There, I said it, that word on everybody’s minds that few dare speak: “recession.” Fear of economic downturn has dominated the business dialogue since we entered 2023. This despite real signs that most companies are still doing kind of ok. Sure, taken together, the economic indicators look quite bleak, but you have to wonder in the chicken and egg world of macroeconomics, how much does preparing for a recession ensure its inevitability?

Regardless of how we got here, here we are. Most marketing leaders have been asked to prepare for the worst, and many are already being proactive about reducing their cost base. Now is the right moment in time to consider that jiu-jitsu thing of how to turn a negative force into a source of advantage, and come out of the back end of whatever this uncertainty is, better than how you entered it. It is possible, but it will require marketing leaders to swim against the tide of fear and boldly lead.

There is no company/brand/organization/division that does not need some form of fundamental reinvention, so why not use this moment of change as the burning platform that drives yours.

Recession Marketing Lessons

As a famous resident of my town in New Jersey once said, “it’s like deja vu all over again.” The economic cycle is just that, a repeated cycle. We’ve been relatively blessed over the last 30 years to have had to deal with this very infrequently – although the downturn of the late aughts is seared in the minds of many marketers who are now in positions where they have to make some extremely tough choices.

So what happens? We cut too hard, often the wrong things, we get to it too late, and we are slow to read the signs about when it’s time to get back in the fight. The recovery often gains steam quickly, so there is little organizational appetite to look backward at our recessionary efforts and assess what we gained and what we lost. So inevitably, we end up repeating the cycle again and again.

Let’s unpack the typical recessionary marketing actions and their sadly typical consequences:

• Those who cut in-market programs too aggressively, do harm greater than their savings, as those who maintain their spending realize a windfall in share growth.
• More than lost share, is the risk of losing a brand’s most valuable customers, as more come into play during uncertain times.
• We let brands erode in favor of down-funnel spend and create an opening for disruptors to reframe our categories away from now voiceless incumbents.
• We delay hiring, often inflicting the most pain on high-potential new spaces which have less current revenue to protect.
• We lay off staff without “rethinking” the work they do (did), so those left to pick up the pieces, and in particular, the strong ones with options, leave. Then we scramble to rehire top talent during the recovery in a seller’s market.

One of the most ironic consequences of recessionary marketing cuts pertains to the timing of cause and effect. For most categories, marketing spending, particularly top of funnel spending, has little immediate impact on your brand. There is lag effect, which, depending on the category and metric, can be as much as 12-18 months. This is about as responsive as steering a supertanker through a slalom course. So, the spending you cut during a downturn has less impact on the market when demand is suppressed and there’s less to gain than it does during the rebound when pent up demand is released. Said another way, the actions your current self takes will weigh most heavily on your future self. Pretty deep, huh?

7 Ways to Create Marketing Advantage in a Downturn

That’s enough negativity. Let’s look at this from a glass half full perspective and discuss how to make the most of this “crisi-tunity.” Let’s introduce 7 ways your brand and business can rise to this challenge. As General George S. Patton once said, “pressure makes diamonds.”

1. Reset your marketing priorities to do more with less
2. Rethink and reduce marketing work – not just headcount
3. Find the small pots of wasted spend that add up to big savings
4. Take this opportunity to clean house with your brand portfolio…
5. …Then high-grade your brand portfolio spending
6. Get aggressive – target others’ high-value customers while defending yours
7. Be proactive – get ready now for the coming post-downturn boom

***
In our next edition of Reinvention Notes, we will dive into each of these opportunities. Until then, stay strong and think about how your organization can seize this moment as a mandate for reinvention.

The post To Recession or Not to Recession? appeared first on Vivaldi.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Partnership marketing can, and should, have a much bigger impact. It can have substance and sizzle. When done right, partnership marketing can accentuate company values and solve consumer needs. It can provide a quicker way to scale for growth and offer reciprocal benefits for both partners.

Too frequently the strategy and thought leadership around partnerships is so painfully obvious (i.e. “synergy”) that it shouldn’t even need to be explained. But there are real, dynamic opportunities to be had. Here are seven strategies to make your partnership marketing actually work.

While there are many types of partnerships — affiliate, brand, technology, strategic, to name a few — these shouldn’t be containers for either/or category distinctions. Instead, they should be both/and. Ideally partnerships not only create attention and encourage curiosity, they also provide value for the customer and demonstrate impact.

For instance, ketchup brand Heinz partnered with online reseller thredUP to create the Heinz Vintage Drip collection — thrifted clothing marked with a unique ketchup stain. Beyond the sustainability mission, the collaboration targeted global hunger relief, with 100% of proceeds benefitting the organization Rise Against Hunger — making the effort interesting, relevant, strategically aligned and mutually beneficial.

Many partnerships focus on passions, interests, opportunities, and yes, synergies — and those are all worthwhile approaches. But what about your customers’ pain points? Taking a customer-centric view and offering a solution to something that negatively impacts their daily life can feel revolutionary — even if it’s highly functional.

For people on the go, making a drugstore pickup and a package drop-off just one stop is a genuine time-saver. Walgreens’s partnership with FedEx does just that, providing a real value by combining services under one roof. Pick up a prescription and mail your packages in just one easy step. It also reduces the pickup locations or touchpoints for the retailers.

We’re all familiar with the importance of targeting in marketing, but you also need to ensure that you are targeting in your partnership strategy. You don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to targeting — so why do it with partnerships?

Build in nuance by targeting (or even hyper-targeting!) the specific customer segments that you’re looking to grow. For B2B companies, this may mean targeting by firmographics, stakeholders, and use cases, while B2C companies may prioritize interest groups, age, geography and other demographic details. Prioritize key segments rather than selecting them all and hoping for the best.

With its “Fresh Invest” podcast, Morning Brew and Fidelity offer a program tailor made for a young, financially literate audience interested in early investing. This pinpoints a segment that both partners want to reach and offers a real value for listeners.

Historically, big businesses have held the power, while smaller companies were just happy to be chosen for partnerships. However, the power dynamic is shifting, with smaller, more agile companies gaining leverage thanks to advances in technology, data availability and broader ecosystem connectivity and interoperability.

Rather than viewing small companies as threats, big businesses need to provide a partnership strategy value proposition to bring them on board. Big companies can’t just win on brand and size as in past eras, today they need to win on process, people, and partner value. Not only will both partners see value, a broader sector of society may as well.

For example, multinational giant Pfizer and biotechnology company BioNTech joined forces to release the Covid-19 Delta variant vaccine.

In the world of classic corporate strategy, the other companies in your category were threats to be defended against. However, in today’s world of ecosystems, webs, and interactions, they should be sought after.

Instead of building walls, building bridges offers more long-term payoff. By partnering with industry peers, you’ll accelerate your knowledge, adding value for your customers and serving as a key player in the larger ecosystem.

To offer one-touch, interest-free, buy now, pay later (BNPL) capabilities during physical checkout, adjacent companies Ingenico and SplitIt formed a partnership, delivering point of sale (POS) flexible installment options to consumers.

Our access to sophisticated real-time data has never been greater — so why aren’t more companies using it? Partner measurement capabilities and performance tracking KPIs give both a transparent and accurate view of how partnerships are actually performing in the market. It’s no longer a mystery which tactics are most effective — capitalize on those that work, and iterate on those that don’t. This quicker learning cycle allows for in-market agility and faster product and service updates.

Companies can create and refine dynamic pilots to test, learn from, and evaluate partnerships. Data tracking also enables a more transparent distribution model for equitable profit sharing.

Over a three year period, from 2017 to 2020, ecommerce platform Shopify tracked a new metric, partner attached conversion rates, and saw their revenue increased 17%, and their partners’ revenues increased 61.5%.

Ultimately your partnership strategy should be in line with your overall organization strategy. Some companies realize that partnership strategies are an extension of the organization and have a central function, but don’t have product or business unit level representation. Others let partnerships only happen at product/BU level. Best in class companies understand that you need both.

If partnerships are just a siloed discipline happening at the product/BU level, the effectiveness is limited, while instead they could be seen as an enterprise growth strategy and key revenue driver for the company.

Great companies understand the value of having a centralized strategic function and a distribution within operators, making sure every piece works together. This requires a strategic plan, partnership architecture, opportunity scoring/prioritization, governance, and ongoing tracking and measurement. Enter the Chief Partnership Officer. For organizations to prove that they want to capitalize on and create real value from partnerships, they need a dedicated team member who is making this a priority.

Microsoft’s Nicole Dezen and Starbucks’s Sara Kelly are leading the charge at those companies, viewing their roles as part of an investment ahead of the growth curve that’s developing.

Key Takeaway

These seven strategies prove that partnerships can be much more than two logos sitting together or a boring backend B2B integration mentioned in a press release. They can, and should, have a purpose and make an impact.

The post Seven Strategies to Build Your Partnership Marketing  appeared first on Vivaldi.

Kevin Lane Keller and Erich Joachimsthaler discussed modern marketing strategies.

Here are some of the key principles of Kevin’s Marketing expertise:

1. It is critical to define your product and services, then to determine collaborations. The intent of your company must be clear before considering potential partnerships. All companies are part of a broad ecosystem that serves a purpose and relates to one another.

Collaborating is not something new and has been done frequently in the past, but Kevin expresses how the function of collaboration has evolved into an integral part of marketing. Partnerships tell a story behind the companies. There is a resulting creation of new customer segments with fortified and enhanced offerings.

“It’s really important to not think of yourself as a marketer or as a company selling products or services, but that you’re satisfying needs, supplying benefits and solving problems.” – Kevin

2. With customers driving the company’s purpose and direction, marketers are no longer in control as they were in the old push-pull world. In the past, marketers are the ones prescribing how customers consume their products and services. Currently and in the foreseeable future, the customers are the ones creating a culture around the product and services through their natural response.

Kevin stresses how “Marketing Myopia” should still be a solid foundation. There is less of the traditional structure nowadays because of the organic synergies that take place through the audience. It is imperative to pay attention to these interactions that produce signals and opportunities to integrate them into the marketing strategy.

“We as marketers are really orchestrating value creation— orchestrating communications and orchestrating your Four P’s rather than designing them all.” – Erich

3. The Engagement Forum is the main ingredient in modern marketing. Word of mouth has been migrating to the digital world, but not entirely. When we interact through interest-driven communities in real life, it also becomes a marketing platform. Setting up a forum for these interpersonal interactions, both digitally and physically, has become one of the primary responsibilities of Marketing Managers.

As Kevin and Erich discussed, each of these niche interest-driven communities have varying dynamics and operations. Keeping track of people’s social and emotional signals in these communities and responding to them allows relationship building while making it feel less transactional.

“I’m changing knowledge and changing the way people think, feel, and act in a way that is going to help my brand and or help the mission of my brand. I’ve got to make sure that that happens.” – Kevin

Companies need to consider having a “Customer-First” mindset:

• Building communities as part of the business model: In the world of hyperconnectivity, value creation is synergetic and not one-sided. The culture built around company offerings and the consumption habits within communities become essential components of the business model.
• Letting consumers create the brand: Making customers feel like they are part of the brand’s co-creation process will increase their brand loyalty. The resulting interaction themes could be reinforced to help lead new insights and new practices.
• Creating value that withstands constant change in the consumer landscape: Companies must connect a business to a brand, not only with the value proposition but also with their promise to the customers. Marketing has evolved over the years, but its value proposition must have an adaptable quality with customers’ relationship as the foundation for decision-making.

Conclusion

The rules of marketing are changing as platforms and interactions become more democratized and digitalized. The connection culture of communities, collaborations, and customers have grown to be key players in creating successful company offerings. Orchestrating the organic synergies among these audiences provides informative trends and signals that will allow them to acclimate and demonstrate resilience in marketing’s ever-evolving consumer landscape.

Watch the full event here:

• 9:56 – The next steps in terms of brand marketing  
• 15:24 – The whole is greater than the sum of the parts in building an ecosystem 
• 18:14 – The consumer creates the brand 
• 31:36 – The importance of brand purpose and communicating it to your audience 
• 36:52 – Beyond branding and new opportunities 

This segment was part of The Interaction Field Series of our LinkedIn Live Events. Please connect with us on our LinkedIn page to stay updated with our upcoming conversations.

The post Customers & Communities First: The New Drivers of Marketing with Dartmouth College’s Kevin Lane Keller appeared first on Vivaldi.

Businesses need to transform from the inside out, yet learn that in today’s market value is generated when you bring outsiders in. Closed off and siloed firms with rigid hierarchies that stifle innovation and efficiency are no longer fit for purpose in an agile and connected world.

In our report, Vivaldi’s brand building experts share winning approaches to tackle these challenges and unlock growth opportunities in five key areas:

1. Brand Leadership

Presented with a sea of uniformity, 86% of B2B buyers cannot discern a meaningful difference between supplier offerings. B2B companies need to reconsider what they stand for and how their firm is really perceived.

Brand-led transformation offers a clear opportunity to stand out. Brands that can articulate their value proposition and differentiate their positioning will cut through. Those without a purpose driven brand strategy and corporate identity will lose the ability to form human connections with employees and customers.

2. Marketing Performance

B2B marketers need a performance measurement system to improve marketing effectiveness. Omnichannel demands marketing effectiveness and operational efficiency. And yet, 53% of B2B marketers fail at measuring the output of their activities.

The challenge of keeping up with a rapidly evolving digital revolution has, to this point, been a reasonable explanation for why so many B2B marketers have yet to develop performance measurement frameworks. Marketing transformation has instead been concentrated on enabling greater sophistication of communications strategies and campaigns. But businesses need both executional sophistication and performance measurement.

Planning and execution only gets businesses so far. Executives are looking at a challenging global marketplace and want proof that the marketing budget provides an ROI, and not just in terms of the bottom line. Marketing led innovation can steer corporate strategy but not when its performance is opaque. When we can’t identify our successes and failures efficiently, it not only effects our response time in tailoring our marketing tactics. It can slow down the whole company.

3. Experience Innovation

B2B buyers’ expectations are driven by their B2C experiences. B2B buyers expect a consistent brand and user experience at every touchpoint. However, B2B is widely accepted to be off the pace when it comes to delivering on the promises of digital transformation.

This gap between expectation and reality provides ample opportunity space for companies with innovation and platform strategies to thrive. However, inventive product and service design will only take you part of the way.

Buyers expect to be enticed into your brand world and guided through a personalized customer journey. They demand a coherent and seamless customer experience, and superior UX design. An ‘always on’ approach that integrates every touchpoint across all channels is vital.

With 57% of the buying process completed before the prospect first comes into contact with a salesperson, there’s a lot of room for error. However, when properly designed and executed, the online customer experience can be unbeatable.

4. Platform Thinking

The conventional pipeline is obsolete. By 2025, 30% of the world economy will be platform-based. Companies that don’t take steps now to create a customer-centric business model that can connect with and truly understand its users, risk both their relevance and their survival.

Platform thinking represents a great opportunity for B2B companies. By facilitating interactions between users and providers, platform design and development creates a competitive advantage.

The benefits of connectivity extend beyond that which occurs between a brand and its customers. Links between suppliers, even competitors, can also enable two-way value creation and generate insights that fuel growth.

Platform thinking, and the blurring of boundaries enabled by interaction fields, are radically changing what we understand brands to be. Grappling with the challenges of platformization readiness now is the key to future performance.

5. Organizational Strategy

Companies that exist in siloes are inefficient, and the demands of our increasingly complex world can only be met by more agile organizations. An aligned strategy is crucial to optimally guide marketing, sales and IT in their daily activities. Purpose-led brand strategies can catalyse organisational alignment, establishing shared values, motivating co-operation, shaping decision making with a revitalised sense of strategic direction.

Developing new business models, accelerating business transformation and executing on growth strategy requires a fundamental commitment to co-operation. Companies wanting to meet the challenges presented by a platform-based economy and the omnichannel customer experience need to break down internal barriers and eliminate rigidity. Rigidity in thought; rigidity in process; rigidity in practice. They have to become cross functional organizations that are built on a corporate culture of shared interests and trust.

Vivaldi’s unique approach to the business ecosystem and interaction fields is helping inspire change for global brands. Our experts work to create cohesive strategies capable of driving the business transformation, brand leadership and experience innovation required to meet today’s B2B challenges.

Download our report now to see best-in-class examples, advice and case studies for how businesses can meet key B2B marketing challenges and change from B2B to H2H.

The post How to turn today’s B2B marketing challenges into growth opportunities appeared first on Vivaldi.

Since then, we’ve seen marketing in the B2B sector change dramatically. Decision-makers in the B2B space will tell you that marketing and selling products has become a strictly rational procurement play. In most categories, products are sold on specs and negotiations happen in an “open book” environment. With corporate compliance more tightly enforced than ever, the “wine & dine” sales approach has lost its edge. Relying on strong personal relationships between sales staff and clients is no longer sufficient. It brings you into the game, but does not close the sale.

B2B companies find themselves in a situation where they need to undertake substantial changes in their go-to-market approach. Upgrades touch every aspect of the marketing toolkit, including leveraging their brand as a strategic asset to mitigate the effects of commoditization, and addressing customer segments instead of selling single product domains.

We reached out to over a dozen B2B clients to discuss how to be successful in this changing environment:

1)   Rethink how brand strategy and architecture help drive sales

Brand has become recognized as a key asset and differentiator in selling along the whole funnel. While in absolute terms, rational aspects still account for up to 95% of the decision, these criteria get increasingly commoditized. All the executives we spoke to agreed that in a scenario where all else is equal, smaller details become the lynch-pin of each decision. Trust in a brand has become indispensable, and a strong and differentiated brand strategy is more necessary than ever. Robert Struble from Vitro Architectural Glass explains that for his company, “product specifications are often reused from project to project, so they have the effect of fueling additional sales once the brand has been qualified and included in the specification. This produces a multiplying effect over time, but it all begins with brand strength.” Meanwhile, BayWa’s Stephan Meyer tells us it also ends with brand strength, since: “The brand’s trust accompanies all actions of our sales people even in the final stage of negotiations.” Going beyond that, Welbilt’s Caitlin Rodgers shares that brand is also a way to get in front of customers’ future needs, by allowing “potential customers to see us as the sole provider of a solution to their problem.”

In the past, brand has often been reduced to logos and corporate designs. Today, there is an increasing demand from the B2B C-suite to leverage brand as a strategic asset. First and foremost, this translates to defining a Brand Identity with a set of highly relevant and distinguished values. Daniela Kahlert from Roche Diagnostics points out how important their brand pillars of precision, quality, and efficiency are in order to outrank competition, specifically when risk-averse customers are deciding on a healthcare provider, while PWC’s Jan-Hendrik Voelke-Albert sees brand as the only sustainable factor of differentiation in professional services.

Florian vom Bruch from leading paper company Felix Schoeller elevates the discussion further to brand architecture, which serves as a strategic instrument to convert prospects along the funnel: “The umbrella brand is especially important when establishing new contacts as it arouses general interest. The more concrete the offering phase gets, the more the product brand comes into play.” Each product brand must play its own strategic role, much like a football player within a team formation.

2)   Extend your customer journey understanding to include a B2B2C perspective

Brand plays a significant role, more so than ever. Asset management firm Amundi’s Daniela Kuespert shares: “The brand is important to be part of the “Relevant Set” when clients are making a purchase decision.” Furthermore, as Anuj Todi from cement leader LafargeHolcim and Alexander Özbahadir from elevator giant Schindler point out, brand positioning needs to be activated along the whole customer journey in order for companies to truly meet their brand potential. Both emphasize that B2B brand management must not stop with the business buyer but needs to engage the end-user or consumer. Simona’s Eric Schoenel elaborates, drawing on his experience from the plastics markets: “The stronger your brand is, the easier it is for distributors to pay attention, visualize and sell your brand.” This then creates a brand-driven pull-effect from corporate buyers through the whole distribution chain, to the end-users.

To achieve this, it is important to thoroughly analyze the customer journey and the customers’ customers’ journeys. Customers increasingly expect their “vendors” to become knowledgeable partners and category captains. Many B2B pure-plays are transforming into a B2B2C ecosystem. Only with deep insight into relevant brand-shaping moments can companies precisely target audiences. Correspondingly, Vitro’s Pat Kenny explains: “We’ve process mapped the ‘journeys’ of our customers and other important channel decision-makers to design new programs to attack, simplify, and reduce pain-points in their business processes.” Meanwhile, Teradata’s Erin Fagan calls for “laser alignment and deep penetration to consistently improve your marketing efforts.”  

3)   Expand into services, solutions, and even platform business models

Another important angle for an enhanced go-to-market approach for B2B businesses is to expand their offering portfolio. Marketing and sales need to jointly pave the way and provide the rest of the organization with the relevant customer insights to enable agile innovation and design thinking sprints beyond classical product offerings. As Margherita Fontana tells us, Dow’s building material range offers “more and more solutions” beyond its classical product portfolio. Daniela Kahlert also agrees on the need for new solution offerings, portraying the situation in the healthcare industry: “We witness increasing commoditization, as product innovations that could be a competitive advantage, get rewarded only with a time lag [before others quickly follow].” Likewise, Pat Kenny notes the rapid commoditization: “The product advantage we’ve enjoyed during the past 15-20 years has been compromised by the emergence of well-capitalized, very profitable competitors and the globally available fabrication equipment which standardizes, even commoditizes, value-added product offerings. These market trends have emphasized the importance of value creation by service innovation.”

In addition, Vivaldi has an increasing number of clients engaging in discussions on platform business models. The desire to grow exponentially and profit from an asset-light platform business model has spawned new innovation initiatives. Marketing plays a major role in creating connections with other players in the broader ecosystem, ramping up new platform participants, and creating consumer demand. Stefan Kirmse from Wacom explains: “This is exactly what is on our plate today. We are transforming our company from a hardware manufacturer to a solutions provider in the digital ink and digital stationery category. Since digital ink goes beyond the written word, and contains enormous amounts of data, we are exploring many ways to become a  platform business model with partners in our broader ecosystem.”

Conclusion: Marketing’s Seat in the Boardroom

In conclusion, B2B businesses are strengthening their integrated marketing and sales efforts. They are taking branding and marketing as seriously as B2C companies already have over the past decades. How important marketing and branding efforts are to B2B companies has shifted from being standard traditional advertising and campaigns on trade show floors to becoming actual business drivers. This new significance comes at a price: marketers need to be increasingly accountable and document their impact on sales and company growth. From our experience, we know that brand has a lasting impact as “it enhances the value of the company, creates the identity, communicates the purpose, and makes it easier to acquire new customers,” explains Caitlin Rodgers. Strong brands “will be top of mind or of first recall when an individual needs to source a particular type of service,” Andre Biane from AIB International says. “I believe a company with the right brand identity, supported with the right messaging, can distinguish itself from competition, separate itself from being perceived as a commodity, all of which helps to grow one’s business.”

We want to thank the business leaders mentioned in this article for kindly sharing their perspective with our community.

Header image above credited to Chris M Forsyth.

The post Leadership Lessons: Marketing in B2B appeared first on Vivaldi.

Stay tuned for the full audio recording.

The post Erich Joachimsthaler Inducted as Fellow of Prestigious ISBM appeared first on Vivaldi.

To be recognized as an ISBM Fellow, an individual must be a senior scholar/thought leader in one or more domains of BtoB marketing who is dedicated to advancing both the theory and the practice of the discipline through their research, their scholarship, their teaching and their hands-on involvement with the practice community.

Erich will also be giving a keynote address during the day titled, “A Revolution is Coming in How Business Marketers Create Value Across Industries and Markets,” that will explore how platform models are transforming the future of business and the key strategies brands can enforce today.

The post Vivaldi Founder & CEO Erich Joachimsthaler to be Inducted as ISBM Fellow appeared first on Vivaldi.

This was one of the topics discussed at the latest ISBM meeting that Vivaldi attended along with a number of ideas for b2b marketers. ISBM is a great network of business-to-business marketers, a discipline that is near and dear to our heart at Vivaldi. We argue that b2b selling relationships are based on trust, and that a solid reputation can be short-cut in what is a long and complex selling process – which makes brand central to the value proposition in b2b. B2b brands also often have very complex, multiple targets that require a sophisticated messaging architecture, nuanced by target audience but building up to a common theme – so we would argue that b2b branding often involves more complexity that consumer branding.

A few key ideas emerged as “red threads” across the meeting as ideas for b2b marketers. First, the idea of “challenger salespeople” (a concept from the recent Corporate Executive Board book) as being the most effective –  salespeople who throw off buyers by offering an entirely new, unexpected perspective. This concept is akin to Daniel Pink’s idea that sales today is more about “problem-finding” (i.e. identifying a problem the customer may not be aware of) rather than “problem-solving (executing a predetermined approach for a problem that may not fit the mold). One of the meeting participants shared her allergy of “problem-solving” as a cliché of b2b branding – a sure candidate for killing on any b2b company’s boilerplate. In contrast, “problem-finder” brands train their salespeople to think content, not sales tactics. Just as in the digital world, savvy brands act as publishers (using content marketing or sometimes even native advertising that were much discussed), effective sales today means more than sales – more than order-taking –  more than service  – but “problem finding”. Challenger salespeople internalize what the brand stands for and live it out ruthlessly, and “problem-finder” brands train their sales teams to carry its values even in the most tricky situations.

The second idea was to have a marketing approach targeted at every stage of the funnel – which in a digital ecosystem can become much more precise. Advanced targeting (through tools such as Semcasting)  can help identify buyers from specific companies. Analytics can dig deeper through attribution modeling (with tools such as C3) that lays out the buying process through a series of touchpoints (online banners, blogs, social media) and helps understand the link between “early-funnel” tools and the final buying decision. Retargeting can then help drive prospects more efficiently through the funnel by adding additional touchpoints for prospects identified as high potential (e.g. by adding advertising, offering rebates etc).  3rd party data overlay helps gather data from a number of sources into a consistent model. Finally, demand-side platforms can help optimize the marketing budget by avoiding intermediary mark-ups.

Finally, beyond a more targeted distribution focused on the most promising buyers, the engagement strategy for each funnel stage also relies on targeting content. There was a great discussion on the role and changing nature of content – from “content is king” of the late 1990s to today’s targeted content: we are not talking anymore about one type of content but about targeted content for each funnel stage. Content to build awareness or reputation will not be the same as content conducive to building trial or loyalty. In a similar vein, talking about “bite-sized” content may be misleading – one of the great comments was that bite-sized will always lack depth for sophisticated buyers such as engineers. In b2b, the size of the bite is different from what consumers can chew off.

As a conclusion, companies often put a lot of creativity into defining their brand – to extract their ROI, the same level of creativity is needed for an engagement program that will make sure that the new brand is truly internalized by the sales force who are equipped to become “problem finders” and challenge clients. Similarly, the marketing plan for the new brand is central to its success – this is where the rubber hits the road. This marketing plan needs to be thought through on a granular level – with specific tools and approaches for each stage of the funnel. The tool palette of the b2b marketer has expanded dramatically, and making the right choices is what will determine whether the brand gets enough visibility or not. Launching a new brand is the crowded b2b space is hard enough – you are better off getting all your ducks in a row first.

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