Yes, I said marketing. When it comes to B2B product sales, we believe that sales and marketing should work as a team, with separate roles but a shared aim—shortening the sales cycle. The way we see it, marketing’s primary role should be prequalification of suspect lists to build the sales pipeline and provide cleaner databases. Marketing should focus on suspects, freeing frontline sales to concentrate on customers and prospects already in the pipeline and ready to purchase or upgrade. So how does marketing prequalify and warm up those suspects? With integrated lead generation programs—like webinars, trade shows, partner marketing, sponsorship with trade affiliations—or isolated online and offline tactics, or timed teleservices with pre-call tactics (NOT “script-read” cold calling). Know your role and success is yours!
archive for December, 2009
Let marketing build your product sales pipeline
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
What’s your call to action?
Thursday, December 10th, 2009Assumption: your offerings were developed because they were new and innovative and served a specific need or they were more superior to what was on the market. But, the Internet has conditioned us all to evaluate solutions as far as we can go without having to speak to a sales consultant. What will persuade interested parties to move from a competitive offering or to justify the adoption of a new concept? Product companies may consider quick-see demos, trial offers, pre-paid subscription models, and other ways to prove value quickly. Service companies may consider unique ways to package or productize their solutions so that prospects can see clear, tangible deliverables upfront. The easier you make it for your prospects to visualize their potential with your offerings, the shorter your sales cycle will be.
Building a community of life sciences professionals across a rarely accessible audience
Friday, December 4th, 2009To build a community in the pharmaceutical market, you must first understand your target constituents and then build their trust with your communication approach. For example, microbiologists working in the Quality Control (QC) department are very difficult to reach in a real-time fashion, especially for that initial door opening conversation. Unlike their colleagues in the Research & Development (R&D) and Regulatory departments, QC Micro professionals are rarely at their desk. Instead, they might be taking test samples in a clean room or processing results in a lab. With an audience profile such as this, it is even more important to provide convenient access to your information and offerings; be available online and build trust with a peer-to-peer approach. Establishing recurring webinar events, which are recorded and made available on your website, and require client input and experiences and partner sponsorship, creates virtual interaction between your company and your current and potential clients. A trusted community for scientific discussion is established, providing that door opener for sales follow-up.
Customer relationship management: Friend or foe?
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009Need a disaster recovery plan for your company’s database? That depends. How do you and your sales team manage your contacts? Would all of your contacts be lost or in jeopardy if your computer crashed or one of your sales guys left tomorrow? If you rely upon many different documents, in many file formats, kept willy-nilly in multiple locations, and maintained haphazardly by many individuals of your team, then you desperately need to reevaluate your approach to customer relationship management (CRM) strategy. It’s a matter of protecting your company’s most important asset—its database. Without it, sales and marketing can’t be effective. I don’t care what you use— Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM, ACT, or Siebel—but you do need a central repository and a database management process.
And it’s not as painful as you think. We all know that mandating a sales guy, focused on sales commissions, is not going to get the job done. But, if you assign a marketing resource to play quarterback, and status suspect lists and customers and prospects at regular intervals, the marketing team will be effective in reaching intended targets, and in turn, the sales team will appreciate it. It’s a long-term investment that will allow sales and marketing to better work together.
