B2B sales can be very complicated and protracted affairs and involve multiple points of touch at different stages. To add to the complexity, they can be with different organisational stakeholders at different points in the sales cycle.
As a marketer your job does not stop at the brand awareness building stage but you should enter into a dialogue with your future customers well into close stages and beyond - to ensure customers for life. It's important to recognise that companies go through different stage in their buy process from problem recognition, information search, analysis and comparison, vendor selection. So ask yourself these basic questions:
- Do you recognise the different buy stages that your indentified target audience go through and can you map these?
- What campaigns, activities and communication tactics do you have in place to move them along the specific stage in the buy cycle they are at?
- Have you covered off the available channels of communication such as web, email, on-line and off-line events, social networking?
- What repeatable campaigns can you develop to help walk your customers through these stages and ensure your organisation is top of mind?
- Can you consider any self service capabilities to allow your customers to walk through their buy cycle stages when they want and how they want?
- For those businesses not yet ready to purchase but are identified as likely candidates in the longer term, what strategies do you have in place for managing them and keeping your organisation in the running?
If you take a holistic view of how customers come to you and can manage the total experience around that, you are better aligned to changing needs of your audience at particular points in time and you will make your budgets work harder for you rather than the other way around.