Hi there! Matt here, from MessageUp.
I like to think that B2B sales are built on strong relationships. After all, the sales cycle is slow and usually involves many interactions between buyer and seller before a deal is consummated.
Sadly, however, that’s idealized and naïve.
Many B2B businesses are focused foremost on making the sale, with relationship-building a distant second. Making the quarterly and monthly numbers is more important than taking the time to understand and engage with customers.
I can sense your eyeballs rolling. “Get off the soapbox, Matt,” you’re thinking. “That was true a decade ago, but we’ve learned that lesson.”
I wish you were right, but I fear you are not.
I meet too many companies whose sales teams are focused on finding “sales-ready” prospects and whose marketing is feature-and-benefit heavy, with scant regard for prospects trying to answer fundamental questions earlier in their buyer’s journey.
Deal-making is everywhere—even when price is not the buyer’s overriding concern—while helpful information is held close to the vendor’s chest like a pair of pocket aces.
Too many buyers experience a jarring handover from the glad-handing sales team to an indifferent, “I don’t know who told you that was possible” support team. Or, worse, they realize the product has been over-sold and important features are still “in beta” (read: being developed now that we’ve sold one.)
Perhaps the clearest signal of all that fundamental change is yet to happen are the number of companies where marketing reports to sales or, at least, suffers inferior status and has lower priority over resources.
With B2B buyers expecting end-to-end digital experiences, it’s become a marketing-led world. If you’re still operating from a sales-led mindset, there’s trouble brewing—and you might find yourself overtaken by more agile competitors before you realize what’s happening.
In this week’s post on The Framework blog, I discuss The Mindset Shift About B2B Buyers That Will Transform Your Outlook on Revenue. It covers each of the issues I just listed in more detail and explains how your company can shift it’s ways of thinking and working to win the minds—and business—of today’s B2B buyers.
Enough of the crankiness. I’m excited to be working with several clients who are committed to marketing and putting in the hard work to make it happen.
They’re also discovering that there’s a lot more to successful content marketing than meets the eye—which allows me to segue nicely into our weekly What We’ve Been Reading collection of helpful articles from across the web.
This week they cover channel selection, building a partner community, Google analytics, and brand storytelling. I hope you’ll read and take something away from each piece but if you only have time to study one, I recommend the storytelling article created by Amazon Ads and The Drum. It’s one of the most beautiful examples of long-form content we’ve seen—and the content is valuable, too!
To wrap things up for this week, my One Step actionable tip summarizes the four mindset shifts recommended in this week’s blog post and sets a quick challenge that will help you take a positive step toward becoming a marketing-led business.
Stay cool or warm and dry or hydrated—depending on whether you’re reading this in the sweltering USA, rain-soaked UK, or elsewhere—and I’ll see you back here at the same time next week.
Cheers!
~ Matt
o/b/o Team MessageUp
