by Fronetics | Dec 5, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain
Content marketing is reshaping the sales process. Here’s what this strategic resource can do for you.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll probably say it again: content marketing is not about making a sales pitch. Nor is it a substitute or replacement for an expert sales staff. However, with the right strategy, and with a closely aligned sales and marketing team, this inbound approach to marketing can revolutionize the way supply chain businesses approach sales.
There’s no question that content marketing has changed the sales process. Thanks to the content and resources available to them, potential customers are more informed as they enter the buyer’s journey. Content marketing helps generate a steady flow of quality leads and provides targeted information to usher prospects down the sales funnel.
[bctt tweet=”Content marketing helps generate a steady flow of quality leads and provides targeted information to usher prospects down the sales funnel.” username=”Fronetics”]
In this new environment, marketing and sales need to work in tandem to be at their most effective. This way they can help each other generate leads, nurture current leads more effectively, and close more deals. Here are three important ways content marketing is changing the way businesses accomplish these goals:
1) Inbound over outbound
Old school marketing was all about outbound — a marketing approach that pushes a message onto a buyer. Traditional advertising — tv and radio ads, telemarketing, banner and display ads — are all examples of outbound marketing. Content marketing takes the opposite approach: inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing focuses on audiences finding you. Instead of pushing a message onto buyers, inbound marketing allows you to establish your brand as an industry leader and let interested audiences come to you. This type of marketing attempts to draw in potential customers through interesting and engaging content.
When it comes to sales, inbound marketing is a game-changer. Content marketing is all about creating a relationship with prospects and paving the way for the sales team to nurture and develop that relationship. Your sales staff is empowered to nurture more leads through to conversion when they are armed with effective, targeted content.
2) Providing information
Once your prospect is ushered into the sales funnel, content marketing can help your sales team continue the conversation. The content you share with prospects at this stage of the buyer’s journey should be designed to answer informed questions and demonstrate that your products and services are there to meet their needs.
Quality content is your sales staff’s best friend. As sales personnel answer questions from prospects and help guide them toward conversion, email, blog, and other types of content are key to keeping prospects interested and moving them down the funnel.
3) Cultivate loyalty
Converting leads is important, but it’s only half the battle. Cultivating loyal customers for your business is crucial to success. Content marketing can not only help you do this, but it can turn those loyal customers into ambassadors for your brand.
Your sales staff should use the high-quality content and guidance provided by your marketing team to engage with satisfied customers on social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Rather than trying to push products, they can use these social spaces to share expert information and foster conversations that will lead other prospects to your business.
Content marketing and sales are a match made in heaven. Curating and creating great content will generate quality leads for your company. It also empowers your sales force to build relationships with potential customers — and close the sale.
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by Fronetics | Dec 22, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
At Fronetics, we work with companies in the logistics and supply chain industries to create and execute digital and content marketing strategies. Understanding the sales processes of our clients, working closely with sales, and developing effective lead generation strategies is at the heart of what we do.
Here are our 5 most read sales and lead generation posts of 2016.
Sarah Collins, an intern Fronetics and a student at James Madison University, College of Business studying Marketing, writes how aligning sales and marketing helps companies achieve 20% higher annual growth rates and improves deal closings by 67%. Read more.
Leads are only valuable if they convert into customers. So, generating quality leads is only half the battle. You need a sales team that knows how to resuscitate a lead, nurture it, and, ultimately, turn it into a customer. Read more.
B2B sales must recognize and accommodate buyers at various levels of self-sufficiency in the purchasing process. Read more.
The most efficient lead-generation strategy includes a way to capture potential customers’ information. Read more.
If you feel your marketing campaign falls short in generating quality leads, you are not alone. Typically, one in 10 marketing professionals questions the effectiveness of their lead generation methods. While you may have some of the components of a strong campaign in place, it is possible that you are leaving out a very important ingredient for success: a call to action (CTA). Read more.
by Fronetics | Aug 31, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
Targeted content can help convince high-level decision-makers and executives to accept your sales meeting request.
There are many benefits to content marketing, but did you know it can help you land that next impossible-to-get sales meeting?
According to expert marketer Stu Heinecke’s new book, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone, top sales professionals use personalized content to target high-level relationships in what he calls “a shadow practice,” which has been extremely effective at reaching critical, hard-to-reach contacts.
In these campaigns, content is targeted to make the connection with the right people — without any obvious pursuit — and secure those hard-to-get meetings. This can be a game-changer for your business.
Heinecke’s book pools the advice of the top 100 sales thought leaders in the world. He recently shared some of his findings with Harvard Business Review.
Here are some key takeaways:
- You can use content marketing to combine marketing and selling, employing specific campaigns to connect with high-level decision-makers and specific C-level executives. Finding a few dozen of the correct high-level relationships can quickly elevate the scale of your business.
- When approaching connections derived from content, Heinecke found that response rates averaged from 60% to 80%, with some campaigns actually hitting 100%.
- The greatest success is associated with content that delivers something of value. Share the personality of your brand, but offer no sales pitch. “Your first mission is simply to create a connection, to establish yourself as someone they’ll want to listen to,” Heinecke states.
- You should offer something more, to be delivered at the meeting. The point is to continue to add value to the relationship. For example, offer to bring relevant research, a white paper, or a free audit of the executive’s business to the first meeting.
- Once face to face, continue to engage in conversation that provides insight to what the contact’s business challenges are. Refrain from a sales pitch, but share examples of other companies with similar challenges, which have benefited from your specific product or solution. Tell a story — similar to what your content marketing does.
Content can help you make important connections — just ask NoWait
The same HBR article also shares the story of the founders of NoWait, a mobile application which allows diners to put their name on the waitlist of a restaurant from a remote location.
With a minuscule budget, the NoWait founders used targeted content as the basis for their entire launch strategy. They sent personalized videos on iPads in custom packaging to the CEOs of the 30 top restaurant chains. Their highly targeted approach allowed the company to focus on the exact people who could do them the most good — the decision-makers of the biggest brands in the industry. The app is already used by more than half of their targeted companies.
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by Fronetics | Jul 12, 2016 | Blog, Marketing, Strategy
Editor’s note: Sarah Collins is a summer intern at Fronetics Strategic Advisors. She is a rising sophomore at James Madison University, College of Business studying Marketing. You can find her on LinkedIn.
Aligning Sales and Marketing helps companies achieve 20% higher annual growth rates and improves deal closings by 67%.
“What do you think you’ll do with that?” is the question that, more often than not, succeeds me stating that I’m a marketing major. Uh, market? I guess? I’m the kind of student that usually has it all figured out. There’s always a game plan, so to speak, but this time around I had some figuring out to do.
That’s where Fronetics came into play for me. I went into my first intern experience looking at it as a giant learning opportunity. As I began, one of the first things that surprised me was that there were sales people in a marketing office. Little did I know, this is the ideal situation in the industry. Finally, the advice that a mentor gave me — “Take sales classes. You’ll thank me later.” — made sense. Marketing and Sales are like the Batman and Robin of the business world: Results are best when they’re working together.
What’s the reasoning behind aligning Sales and Marketing?
Through my research, I’ve learned that aligning Sales and Marketing goes back to a basic business concept, the buyer process: awareness, consideration, decision. The ultimate goal in business is essentially the same across the board. Sell and provide your product or service to your target audience. In order to achieve this, it’s best to focus on what the buyers’ immediate needs are at each individual stage of the buying process, and Marketing and Sales excel at different stages of this process.
It relates back to my economics class. Countries will always specialize in what they have the comparative advantage in because, when those two countries trade, they both end up with more than what they would have produced on their own. So Marketing and Sales specialize in their own stages of the buying process, and, in the end, they’re both better off.
HubSpot gives a great example. It wouldn’t make any sense for Sales to try to sell the product to a lead that has entered the awareness stage. At that point, the lead is only looking for specific information. It’s a strength to know where the customer is at and who is best fit to assist.
Why should you believe me?
According to ZoomInfo, only 8% of companies have strong alignment between their sales and marketing departments. Those that are aligned correctly statistically achieve a 20% higher annual growth rate and are 67% better at closing deals. As Articulate Marketing puts it, people are too informed in this day and age to tolerate even the slightest gap in what different departments tell them. The sales process has changed because the internet has given people access to so much information, and companies need to adapt accordingly.
Marketing and Sales are still two different entities.
While the two departments desperately need to be aligned well, there is no denying that they are, in fact, different. Sales generally has short term, tangible goals — such as new-client generation — while marketers are looking farther ahead at goals that aren’t quite as easy to measure.
The movie The Wolf of Wall Street offers a fantastic demonstration of how Sales works. Jordan Belfort (Leonardo Dicaprio) asks his friend Brad to sell him a pen. Brad simply says, “Write this down.” Mr. Belfort now has an immediate need for the pen. Salespeople have the ability to create this need for the buyer.
In an article by the Tronvig Group titled The Difference Between Sales and Marketing, James Heaton states that, in contrast to Sales, “Marketing should put forth an offer that meets the buyer’s needs right at the place and time of the sales opportunity. The most effective marketing is therefore about communication, not manipulation.” It’s when these differences between Sales and Marketing finally begin to work together that all the bases are covered, and the magic begins to happen.
How should companies align Sales and Marketing?
There are two main ways: strategically and physically.
Strategic Alignment
You can ask Sales and Marketing to collaborate in defining a lead generation strategy. This way the two departments aren’t getting frustrated with each other. Marketo highlighted three ways to do so.
- Lead Scoring can be incredibly helpful in understanding which leads are most interested and how good of a fit their company is for your business. These scores are only helpful if Sales and Marketing have worked together to create mutual understanding of the system.
- Lead Generation Metrics need to be understood by both. It won’t work if marketing doesn’t understand what is qualified as a SAL (Sales Accepted Lead) and SQL (Sales Qualified Lead), or if Sales doesn’t understand what makes up an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead). A mutual understanding will increase efficiency because each department knows exactly what the other is looking for.
- Service Level Agreements can ease the process by outlining each phase of the cycle. For example, when an MQL is handed off to the Sales team, how long does the Sales team have to get in contact? What if they don’t at all? If the system becomes automated enough, you can expect a higher level of performance because the system will provide documentation on how someone became an MQL, and sales will have a record off their contact.
Physical Alignment, aka the Office
The physical layout of the office is also crucial. A study done in 2015 by CEB found that when employees are satisfied with their physical work space, they are 16% more productive and 18% more likely not to quit. Harvard Business Review found the open-concept office, having Sales and Marketing in the same space, resulted in more successful communications. One pharmaceutical company even found that the sales jump was more than 20%, $200 million in revenue.
The statistics are all there showing how detrimental or incredibly helpful aligning Sales and Marketing teams can be.
So have I exactly figured out the answer to my question? Not completely, but there’s still time. What I have learned is that the only choice to make regarding Marketing and Sales is that there is no room for competition between them, and I should definitely be mixing a sales class into a semester or two. Learning early that Sales and Marketing are both essential to each other and gaining experience in both skillsets could be just the competitive edge I need for my future. Lucky for me, there’s three more years of learning to be had.
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by Fronetics | Mar 15, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
Cultivating a lead is just as important as finding it in the first place
If you have a solid strategic marketing plan in place that is generating a high volume of quality leads, tomorrow’s revenue should be almost assured, right? Not necessarily.
A lead is only worth as much as the effort your company puts into cultivating it. The next vital step is to convert those leads into new sales or clients. In other words, getting quality leads is only half the battle.
Your business grows through a steady stream of quality leads being nurtured and developed. If you have these precious leads in hand, it is vital that you also have a sales team that knows how to turn them into customers. If you don’t, that brilliant strategic marketing plan was a waste of valuable time and money.
There many moving parts to an effective lead-generation campaign, and often there are many steps required to cultivate those leads into sales. Your sales team should:
Conduct consistent, quality follow-up on all leads.
Committing to expedient and professional follow-up provides better conversion of leads into opportunities. This means that when cultivating a qualified lead, you don’t want your sales reps to make one phone call and simply leave a voicemail. You want real conversations to happen. What works best is having someone whose only job is to reach leads in person, overcome objections (identify and present solutions that truly meet your clients’ needs), qualify them (determining whether a lead should move into the sales process), and facilitate any needed connection to your sales teams to complete the sale.
Realize that time is of the essence.
Studies show the faster you contact the lead, the better your chances of conversion into a sale. According to a study by Franklin Covey, contact ratios improve 900% if web leads are called within five minutes of submission. While your sales team may not be able to act upon a lead with that kind of velocity, it is vital that they utilize proactive sales strategies, rather than reactive. Reactive is leaving a message and, if they hear back, responding to it. Proactive is going after the sale with confidence and commitment to engaging the lead in real dialogue.
Target the best window of time to call leads.
This, of course, has many variables and will be relative to your particular business and potential-client demographic. But, one study suggests that Thursday and Friday offer the highest productivity in lead conversion, and the hours between 4 and 6 p.m. often produce optimum results.
Have the ability to listen and offer viable solutions.
Your sales team needs to be well informed about the products, services, and solutions that they are selling. They also need to remember that it’s vital to take the time to discover and understand the potential customer’s needs and wants first, then make the move to match and sell the appropriate solution.
Capturing successful leads is only the first step in generating greater sales revenue. Your sales team must be able to follow up quickly with proven fundamental steps that turn leads into customers.
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