Marketing to Sell

Corporate decision making is messy, confounded by perceptions, expectations, and personalities with individual and professional motivations that often conflict. And, depending on whom you listen to, 60% to 70% of the B2B sales process now occurs before the prospect engages with sales.

Until we have created a sense of preference, marketing to sell must stretch its intellectual tools to find and nurture prospects through more of the realization and qualification process.

A Marketing to Sell Story

Let me tell you a story about a really smart technology company with disruptive technology for the enterprise. They have come up with a longer lasting, more powerful, smaller, cleaner way to store and retrieve energy in counterpoint to batteries, which can be noxious, are large, and occasionally fail. Did I mention that this technology is new and thus has not been tested over time? And, because we are early in its life cycle, it’s also expensive.

The impact on industry could be huge. Think of a company’s data center. In case of an outage, most rely on lead acid batteries which cost a lot of money to maintain and have a shorter life expectancy.

To get real world input to the “marketing to sell” plan, this company engaged targeted executives in purposeful conversation or an evolved form of prospect persona research designed to bring clarity to prospecting. The goals:

• Identify high potential and low potential prospects.


• Understand their information behavior—how they learn or don’t learn.


• Assemble the information into human form to drive messaging and focus sales and marketing (marketing to sell).

Here’s what the research revealed—the decision making process in all its beauty:

• The CEO only cares that he has a signed agreement regarding how many microseconds it will take for all of his critical data to be back online if there’s an outage. Doesn’t care how it gets done and has a say in the final purchase decision.


• The CFO is open to the concept of buying an expensive, superior technology to decrease cost of ownership, but is under short-term pres


• sure to push down costs. She is wary of being on the bleeding edge of technology and gets vendor info through purchasing. She signs the check.


• The CIO is very experienced. He lives and breathes data recovery. Losing power is his worst nightmare, and he’s survived a few. Batteries have always saved him. This makes him unlikely to “cross the chasm.” His peer network is his primary source of information on innovation (engineers are his second). He also learns online, at executive level events and from the trades which he skims online in the office and reads at home on paper. If interested, he assigns indepth research to his assistant. He’s involved with key vendors, leery of others. He makes the purchase recommendation.
  
  
  
  • When exposed to the technology, his remark was “unproven.” He was specific about the testing and results that might eventually get him to try the technology, if not change his mind.
  
  
  
  


• Engineers are voracious, gobbling bits of information from their favored websites, communities, and social media. Always curious, looking for new ideas, innovative technologies that do things more elegantly—better, cleaner and faster. If an idea intrigues, they research (they were very specific regarding the information they require), valuing anonymity until convinced. They feel a responsibility to champion such innovation to the CIO.


• When exposed to the technology they were impressed but cautioned that the data center’s batteries were unlikely to be ousted anytime soon. Instead, they brainstormed, for example, about use in remote installations, like switching stations on top of mountains where they are critical to operations and maintenance is almost impossible.


• Purchasing is responsible for vendor evaluation—both initially and ongoing—and their recommendation is part of the decision making process. They get their information from trade shows, vendor presentations, and online research. They have an uneasy relationship with Engineering.

These results, to me, are a beautiful thing, an intellectual and technological road map for marketing and sales to sit side by side and combine their energies. Marketing to sell.

Marketing to Sell