Often you can hear from business owners, CEOs , marketing and sales managers that their product/service is too complex and sales cycle is very long. Customers don’t understand what they want, are not aware of the current situation and therefore it is very difficult to sell.
This is a typical situation. However, it is your choice whether to become a victim of circumstances when you can take matters into their own hands. In this article I would like to share Promodo’s own sales experience.
Initial issues
Our company specializes in integrated Internet marketing (SEO, PPC and media advertising, SMM, email- marketing, conversion rate optimization, etc.) Currently, the company employs more than 100 employees in four offices (two offices are located in Ukraine, one in Russia and one in the UK).
Geographically, the company is focused on two markets:
1. Former Soviet Union (Russia, Ukraine)
2. Foreign markets (US, UK , Europe, Asia)
Communicating with potential customers, our sales team experiences the following difficulties typical for B2B market:
• Lack of customer information;
• Lack of understanding of client’s needs;
• The complexity of the services offered, as they require high level of technical training.
Every day several dozen potential customers contact the company by phone, via contact form on the sites or e-mail.
Problems to solve
Marketing department had the following problems to solve:
1. To increase the total number of incoming requests without significant budget increase;
2. To increase conversion of requests to completed transactions (percentage of requests that turned potential clients into actual clients);
3. Education and training of potential clients.
Solution
In the first place marketing department was moved to the sales department in order to determine main problems and increase effectiveness by eliminating them.
Sales Managers described their most pressing problems as following:
• Everything seems to go smoothly during the process, but then the client can suddenly disappear and impossible to reach;
• Over the time customers tend to lose their interest and engagement during negotiation process;
• In most cases, sales managers communicate with the clients over the phone and it is difficult to fully explain significant value of the service due to its complexity
Information field creation
In order to create quality information field around customer, which would allow educating and maintaining contact with him, you need to create a lot of high quality content and you must have all necessary tools to deliver this content to potential customers on a regular basis.
Software Act-On was chosen as a “Mission Control Center” providing personalized, one-on-one marketing. In addition it practically doesn’t require maintenance on the IT part.
As expected the main difficulty appeared in the process of content creation. The fact that employees in the operating divisions are constantly overwhelmed by the ongoing work and it is very difficult to find time and resources to assist marketing needs.
To simplify the process and reduce the costs we have decided to focus on educational content that will be useful for all types of contacts: potential, current and former clients. Common believe is that the best solution is deep customer segmentation by purchase cycle stages and other criteria, but in our case this decision seemed too complicated so we chose basic segmentation.
3 main types of content that we use for customer training and information fields creation:
• Case studies. Examples of successful projects with detailed information on product development perhaps are most popular in B2B segment. On one hand, the case shows the ways to solve similar problems in other companies, on the other – proves credentials. We regularly receive a lot of positive feedback on this type of content and we are confident that it works. By the way, studies confirmed what cases is the most effective tool in the complex B2B sales.
• Free guide. We have prepared a number of free guides that help customers better understand their marketing/promotional problems, as well as pros and cons of various options to address them. In addition guides support company ‘s image and expertise.
• Free webinars (web-conferences). In order to hold an event for 500 participants the company needs serious budget and resources. Conducting similar event online is much easier and cheaper. Speakers just need to allocate one hour of their time and use software to organize the event (we use GotoWebinar).
Methods of content delivery
The main tools for content delivery are:
1. Email Marketing. With help of Act-On we were able to integrate the CRM system with e-mails, delivering useful content at the right time. In particular, the supporting program was created for the sales department and all the inquiring customers began to receive periodic educational materials.
Thus, the sales staff had strong marketing support and customers had a better understanding of the proposition value.
2. Corporate blogs. We update company’s English blog with expert’s articles on a daily basis. Useful content on the site gradually increases the number of visits from search engines and promotes the brand simultaneously educating potential customers.
3. Facebook and other social networks. It is important to use this channel to communicate with potential customers. Social networks are especially a good source for useful content promotion – webinars, free tutorials, articles.
4. Banner advertising on niche sites and pay per click advertising on social networks. We found that integration of banners, contextual advertising and free content often leads to significantly better results than attempts to sell a complex product or service directly. In addition, contextual advertising on LinkedIn and Facebook allows you to attract quality audience.
Content in exchange for contact information
Sharing useful content in exchange on contact information proved to be a very effective method. Since we promoting free tutorials and webinars we were contacted by clients such as marketing directors of Royal Bank of Scotland and Unicredit or top managers of Betfair and William Hill.
Results
Evaluation of the results pleasantly surprised us: sales increased by 141%. Also the number of requests increased significantly and most importantly, conversion for service purchases increased by 76%. In other words, sales process became much easier, much higher percentage of customers contacted the company and reached contract stage. This is the main proof that the creation of the information field and client education work. B2B customers really need better understanding of the product, price and value justification for the offered services and proof of credentials. And this can and should work!