webinar with solid content such as a dynamic speaker from the industry, a well-known customer, a demonstration or other compelling information will drive people to interact with you. Doing a Q&A, for example, is much more powerful and less expensive than a trade show. Plus, it can be recorded for repeated viewing. From a budget standpoint, a well-orchestrated webinar is a proven way to drive leads and revenue at a very reasonable price point.
Trade shows
Consider the shows that best fit your industry and budgets. Trade shows can quickly add up to a huge expense with little return if you’re not careful. Trade shows can, however, be strategically utilized, especially as most industries have an annual ‘must attend’ show or two where not showing up can raise questions as to your viability. Pick and choose carefully where to spend your marketing dollars on trade shows; research and planning are essential when you have a limited marketing budget and resources.
Marketing automation component
Here you can track what’s going on across all of your marketing channels, especially your email platform. There are many products at different price points from the high end to the more affordable end products. Some examples are Burst, Hubspot Marketing, LinkedIn, Marketo, Mixpanel, Salesforce Einstein, Sendak’s and TrackMaven. Some companies choose to build custom installations. No matter what you choose, at a minimum, your marketing platform should have scheduled mailings with a funnel/nurture program that analyzes who opens your emails, when they’re opened, what they do and what they should receive next. You could run a different automated process for each prospect depending on their buyer persona. Drip mailing campaigns are also part of the marketing automation component.
CRM component
From a logistics perspective, the best form for an ICP database to take is in a customer relationship management system, such as Salesforce or Sugar CRM. Dossiers, spreadsheets and other remote databases are also considerations, but these systems become expensive when you start looking at large databases. For instance, if you consider IT managers, directors, VPs and CTOs, there are more than a million of those people in the United States alone! If you develop that database (as we have), it’s vital that the data is easy to access and sort so the investment in a CRM tool is worth it.
Segment your database with your top potentials available in your CRM package at the top level for you to work and monitor their progress carefully. The other 100,000 or 300,000 or one million could be on another platform that’s much less expensive than your primary CRM system, yet will still allow you to reach out as needed. It’s advisable to stay in regular touch with your entire database, because once in a while you’ll find that some of those people who aren’t in your CRM system will become interested in your solution. Migrate them into the CRM system after they’ve responded to an email or an outbound campaign, or clicked one of your channel offerings. (Be sure to back up your CRM regularly, and make sure it’s available on a cloud service as your ICP database is your lifeblood.)
It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results. – Warren Buffett
Let’s delve specifically into research, as different types of marketing research are available no matter your budget.
The Internet is a good place to start — and it’s free!
Mid-sized businesses looking to break into the big sales leagues with the least amount of marketing spend must always keep their eye on the primary goal of establishing PAM is at the table. Go online to determine at a high level what’s going on in your specific industry or market segment. Are acquisitions taking place? What does the activity look like? Which companies are thriving and which are going out of business? Are companies leaving the industry? All of this information can be obtained via Google research and old-fashioned gumshoe work.
Engage in public relations on social media to build awareness and a solid brand in the industry (and with any associated analysts).
Marketing will create a sustainable lead and demand engine. Duties that fall into this category include management of the website, construction of various webinar series, the development of email outreach and a nurturing track. They develop drip email campaigns for the entire database. These steps are critical for marketing to ensure that the sales team is on target with the right prospects and can jump on warm leads generated by the marketing machine.
The ICP will provide a strong understanding of who your prospect is and what’s important to them. Marketing must dive deep to learn who is influencing the ICP — the people prospects watch to gather decision-making criteria, such as industry-specific publications, analysts (and their reports) and industry-known, respected bloggers. Even their competitors are influencing your ICP, so observe them too. Identify who your prospects are watching, following on Facebook, and reading on Twitter. Determine which social media sites they’re following, what they do on LinkedIn and what type of conversations they’re having.
Once you understand your ICP’s social media world, you will be in a much better position to understand the pain your ICP may be experiencing along with other issues that affect their business life. When you get your day in the sun in front of them, you must already know who the influencers are, be on their radar, and be able to provide fresh and necessary content. These core pieces are what the marketing department must have their heads and hands around.
Outside-in analytics are essential for effective marketing as you launch the sales process.
Analytics are all about visibility, and being able to see and understand the market. Outsourcing is a viable tool for this step. It ensures there is no bias on the raw data and will provide the clearest view of the available information, and hopefully lay out the most impactful subsequent steps. At the highest level, these analytics will illustrate which of your marketing plans are working, where people are spending their time, what they’re clicking on, why they’re calling in, why they’re requesting a demo and which particular marketing component is driving the engagement. You can discern what your customers want, where they experience pain, what they are willing to purchase and what their journey looked like as they headed toward spending.
I’m a big believer in marketing analytics. If you have the money, you can use analytics to shave any wasted steps and reveal a clear path to your guaranteed customer base. It costs to hire outside firms, but that’s the kind of detail you need to be effective in your messaging to the marketplace. When you combine the outside-in data with what your salesperson brings back from the trenches, you will have a clear idea where marketing should focus.
An inside-out company will have product marketing people sit in their cubes and guesstimate what they need to be doing and what the market is seeking. They compile some materials and throw it over the wall to sales who then chase down possible prospects. What an inefficient waste of resources! Trust me, outside-in marketing is the more efficient way to go.