A merger between sales and marketing has taken place in the B2B market. Marketing professionals must now know the latest sales techniques, and salespeople must be familiar with digital marketing concepts. Both are essential for success, and it will be challenging to achieve them without alignment.
Define the sales funnel
Driving your prospect from one stage to the next, in theory, might seem straightforward, but in practice, it isn't as simple as it looks. There are five stages: Discovery, Diagnose, Design, Decide, and Deliver. The lead should be taken from each stage, from a suspect to a prospect to a paying customer.
According to CEB Global, the average B2B buyer is now 57% of the way through the purchasing decision before looking to engage you. When they do reach out, it's frequently with questions surrounding pricing and, if applicable, licensing. Prospects now have access to pretty much all the information they need. Compared to 10 years ago, when your salesperson held all the cards for product documents, case studies, use case scenarios, and competitive benchmarking, all that information is now freely available on the internet.
The Stages: Sales combined Marketing
It delivers content combined with the influence of social networks during the discovery stage that is imperative in today's market. Your salesperson should no longer focus on the number of calls they make but how much content they are curating or creating instead.
Every week, make sure your salespeople have content queued up across their social networks - Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook - ensuring they are always at the top of mind with their customers and prospects. The marketing team should work with them to include a call to action in all of the content they share or direct users back to their profile. In this way, inbound opportunities are generated, and although each person is at a different point in the sales funnel, each salesperson will act on them.
It boils down to sharing content to stay top of mind - but there is a secret sauce to deciding what content to communicate with each lead/prospect based on where they are in the sales funnel.
Delivering the right content at the right time to the right persona is essential. As a beginning stage (top of the funnel), the discovery stage (blog posts, lists, infographics, short videos, lasting no more than 60 seconds) should consist of informative and easy-to-consume content designed to grab the audience's attention.
In the middle of the funnel, when you reach the diagnosing stage (middle of the funnel), you need to provide content aimed at influencing the buying decision and addressing the problem a suspect or prospect may be facing. In the design and decide stage (bottom of the funnel), you can launch your content to highlight your offering, conveying why they should buy from you and how you stand out from the crowd.
Final thoughts
Content is vital, but there are a number of other factors to consider if you want to drive leads further down the funnel. One option is to offer incentives or discounts. Defining a specific date and time for an exclusive offer will also keep your prospects' minds engaged, so you can increase the amount of communication/engagement with them the closer it gets to that time.
Creating customer personas is also a good idea, as it will help to ensure that you reach the right audience and drive them through the sales funnel by using the appropriate channels.
You stand a good chance of driving your target audience down the sales funnel with a well-defined content strategy, along with a good understanding of the channels they frequent. Stay tuned as we discuss content strategy in more detail soon.
Grow better with Zooloo, we are happy to help you get started with digital transformation, please contact us at sales@zooloo.asia.
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Tags: #CRM #MicrosoftDynamics #digitaltransformation #B2B #digitaladoption #digitalintegration #digitalsolutions #wholesaletradesector #wholesaletrade
