Smooth Buyer Transition from Marketing to Sales

Your buyer’s process of buying doesn’t include a line drawn between marketing efforts and sales activities. They look at the whole process as their evaluation of whether or not to buy. In fact, they probably label everything you do to interact with them as sales. It doesn’t matter one iota to them what you call it.

Just because we’ve changed how we think about marketing, doesn’t mean your buyers have a clue. Nor do they particularly care. They’re focused on what they need, what they want and getting whatever they can to make their decisions fool proof.

What B2B companies need is a fluid process from the initial stages of the buying cycle straight through to acquiring the customer. But, that means that marketing and sales have to work together—seamlessly. That bump during the transition is becoming a hurdle that disorients your buyers. Eliminating it and ensuring that the same, high level of interactions and dialogue are what your buyers experience from start to finish is imperative for growth.

When IDC asked how well they support sales on a scale of 1 - 100, marketers gave themselves a score of 66. But sales only gave them a score of 57. Thankfully this statistic doesn't have a huge variance, but I think the interesting thing is how far off marketing is from meeting the needs of sales—from both perspectives.

What companies really need to understand is that buyers do not distinguish the difference between marketing and sales. To them, it's all one process. If your transition isn't smooth and everyone isn't on the same page, then the buyers will react to that—without distinction between which efforts originated from sales and which from marketing.

Once again, a perspective issue. The vendor side is so used to having a distinction at the intersection of sales and marketing that the process is probably seldom considered from start to finish as one journey for the buyer.

But it is.

And the smoother we can make it, the better off we'll be for increasing engagement levels with our potential customers.

Another consideration is how content is used by buyers. Is there a difference in types/formats of content provided during progressive stages of the buying cycle? IDC found that marketers focus on developing more of the same types of content they've developed in the past to preserve budget allocation—whether it produces results or not. Buyers dislike being forced to take a demo or view specific collateral when they aren't ready for it in THEIR buying process.

Marketing and sales really is all about the buyer and we need to honor and address their needs. Throughout the entire process. To finely tune a fluid process for buyers, it falls to marketers to monitor the content sales is using and ensure it's what they need and as effective as they think it is.

If you're tempted to say you KNOW it's effective, scroll back up and read those statistics at the top of the article again.

Here are some things marketing can do proactively to tune the content they provide to sales:

• Go get proof.
• Ask your salespeople what works and what doesn't.
• Generate content for each step of the buyer's journey.
• Do a content audit and yank the rubbish.
• Analyze your content for customer focus. Discard everything that doesn't pass.
• Block out the steps of your buyer's journey.
• Create content that addresses the needs at each step.
• Work with personas, profiles, segmentation and salespeople to get it right.

IDC concludes that reducing spend on content would provide a way to reduce marketing costs. But companies need to focus on generating content that works. Content is "old" in two months. That means that it has to be produced continuously for your company to build and maintain a thought leadership position. The industry changes and buyer priorities change, as well.

Producing the right kind of content will eliminate all that waste that's going on now. Currently, somewhere from 75% to 90% of marketing content is not used by sales. By developing customer-focused, high-value content, you'll see your engagement metrics escalate. And getting buyers through their decision to purchase from your company is the overall goal.

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B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee helps companies significantly increase their marketing momentum by generating more and better leads for their sales organizations. She helps them capture the attention of web site visitors, and strengthen engagement with high value content till they are "sales ready." Visit the Marketing Interactions website: www.marketinginteractions.com.