The marketing department has long been labeled the department to always spend money, unable to prove whether what they’re doing is effective. In turn, the sales department is left to wonder what business the marketing department is actually bringing in? In a previous career, that blended sales and marketing, I was exposed to exactly this situation. We’d purchase newspaper and magazine ads, design and distribute brochures, write editorial for publications, send out email blasts to our database, sometimes even send out snail mail (ugh!), all of the typical outbound marketing techniques you can possibly think of. We never really knew exactly how well any of our efforts worked. Now, 6 years on I have witnessed the industry evolve and it’s so exciting to me to see how much sales and marketing technology has advanced and how much it revolutionises the marketing function and allows for better synergy between the teams.
Sales and marketing technology is, without doubt, something every business that deals in B2B sales should be investing in and here’s two big reasons why:
By running your marketing campaigns through your marketing software you can track everything. For example, here are just some of the things you can track:
Social media postsEmails
Landing pages
There’s so much more you can do with the right technology. You can experiment to see what tactics work best for your buyer personas and you can collect all that crucial data to continuously sharpen your marketing campaigns so that they turn into slick lead generation machines.
By understanding your current customers you can then tailor your products or services to what they want. As you know, upselling or cross-selling to an existing customer requires far less resources than trying to bring in a whole new customer.
By collecting data of your potential customers (leads) once they start to interact with your business either via your website, a social media post, a blog post etc, You can track:
All of this valuable information gives your sales people a head start. They’ve already begun to get to know their leads and they haven’t even picked up the phone to talk to them yet.
Every business should be taking advantage of what’s on offer in the market now. From budget to enterprise level sales and marketing software, there is something out there to fit any businesses’ B2B marketing needs. As a marketer or business owner, all you have to do is invest the time to find the right software, incorporate it into your business and watch what a positive difference it makes.
If you’re interested in understanding how your current B2B marketing is performing and how you can build a lean, mean, lead generation machine, download our free B2B Marketing Health Check tool by clicking on the button below.