What’s Important to Buyers & How it Continues to Affect Sales & Marketing?

Posted on May 22, 2011 in iDeclare Blog | 0 comments

While I have been talking with companies and clients over the last few months I have found that many organisations of all sizes seem to have been struggling to fully get to grip with the real meaning of the plethora of messages around social marketing, SEO, SEM, PPC, social media monitoring, email marketing strategies, blogging, landing pages, web analytics and so on. In fact, how marketing is being compelled to radically evolve to meet the needs today’s buyers.

In an ever-increasingly complex world, buyers are using technology to disrupt both marketing and sales by simply becoming better informed from the outset. Buyers can easily find information about the kind of products, services and solutions that could be of help to them. Additionally, buyers will be looking for information from other customers who have bought similar products, services and solutions. They’ll be looking for references, case studies, reviews and more to help them in the decision making process.

Here’s a little research from IDC which I found helpful to put things into context and simplify the changes being experienced – the increasing importance of content… relevant content.

So, with this in mind – that content is increasingly important to buyers – coupled with the ever-increasing number of online channels to reach customers and new prospects in terms of interaction and engagement, how does today’s marketing & sales organisation embrace this trend? How does the organisation go about reaching buyers? How does Marketing align this with Sales? How does content become more aligned to the buying process? How does the Sales organisation become engaged? How is success measured? How does the organisation go about creating content in the first place?

Well, as with so many things marketing and sales, I feel it needs to start with an overarching communications strategy – something that holds together the sales and marketing approach, a communications and messaging framework. Contrary to often popular belief, spending some time working on this before trying to jump in head first to try and “solve the problem” will pay back generously, be sustainable and of equal importance ensure marketing agility. Marketing agility being the ability to change quickly under the guidance of a communications strategy to changing customer and business needs.

Without a good, clear and agile communications strategy it becomes increasingly difficult to answer questions including:

• What do we stand for?
• What do we do?
• Who do we do it for?
• What value does this bring to our customers – the ROI?
• Which customers may be able tell the story for us?
• Where might these customers be able to tell the story for us?
• How could our customers go about telling the story for us?

It goes without saying that in the absence of a clear and agile communications strategy, it also becomes increasing difficult to ensure that the sales organisation is properly enabled with the right information at the right time too.

Therefore, there is the danger that the most expensive customer interaction, between a prospect or customer and a sales person, can be wasted if the sales person is not properly equipped with relevant information and tools.

So, coming full circle, as pointed out by IDC in the chart above, content is increasingly important to prospective customers during the buying cycle and by the time buyers are ready to engage with a sales person, they are more knowledgeable than ever before. At the same time sales must be equipped with relevant content and supporting tools to help solve the customer’s business problem.

I’d love to hear your views and experiences – what do you think?

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