Advertising for B2B sales growth
Key determinants of advertising success to achieve B2B sales growth include:
- Defining a message that gets “traction”.
- Finding a cost effective location.
- Getting sufficient good quality responses.
- Ensuring the costs are viable.
Grouping prospects actually helps with all of these. Clear audience definition makes it far easier to define the message. Profiling customers makes it easier to find places where groups congregate. Common interests are a great reason for businesses to work or locate together.
Content Marketing
It’s a classic error to create content just by thinking about the media. The messages have to be right. Effective design should consider the audience and what it wants.
Considering what the suspect “wants to fix” is just the first step. Analyse the “specific problems” facing those in a particular niche. These are far more likely to generate effective distribution. So marketing has to define the niche. Again “specific groups of customers”.
Outbound Marketing
The choice of method hides the more general problem. It doesn’t matter if one uses cold calling, cold emailing, direct mail or any other method.
- How does one decide who to contact?
- What list is worth buying?
Again the characteristics of specific groups of customers form a good basis for finding similar companies.
Improving Sales and its processes
There many options here for B2B sales growth:
- Increasing the head count is an obvious tactic but may not be the right answer.
- Reducing the time for sales tasks. Better software, or tools may be the key here. Some Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are awkward. It’s bad news if CRM turns sales people into expensive data entry clerks. Software that makes it easier to enter the data is available.
- Increasing the numbers of experienced sales people could help.
- Training sales people to make them more effective may help.
- Allocating sales people to products, services and territories can be challenging.
- Splitting the sales role can help. Junior staff might carry out internal or less important parts of the role.
But increasing the effectiveness of sales people may work best. It is very easy for sales to spend time on leads that go nowhere. So yet again identifying which “groups of prospects” are the most likely to become good customers is a vital support.
So it’s fairly easy to see that the “identifying groups of customers,prospects and suspects” supports many ways to grow sales revenue. We’ve seen this on previous pages.
And if we don’t identify these groups it becomes much harder to grow sales revenue.