B-to-B Web Marketing Should Help Sales People Sell

An effective B-to-B website is a salesperson's friend.

Successful B-to-B internet marketing is not only focused on search engine tactics, lead generation, and branding. Effective internet marketing also provides tangible aide and support to the business development team. A good B-to-B website should help open those proverbial closed doors and open the minds of valuable prospective clients.

A recent success underlines the importance of why supporting your sales team with good web marketing will pay strong dividends. An admirably persistent senior business development professional with decades of successful industry experience wrote the following sales report regarding a strategic key account target opportunity:

An Effective B-to-B Website Helps The Sales Process. 

"I've been trying to contact this prospective client for a while and I finally got a meeting with him. The contact explained that he typically does not meet with vendors of our size, but thought that this particular contract was warranted of some research as I continued to leave messages and emails."

"The contact went on line prior to our meeting and researched our website and was impressed with what he saw…"you guys could obviously handle the work".

"The contact has put us on the bid list and we should expect the bid package shortly."

How did internet marketing help bring about this important sales step? By helping to inform and educate the prospective client about our company, at his own time and choosing.

The website acted as a strong verification and validation of our company's capabilities and expertise, helping convince this important contact that our company offers the right products, expertise, and services his company needs. His research into our website convinced him that we were a vendor worthy of consideration, and helped our business development representative "close the deal" by putting our company into their coveted bidder's list.

For successful web marketing, "Content is King". This approach helps your sales team. Good content can be used at all the multiple stages of the sales process, from early research to validation, verification, and call-to-action. Having intelligent, precise, concise, content is key to technical B-to-B success. Like a good sales brochure, effective website content acts as an educational sales tool, helping the client navigate from the initial discovery & research phases to sale and post-sale follow-up.

How does one ensure web content is helping their sales team? Listen to the sales team, ask questions. Get feedback. Go out and meet clients. Walk in the shoes of your business development team. Mingle with clients and prospective clients at trade shows, conferences, and other events. Track industry news. Take an interest, roll up your sleeves, and get involved. Don't be remote.

Along with quality lead generation, helping salespeople close sales should be a top priority for B-to-B marketeers. Sales people are one of the main spark plugs which make a company engine run. Having been a successful B-to-B industrial salesperson myself for many years has greatly influenced my approach to marketing.

If marketing doesn't help sales people, it won't help the rest of the company very much, either.

Good marketing succeeds on the ground, in the trenches, and is viewed as a valuable resource business development people want to use. So be useful!

Give Your Sales Teams What They Crave This Valentine's Day - Good Leads.

Is Search Engine Marketing Tactical or Strategic?

Rhetorical Marketing Questions of the day:

Is search engine marketing a tactical or strategic marketing tool? Yes.
Is search engine marketing transactional or relationship (branding)? Yes.


OK, the best answer is "All of the above". 


B-to-B Search engine marketing is a fantastic way to generate leads for specific projects and business opportunities, and it acts as an ever-present branding tactic. SEM is both Tactical and Strategic... both goals can be applied to paid and organic search campaigns. 


In effect, SEM can target and pull in leads for every stage of the buying decision process... attraction, features, benefits, solutions. 


Webpages and Paid Search ads can target the potential customer across the entire buying process, including:


1. Getting their attention. Simple awareness. Uncovering a prospective client need. The prospect is thinking about thinking about buying.

"You have a problem" or "hey, we exist!", "We offer a product or service you are pondering or considering" etc.


2. Researching options. Competitive research. The Prospect is thinking about buying.  


"How our product or service, and features and benefits, meet your needs", "why our offerings are better for you than alternatives" etc.


3. First Contact. Getting the lead, or inducing a call-to-action. The prospect is going to buy from someone, it may as well be us. 


"Solve your problem now", "We have a solution to your problem", "We offer that niche specialized product or service you are looking for" etc.


Understanding the market I am targeting and the issues they face, for which my company can provide help and services is key to how I approach the use of webpages, search terms, campaigns and ad filters.


Since people search in a huge variety of ways, a particular search term used in a campaign may be attracting people who come from many or even all phases of lead generation development... from those just beginning to search and those about ready to make a decision to contact a business. 


To accommodate these different visitors who have different agendas, a landing page must be focused but also have a little something for everyone who visits the page.... appropriate content with links to 'learn more' related pages, a call-to-action, and a look and feel which invites the visitor to stay in the site and explore - - or better yet - - contact you, no matter what stage of the process they are in.


An intelligent and aggressive approach to organic and paid search engine marketing allows both tactical and strategic marketing. 


Thus, transactional marketing campaigns that target niche services, products, markets, fragmented markets and micro markets are very effective and profitable. 


For building reputation, awareness and branding, creating more branding focused campaigns to promote and support broad and key brand name related searches is helpful. Web analytics can help measure the quality and performance of such campaigns.


Targeting the customer awareness, research, competitive comparisons and call-to-action phases of the potential customer base will power greater lead generation to feed the B-to-B sales funnel. Webpages that "sell" in professional way help throughout the entire lead gen process. 


Just like a top performing sales representative, a B-toB website should be able to conduct consultative selling along every customer decision phase, in order to engage and keep the quality visitor, and encourage them to take the logical step of contacting your company to buy/investigate your goods and services. 


Best Regards;       Erik Holladay