Challenging times require your B2B prospects to adjust to new ways of doing business—and your sales and marketing strategies may need some adjusting, too. While maintaining sensitivity to your clients’ and prospects’ needs is paramount, your organization’s marketing shouldn’t grind to a halt altogether. It’s important to keep moving forward to attract new prospects and continue making progress with existing clients. Here are three steps you can take immediately with your local teams, with or without an outsourced marketing agency supporting you, to “move the needle” with clients and prospects
Step 1: Build and expand your prospect list.
Clearly identify your audiences by verticals and the buyer personas within them. Then identify the prospects who match those profiles, using a tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to directly identify decision-makers within target companies or an app such as Skrapp.IO to find corporate prospects’ emails. Use this information to develop relevant databases, capturing prospects’ email and mobile numbers to leverage other channels of contact, such as SMS messaging or WhatsApp.
Step 2: Use demand generation to capture your audience’s interest.
Once you’ve identified your audiences, reach out to them. In our experience as an enterprise marketing agency, we’ve found these demand generation tactics to be the most effective for our clients:
- Content syndication: Sharing your content on relevant, specialized websites in your industry helps to generate demand on third-party pages. Ensure your content is relevant to the situation and to the solutions your customers are seeking. As they engage with your content, interact with them to ultimately deliver leads to your team.
- Email marketing: It may not sound sexy, but email remains one of the most effective (and cost-effective) demand generation channels.
- Webinars: Your prospects may spending more time online than usual, monitoring news or working from home. That makes now the perfect moment to educate your market, especially about solutions that are relevant to the current world situation. Webinars are an easy way to capture your audience and spotlight your products, your services, and your team. Create live or on-demand webinars about relevant topics and use them to attract prospects.
Step 3: Adjust your sales appointments.
It’s important to maintain relationships with the prospects you have formerly contacted. Existing sales appointments don’t have to fall by the wayside just because you can no longer travel or meet in person. Simply offer to transform them into remote sales conversations instead of face-to-face meetings. Prospects will appreciate your flexibility.
Keep making new sales appointments, too. Nurture your prospects and bring them as close as possible to purchase. Complete your demand generation tactics with a strategy to schedule remote appointments, prioritizing those prospects who have interacted with your content before.
Extend one-to-one communications from your sales executives. Aim to set a remote date for a conference call or video call. Ensure the discussion is calculated prior to speak to the client. It’s important to be sensitive to each individual’s situation and take a thoughtful approach to communications during difficult times, but don’t be afraid to convey the value of what you have to offer.
Whether you use an outsourced marketing agency or rely on your own resources to implement these tactics, they will help your organization develop the business continuity needed to withstand today’s tough times and position you for future growth.
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