Skip to main content

Sales and Marketing Unite | Oktopost Podcast

We’re very excited to share the new Oktopost podcast, B2B Marketing Now! In our first episode, Brett McNay, the Director of Enterprise Client Engagement at Bluewolf, an IBM Company, joins Jessica Stephens, Inbound Marketing Director at Oktopost to discuss sales and marketing. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, as this is the first topic of a twice monthly program. Next time we will be reviewing the power of video in B2B marketing.

 

A Few Takeaways from Episode 1

“SDRs can be a key connection between sales and marketing.”

Many successful organizations have a blurred line between the two groups, having a few SDRs that actually roll up to marketing. Having that crossover is powerful. It creates greater revenue accountability for marketing and greater brand accountability for sales, overall helping the bottom line. Additionally, the feedback loop created by sales delivering insights gleaned from prospects to the marketing team facilitates stronger content. They encounter potential customers when they are still in the early discovery phase, which provides a lot of context. If the sales team is consistently getting the same objection or hearing a gap in the external awareness of the product, sharing that with marketing (and even product) to build better messaging.

“Delivery is the alpha and omega of business development.”

Sales professionals are no longer just following up on leads. It’s all about the customer experience now. Consumers are more well informed than ever before, which means sales needs to be as well. Often, a prospect will understand feature sets pretty well by the time they have a discovery call. Or, worse yet, they think they know everything about the products they are evaluating. This being the case, especially the latter, sales teams should be prepared to deliver a full education in some cases. Sales people becoming thought leaders can be critical in a crowded market (most are), it can no longer just be a feature or pricing competition. Marketing needs to help prepare the sales team for these interactions, arming them with more than the traditional sales enablement pieces.

Quote here shared by Brett, from the book “How Clients Buy”

“ABM is fluffy”

ABM is an effective marketing strategy, not a tool. It is a heavy buzzword right now, and there are dozens of tools on the market to enable teams to more easily execute an account based marketing plan. The tools are not ABM. Programming requires a huge commitment from both sales and marketing. It completely changes success metrics, which is a hard change to make for most teams. Traditional sales strategy is not an easy thing to change. A less drastic alternative discussed is the “double funnel” concept from TOPO.

“Walking videos on LinkedIn”

Sales professionals love videos on LinkedIn. It goes hand in hand with the idea of sales sharpening their thought leadership skills. The individual’s brand developed through videos or podcasts can have a positive impact on deals won, and not just for social selling. Marketing should embrace this, making sure videos contain captions and upcycling them into the company’s content plan. A great thing to build into an employee advocacy program.



from The Oktopost Blog https://ift.tt/35AzB2E
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is a Local Citation? Local SEO

In simple SEO terms, a local citation refers to any mention of your company online. This could be in a business directory, or on an industry-specific site, a blog or any other local website. Although local citations can help you rank in local search results, they are no longer a major ranking factor . However, they are still worth considering in order to promote your business. Common citations you are likely to already know of include listings on business directory websites such as Yell or Thomson Local . A complete citation should include the name, address and phone number of your business. Local citations do not always include a link to your site although they are more valuable if they do. What do they do? Citations help rank your Google Local Pack listing (this was formerly called Google+ Local map) by providing Google with credible sources of information about your business. Citations tell Google that your business exists, is legitimate and that what you say about it is accur...
12 comments
Read more

The beginner’s guide to semantic search: Examples and tools

Ever since Google’s Hummingbird, the term “semantic search” has been thrown around a lot. Yet, the concept is often misunderstood. What is semantic search and how it helps SEO efforts? When people speak to each other, they understand more than just words. They understand the context, non-verbal cues  (facial expressions, nuances of the voice, etc.) and so much more. It comes naturally, so we don’t really appreciate how difficult it is to explain what is being communicated without the help of all “beyond-words” signals. Factors that make the lives of both Google and SEO so difficult Google is trying (and often struggling) to understand what it is that their users want (without actually seeing or hearing them) SEOs are trying to reverse-engineer what it is that Google managed to understand from their users’ queries and how to build pages that meet those mysterious criteria. As Google’s algorithm is getting more mature, it is becoming even more difficult to decode what...
8 comments
Read more

7 Boring SEO Tasks You Can Automate to Save One Day Per Week

An SEO expert’s day is filled with a plentitude of activities to rank well on Google , starting with taking care of basic content quality to backlinks, site structure, mobile user experience, and other technical features. Not to mention having to squeeze the time spent on each task between meetings, conference calls, emails, and urgent projects, which take up a large portion of the week. Before you can even think about finishing less-important SEO tasks, you are already running out of time. The truth is some tasks are too boring to complete at the end of a tiring day. But you can’t leave it on the table to handle some other day, as it will only overshadow other, more important tasks. So, what’s the way out? The good news is advanced online tools can handle your boring SEO tasks, helping you save at least one day per week for creative activities. Here are some of the boring SEO tasks you can automate now and save yourself from performing these tedious activities. 1. Automate SE...
1 comment
Read more