Take B2B Marketing to the Next Step with In-Person Meetings
As building products marketers, it’s amazing to think of the amount of time and energy we spend planning out the perfect marketing tools and strategies. Sales enablement is one such tool that is becoming increasingly prevalent and effective. Done right, sales enablement can provide your team with the tools needed to generate and nurture more qualified leads and close more deals. But what can often go overlooked is what comes after sales enablement—the real, human-to-human contact that finalizes a sale.
It’s not just sales enablement that can fall victim to this, either. A lot of marketers spend time creating highly detailed, specific marketing campaigns, lead scoring systems, special trade show events, and so on, but never develop follow-up plans to determine what will actually be done with the leads produced from their efforts. Put simply, you can collect all the form submissions you want on a landing page, but if you’re not doing anything with those submissions other than sending them more automated emails, you’re not accomplishing much.
And yet, it’s more common than you think. Marketers fail to turn over qualified leads to sales, and salespeople fail to pick up the phone and call the leads they do get from marketing. It’s an endless cycle of unproductivity if not addressed.
As B2B marketers, we cannot rely on digital-only tactics or even sales enablement alone. Face-to-face is still the best method of actually closing a sale. Just look at a few stats I found in a recent Marketing Daily article:
- In-person meetings are 85% more effective than virtual meetings, and this is even true for existing customers (65%)
- For complex products and services (AKA most B2B purchases), decisions are made more on the basis of organizational/personal relationships and trust than technical features and functions
- Cognitive studies prove that, in B2B sales, there needs to be an emotional connection beyond analytics
- Overall outcomes of group purchases are far superior when there are face-to-face meetings with vendors, leading to both better efficiency and long-term satisfaction
Just because face-to-face is important in the B2B world doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to incorporate digital marketing and/or sales enablement. Instead, consider what your marketing can do to prime a prospect for a face-to-face meeting. And consider what sales enablement tools you can provide that will make the biggest impact for your sales team during a trade show or another face-to-face meeting with a buyer.
To read the full article from Marketing Daily, click here.
