Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

Saying that “content is king” has become such a cliché – so much so that I went back and forth on whether I should even say it here. I decided to go ahead, because no one who does marketing can afford NOT to discuss the importance of creating useful, rich, varied content.

Content is king in B2B marketing because long buying cycles mean that rather than pouncing, marketers need to patiently build relationships with prospects. A single inquiry does not turn someone into a sales-ready lead, and sending those leads to Sales would be a mistake. The need to patiently build relationships with prospects until they are sales-ready, a process that can easily take months, brings us to the perhaps overused, but in no way overhyped, concept of “content is king.”

Content is king for marketers because building those relationships with prospects is best achieved by being useful to them and providing them with timely, relevant information. Whether you provide that information that sustains the relationship through social media, white papers on your website or email – ideally a combination of those – the information needs to be of high quality.

“High quality” means, of course, well-written, but it goes beyond that. High quality content is content that is relevant to the audience you serve, and content that is timely for that audience. Ideally, you want to send an email to a prospect that addresses a major pain point for that prospect, and you want to send it at the right time.

While your marketing organization would need to create, or outsource the creation of, great content, making sure it is delivered in a relevant and timely manner can be achieved by automating your lead management process. Marketing automation and sales acceleration tools provide your marketing and sales organizations with the information about prospects that enables them to deliver that great content to the right person, at the right time.

In a market where B2B buyers report that they were the ones who have found the vendor, make sure they find YOU by creating and distributing consistent, constant, high-quality content that keeps your company top of mind when it’s time to make a buying decision.

We all know that the rules of demand generation marketing have changed. They’ve been different for a long time now, but it’s not easy to accept – let alone embrace – those changes.

With the vast majority of decision makers now saying that they have found the vendor rather than the other way around, and with an ever expanding gap between marketing planning and buyer preference in the B2B space, marketers must adapt and indeed, embrace the fact that the buying process is now buyer-focused rather than led by the vendor.

Buyer focus isn’t necessarily a bad thing – in a way it evens the playing field. In the past, the company who could allocate more resources to marketing activities had a huge advantage and a far better chance of closing a deal. Now, it’s not so much about your marketing budget as it is about your ability to build and maintain a meaningful, long-term relationship with buyers.

Lead nurturing can only work if we are willing to set aside old assumptions about how marketing is “supposed” to work and embrace the new rules: a long buying cycle, where buyers take the lead, and where our job as marketers is to nurture a long-term relationship with them where we provide them with useful information, tailoring that information and its frequency of delivery to the needs of the specific buyer.

Managing long-term relationship with B2B buyers is of course a challenge in itself and something that no marketing organization can be expected to do manually. Marketing automation software thus changes its role from a supporting role into necessity that the modern marketing organization can’t manage without, at least not effectively.

The patience, persistence and precision needed to effectively and successfully nurture a lead from the initial marketing inquiry until they are sales-ready becomes attainable by automating the nurturing process. Timely, precise messages tailored to each prospect’s specific pains and level of readiness align marketing campaigns with prospect needs and readiness and increase sales effectiveness, and the company’s bottom line.

Many companies still grapple with the issue of sales and marketing alignment, or misalignment. Traditionally, it’s been very difficult for marketing and sales organizations to align. Marketing often complain that sales doesn’t follow-up on leads, while sales say that they do follow up, but those leads are no good – they are not sales-ready. So while marketing often assumes that sales needs more leads, sales reps actually don’t need “more leads” – they need “better leads.”

When marketing and sales don’t work together to identify leads, to define what is a sales-ready lead and to follow up with those leads with an agreed-upon sales-ready messaging, the result is a sales-marketing disconnect, which greatly reduces sales effectiveness and hurts organizations’ bottom line by reducing sales.

Sales and marketing misalignment hurts organizations because it means that the marketing organization generates leads that the sales force can’t use, and marketing messages that don’t sell. Sales people, on the other hand, approach leads with generic messages, or with their own messages that are disconnected from the company’s message as defined by marketing.

One of the best ways to increase sales effectiveness is to align sales and marketing by having both organizations involved in determining and identifying lead readiness so that sales can focus on sales-ready prospects, and contact those prospects with effective, sales-ready messaging.

The right marketing automation tool can make a big difference in sales and marketing alignment. Marketing automation solutions provide sales with better leads because they provide tools such as lead scoring and lead nurturing, which enable sales to focus on sales-ready prospects while the marketing organization keeps in touch with leads that are not yet sales-ready.

Marketing automation solutions also encourage sales and marketing to work together, defining the criteria for lead scoring, and creating sales messaging that comes from sales but is in line with marketing’s general messaging.

The IDC Sales Enablement presentation from last year is still very relevant today, and is one of my favorite tools for demonstrating why sales enablement tools are so important in the B2B space.

When asked about their relationship with sales reps, buyers said that the most important area where sales reps need to know more in order to improve the relationship between buyer and vendor is the buyer’s needs and objectives:

Adding that sales reps need to “put aside the generic pitch”:

Think about it for a moment, even in terms of your own interactions as a buyer in your own life. When someone is trying to sell you something, is there anything more annoying than the seller starting off with some generic pitch that obviously has nothing to do with you and with your own needs? There’s no bigger turnoff for a buyer than to get the feeling that someone is trying to sell them something without explaining why it is relevant to them, and this is true in any sales situation.

Of course, to be able to put side the generic pitch and sell a product based on the benefits it offers a specific customer, the sales rep must be familiar with that customer and have an insight into what they really need. Sales effectiveness can’t be achieved without the sales force having access to relevant, timely information about prospects and their needs. Generic pitches and cold calls are a huge waste of time and greatly reduce the sales organization’s effectiveness.

Arming your sales force with the insight needed to make a timely connection with a prospect and to offer them relevant information that answers their specific needs rather than using a generic pitch is not an easy task. Implementing a marketing automation system, or a more compact and affordable sales enablement solution, is in fact the only way to achieve buyer-seller alignment, using tools such as trackable emails, prospect activity tracking, and real-time lead alerts. The goal: get to know your prospects better and approach them when they are ready, with a sales pitch tailored to their needs, putting aside that annoying generic pitch.