Klaxon Marketing

If you ever want a really simple definition for what business to business marketing is all about, it would be that marketing is the management of acquiring sales leads.
I realise I’ve just upset a whole lot of people with that statement. After all if you’ve ever studied marketing, you’ll happily agree that marketing is “putting the customer at the heart of your business”, or it’s “understanding your customers needs and wants and satisfying those profitably through the provision of goods and services”. Both statements of course also being true.

But in its simplest form, what most business owners really care about, is that marketing should be generating opportunities to sell a good or service i.e. a sales lead.

This is particularly important for organisations where budgets are tight and the idea of running a marketing campaign around changing perceptions of your business in the market place, or raising awareness of your green credentials, should perhaps play second fiddle.

Of course, marketing campaigns that generate sales leads need to feed a hungry and skilled sales force, whether that’s a team of ultra competitive sales managers, or the managing director of a small company that knows his product inside out.

What then are the typical types of marketing tactic you can employ as a tool for generating a sales lead?

Well here’s a list of three commonly used tactics for you to think about:

Telemarketing - I doubt this needs much introduction and most people have been on the end of a sales call, but planned and executed well telemarketing can reap rewards. Whether you want to build a pool of qualified sales leads, or set appointments for your sales stars to bring home the bacon. Telemarketing is certainly a tactic not to be sniffed at.

Exhibitions - again, nothing new here and I’m sure anyone working in B2B marketing has either attended or worked at an exhibition. There are many hundreds of exhibitions taking place all of the time on every conceivable subject and you can spend a ton of money on a show, with costs for a stand, floor space, staffing, collateral etc etc. The key is to ensure you carefully manage your pre, during and post event execution to ensure every inch of your involvement is geared towards collecting and following up on sales leads.

Content-led Marketing – this is perhaps a less commonly used term, but something to think hard about. Essentially it’s the idea of offering some content of value to entice a prospective customer to make contact with your company and enter your sales pipeline. This might be something as simple as offering a downloadable ebook guide, or a whitepaper, right up to running a series of expensive events / seminars.

You’ll have seen this a lot from companies selling large, complex big ticket items such as IT products, but you’re equally likely to find smaller operators putting on events such as those selling property investment clubs, or courses for how to sell contracts for difference.

How then do you use content based tactics effectively to generate sales leads?

I’ll eventually write about each of these tactics and more in detail, but I want to start by discussing the use of propriatery events. You can see below a slide deck I recently pulled together on the subject, which details some of the critical success factor to using event marketing for lead generation.

For me, the key to event marketing is providing something of value.

You’ll have seen in the slide deck a statement that the more value you add, the warmer the sales lead will be and I firmly believe this is the case. If you want to use events as a basis for generating leads, you had better ensure you achieve a good return on your investment, because to be sure, events will not be a cheap tactic, but they may potentially offer the greatest reward.

Related posts:

1. The Next 3 Event Promotion Meme
2. Networking
3. Simple Tips for Surviving Corporate Events
4. The Joy of Testing
5. Exhibitions and Tradeshows