“What you think about your business is not what your prospects need to hear” – Adel Strauss
Adel Strauss is Director of Marketing at Integris where she has refined Integris’s branding and messaging over the last three years, elevating Integris’s sales and marketing to reflect the Class A IT services they provide. Before Integris she worked at B2B businesses, honing her design and marketing skills.
What are the common issues you’ve seen in the places you’ve worked from the B2B perspective along the lines of marketing mistakes and branding mistakes? What is setting customers off?
If there is inconsistency between what people see (Brand) and what people get (collateral, conversations, experiences) then trust can’t be built. And trust is everything today. Buying is based on feeling and emotion and if you remove trust in the way you do business, then your potential customers will move on very easily to the next provider.
Make a clear process and defining the journey to the customer. If the process is broken, or unclear, they will walk away. The process should always communicate the next step to the customer so they can determine if they want to continue or not.
When this process is aligned, the path to becoming a customer can easily flow. If you remove the complexities and fine details, people will end of where you want them to be- a customer.
How do you know what problem you solve for your customer?
1.Talk to the people who are doing the work and solving your customer’s problems every day. Map it out. What are the common themes? Now take that and communicate it to your future customers to solve their problems.
2.Talk to the marketplace. Ask what problems they are having and describe how you can solve them based upon your conversations with your customers. If there is a gap in the market and the message is effective, it will resonate.
How do you align your internal marketing and sales team?
Marketing needs to support sales with communicating to prospects the right information at the right time. They can also help sales simplify the process and understand what action steps are leading to next steps. Sales needs to communicate to marketing what they are hearing on the front lines and what questions they are being asked. Then marketing can refine the message and produce engaging content their audience actually wants to hear.
The alignment of sales and marketing results in an increase in close ratio and average customer size. It also results in less people within your organization needing to be involved to bring on a new customer because everything has already been laid out and all internal parties know next steps and their role within those steps.
At the end of the day, there has to be an understanding between sales and marketing that the overall goal for B2B professional firms should be, “How do we start a conversation?”
