Rachel has 25 years experience working in senior marketing roles for companies that include Verizon, OpenX, and Unruly to name a few.
In this conversation Rachel and Mike covered a range of topics relating to B2B sales, and B2B marketing, that can be summarised as customer-centricity, creativity, and aligning sales and marketing.
Here's a few summary points from the conversation:
Collaboration
Functions are becoming more siloed, but sales, marketing and product should be strategising and planning together.
Sales and marketing messaging
How do we ensure that sales and marketing messaging is aligned, and how do we ensure that our ideal clients receive marketing messaging while they are out-of-market, and sales messaging when they are in-market.
Are you having a laugh?
Some of the most memorable TV ads for B2C brands are the ones that make you laugh, or at least smile, but a lot of B2B communications is devoid of humour. Paddy Power and Specsavers are renowned for producing funny, engaging work, but in B2B marketing we become very product and feature led, and dull. Why is that and what can be done to add more emotion to B2B marketing?
We're selling to people
In B2B sales and marketing we are selling to people not companies. People will engage if they are interested or entertained, and putting your people at the front of your communications is key.
Creativity
Sometimes the creative can feel like an afterthought, as if the marketers have agonised over targeting, media selection and optimisation, and forgotten that the actual creative is at least as important as those other factors.
Sales and marketing alignment
A recent study by The B2B Institute looked at over 700 companies across 5 different B2B industries, and found that the overlap between the people marketing were communicating with and the people sales were communicating with had only a 16% overlap.
Arguably, marketing should be communicating to 100% of your total addressable market, and sales should be talking to the 5% of people who have a brief and a budget, and are in-market for what you are selling today.
In this conversation we shared some thoughts about how we can better align sales and marketing functions to increase performance, and ultimately, revenue?
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Six Sells is a B2B communications agency for sales and marketing leaders.
We help your client-facing people to speak to more of your ideal clients, more often, via social media and personable content.
We offer training, consulting or done-for-you services, which increase the awareness, familiarity, trust and interest in your company and its products and services.
Email hello@sixsells.co.uk for more information.
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#b2bsales #b2bmarketing #communications #peopleshapedcomms #creativity #customercentric #salesandmarketingalignment
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