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Your offerings were developed because your solution meets a specific need in a new, innovative way and/or in a way superior to similar offerings in the market. Human behavior tells us that today’s B2B buyer—especially today’s B2B tech buyer—wants to go as far as they can in evaluating your solution virtually before having to engage and/or respond to a sales consultant by email or phone. It’s your job as the solution provider to serve up content in a way that clearly demonstrates value AND lends itself to this virtual vetting process. And from your perspective, you have invested in a sales team and need that team to be extremely efficient with their time, avoiding chasing tire kickers in order to focus on serious buyers.
What will persuade prospects to move from a competitor’s offering or to justify the adoption of a new concept to start a relevant sales conversation?
Product companies may consider providing an educational asset (solution guide, white paper, third party assessment/analyst report, pre-recorded webinar, etc.) to download as gated resources—which establishes brand recognition and initiates the sales process. These assets demonstrate thought-leadership and feed other marketing channels. After 2-3 days, have automatically deploy an email from your CRM or marketing automaton tool that links to a video landing page—giving a peek into the product. Upon viewing the video, you can direct your prospects to schedule a demo with one of your sales consultants or go directly into a trial program, if available. However, we have seen greater success allowing sales consultants to control the trial and pricing requests upon the live demo.
Service companies may also consider providing an educational asset to get things started but should first make sure there is a unique way to package or productize their solutions (or methodology) so that prospects can see clear, tangible deliverables and outputs upfront—not just a list or services. You can then expand upon deliverables via a “brief” turnkey GoToMeeting session with interested prospects. Be sure to promote this offer on your website as well. It’s mutually beneficial and also you gauge your prospects’ level of interest and intent before committing your sales resources to do any heavy lifting.
Both product and service companies should also consider the of development customer case studies to validate your claims along the buyer journey.
All of this said, we recommend that your marketing programs ultimately focus on only one or two strong calls-to-action rather than many. Using too many calls-to-action ultimately dilutes the strength of each and can throw off your click rate statistics. Make it clear to the recipient what you think their next action should be by determining what you feel would be most valuable to their virtual evaluation.
Key takeaway: The easier you make it for your prospects to visualize their potential with your offerings, the shorter your sales cycle will be.