Enable Your Sales Team – And Stop Throwing Away Your Marketing

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Worried that you don’t have the marketing budget of a huge corporation? Don’t be. It doesn’t matter because your marketing materials aren’t being used. At all.

One study claims that 70% of marketing materials from Fortune 500 companies never get used. Seventy percent. Smaller companies have an advantage in that they can be more agile and responsive to what’s happening. But are your marketing materials actually getting used?

Challenger Reps spend 1/3 of their time making their own marketing materials.

They already know how to TEACH, TAILOR, and TAKE CONTROL of the sales process. These traits are part of their DNA. But training sales reps into Challengers is as much about building the consultative approach into your marketing as it is about developing individual skills. Your company’s job is to enable your reps with marketing tools and strategies that really work so they can make sales.

Marketing Building Blocks

There are three parts to the marketing strategy for the Challenger Sales approach:

  1. Build Your Audience – LinkedIn is almost like a silver bullet for making new connections. It’s the ideal networking event. You can narrow down who you want to talk to, and then run connection campaigns to start that relationship by sending a reframing article. When you send a reframing article and someone connects with that, then you’ve immediately got someone in your audience who needs to be there. And you’re helping your sales reps stay in front of the right audience and drive the conversation.
  2. Capture & Follow up on Leads – Now that you’ve built up an audience on LinkedIn, what you want to do is take that same content and as much of your audience as possible and convert that to email. Bring those connections over to your website and get them to sign up for your email marketing. One thing though: You need to be willing to give your best stuff away in exchange for asking for their email address. Take the most valuable thing you have and put that behind the email gate.
  3. Stay Top of Mind – Now that you’ve captured the right audience you need to continue to provide good content. If you’re delivering this steady flow of insight-driven content you’re going to put your sales reps in a vastly better place and generate more referrals. You’re building the audience you’re interested in attracting and creating a reputation around your company as the go-to source for what you do. You’re creating more productive and effective interactions with prospective clients. And by helping your sales reps stay in front of the right people with the right content, you’re giving them back 1/3 of their time.
  4. Consistency is Key

    The hardest part of executing a strategic marketing plan is consistency (it’s the #2 marketing mistake I see over and over again). The old marketing rule was that it takes 16 impressions to get to a sale. These days, we’re so inundated that it takes a lot more – 32, 48, maybe even 64 impressions. The only way to cost-effectively break through is to build an audience that you get to talk to over and over again without paying a media company.

    You need to commit to a full year of this approach to really understand and see the results that can be achieved. But it’s more realistic and effective to get to exactly the right audience and stay top of mind. If you can commit to staying in front of the right audience, then you will create new sales opportunities that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

    By taking a key insight-driven approach to sales, you’re helping put into place the key building blocks of marketing. And then leveraging them to increase your word of mouth.

    Learn more by listening to our B2B Word of Mouth Marketing podcast episode, Support Your Sales Team with Strong Marketing Foundations.

    All the best,

    Bill Bice
    CEO

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