Do you pick and choose the clients that you work with? Or is your business leaning hard on referrals to generate a significant percentage of your income?
It’s not that referrals are a bad thing. Far from it. They show that you’re getting things right with your existing customers. But when referrals become anything more than an additional, nice-to-have income stream, there could be a problem. It means your outbound marketing isn’t hitting the mark.
Focus on the marketing that matters
Sometimes it’s just a lack of resources. Maybe there are too many unqualified, badly-defined leads coming in from a wide variety of channels. Too much noise and not enough time to attribute, track and report on progress.
Whether it’s a lack of leads or the wrong leads, your KPIs can suffer and company growth objectives can be difficult to focus on, never mind maintain.
When you’re fighting fires, relying on referrals and struggling to justify costs, it means your business is suffering because:
- You don’t have control over the type of businesses you work with
- You can’t adjust your business development to match your capacity
- You don’t convert website visitors into customers
- You’re reacting to your environment instead of building your niches
- It’s difficult to hit revenue targets
- You can’t control growth
Now, more than ever, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, instead of taking a few minutes to scan the landscape.
But there is a better way.
Are you ready to take a step back and take a look of the bigger picture? If so, you could do a lot worse than analyse your opportunities with a personalised sales and marketing scorecard.
A bespoke B2B strategy for best results
No two B2B organisations are the same, but the sales processes are similar. From a digital perspective, you attract website visitors, convert website visitors, close the deal. And repeat. It’s all sandwiched between your strategy and your reporting.
You’re aiming to create a virtuous circle of market evaluation, product and service analysis, messaging and content adjustment, market testing and measurement.
Yet, to make the biggest difference to the bottom line, you need to focus on the parts of your sales and marketing plan that need the most urgent attention. And you need to approach them with a strategy that’s right for your business. That’s why a tailored sales and marketing scorecard can make all the difference.
Attract B2B website visitors
Maybe you need to attract more customers to your website. At this point it’s all about identifying and understanding your target audience, knowing where they hang out online and recognising their pain points. You won’t get anywhere with your inbound strategy until your prospects can find you.
This is when your marketing personas will prove to be invaluable, as you’ll need to get under the skin of your audiences. You’ll need to know how to compel them to visit your website or read your content so that the relationship can begin. This can be the most challenging part of the marketing funnel, but it can also be the most rewarding.
Your personalised sales and marketing scorecard may identify that there are opportunities to strengthen the attract stage. If so, it will also provide you with a range of tools and techniques that will help you make some serious improvements.
Convert B2B website visitors
Perhaps your current process needs a little help to convert more of your website visitors into prospects, also known as marketing qualified leads (MQLs). The more people who actively engage with your company online, rather than just passively visiting your website, the closer they move to the sale.
Most businesses find themselves in a position where they would like to do a better job of converting website visitors into prospects. If your scorecard suggests that you have the opportunity to strengthen your conversions, then there is a raft of techniques for you to explore.
And when you can identify, categorise and guide your target audiences through the funnel more effectively, everything begins to happen faster. The close is in sight.
Close more B2B sales
There’s a chance that the close phase of your marketing could be letting you down. This is the bridge that connects your marketing and your sales efforts. In the close phase, you’ve transformed all those prospects into opportunities, also known as sales qualified leads (SQLs). It’s all about making sure the people who sell for your company have all the marketing materials and resources they need to make the sale.
But it’s also about making the deeper connections between marketing and sales. It’s about passing on the information and the nuances that make each SQL individual. Combining personal attention with automation techniques means you’ll guarantee that every prospect receives a minimum standard of help with their buying decision.
You’ll also be able to identify the right sales messaging to use in every situation, based on their lead score, how they first interacted with your business, and the journey that they took through your marketing funnel.
Once your sales team have the resources, the back story and sight of the journey so far, that’s when the magic happens. That’s when all the hard work finally pays off.
