In a business-to-business (B2B) environment such as the Animal Health and Nutrition industry, the role of marketing is sometimes called into question. “Do we really need to spend so much money on a trade show booth?” ” What impact will the new ad campaign have on our business?” “Our customers only care about price; a new brochure (or website, or packaging, or slogan) will not change that.”
It’s hardly surprising, then, that many sales professionals are not at all excited when they are invited to join in planning the next marketing activity. Given all their other urgent tasks, helping to “make more noise” doesn’t seem very important.
Here we will share three actions you can take that will make your sales colleagues excited to participate in the planning and execution of your next marketing initiative.
Make marketing relevant to your sales team by focusing on their customers’ success.
We all know that the best marketing messages are those distributed through word-of-mouth. When asked, key influencers such as animal nutritionists and veterinarians say that they trust the opinions of their peers more than almost any other source of information.
So, if you want to engage your sales team, frame your next marketing initiative around the idea of creating the conditions and facilitating this peer-to-peer exchange. To achieve this goal, you must find more ways to help your current customers succeed because only successful customers will refer your business or brand to their peers. And that’s a win-win-win proposition if ever there was one.
Go light on planning and heavy on executing.
I can recall many awkward situations when a marketing or product manager invited a sales colleague to plan the launch of a new product that was still under development, only to see the discussion switch to how they could solve an immediate issue or demand from a big, important customer who needed a solution “right now” and not three or five years hence.
The different time pressures are a frequent cause of misalignment between sales and marketing colleagues. Both perspectives are important, but the consequences one faces are much more immediate than the other. By the nature of their work, your sales colleague must prioritize their customer’s urgent needs over initiatives that will benefit them in the distant future.
It behooves the marketing professional to take the initiative and bridge that difference. You can accomplish that by practicing this two-step move: limit the time spent on planning and build an execution calendar to ensure that progress is being made, even if the result is still far off in the future.
Track and report the results that matter most to sales and marketing.
Modern marketing is awash in metrics that track consumer behavior to an extent that it is downright creepy. Our problem is to tease out which metrics are truly important and which ones aren’t.
To measure relevant metrics, you must establish where your prospects are right now relative to the problems they’re trying to solve and where they’re trying to go. It’s their success that will attract new customers, which will ultimately excite your sales team and convince them to engage with your marketing initiatives with enthusiasm.
In summary, if you want to excite your sales team around your newest marketing initiatives, you must focus on their current customer’s success. Next, remember to go light on planning and heavy on building an execution calendar so that the sales team can show that your initiative will make their customers more successful. Finally, track your progress by measuring the degree to which your customers are being successful in achieving their goals.
If you are ready to implement marketing strategies that excite your sales team by focusing on your current customer’s success, contact us.
If you want to learn more, continue exploring our website. FarSight Consulting constantly adds new resources to help you transform your marketing into an incredible sales growth machine.