Don’t Let Your Wholesale B2B Business Be Engulfed Among the Competitors!

Are there examples of successful wholesale B2B strategies? Originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

As a marketing executive, my position has a unique goal: to create sales leads for the sales team. This does not mean that I don’t care about the brand, reputation, the existence of social media, marketing or other buzzwords, but “leads” are the top priority of marketing. If we don’t fill the company’s sales channels, nothing else makes sense.

To do this, I have six B2B marketing strategies. Originally, these are things that I care about. Until the CEO and Chief Sales Officer affirmed, I am sure that we are making great progress. First of all, the marketing team and I gave myself a quarter of time to develop a B2B marketing strategy, because no amount of time cost is unacceptable! I am not saying that it is easy, but if it is easy, they will not hire me.

B2B Marketing Strategy 1: Marketing/Sales Alliance

My team met with the chief sales officer for the first time. We need to personally understand the sales team’s needs for sales leads. Our second meeting was with the sales manager and sales team members. They are our new focus group. From there, we will arrange as many team discussions as possible to determine the sales staff’s definition of ideal prospects and what qualified prospects mean to them. We will also jointly decide how to measure our search for qualified and potential customers and introduce them into the sales channel. There are no stupid slogans in this, we just need to set goals and start planning to produce results.

B2B Marketing Strategy 2: Marketing Automation

We will have a marketing automation platform and predictive analytics integrated into our website, fully tested and ready to be completed within 90 days. As a marketing team, this is vital to our future success. We will not treat this as a scientific experiment! We don’t have a year to think and establish research. In 90 days from today, the sales team will rely on us to launch the first goal. I have provided a list of recommended marketing tools and platforms. I told my team that if they need external help to find the right marketing automation software, Then please use action to obtain it. If we create a good sales opportunity, it will easily cover the first step of the entire plan.

B2B Marketing Strategy 3: Social Media And Inbound Marketing

We don’t need a meeting to decide “Should we use WeChat, blog, or a company like us to use Weibo?” We will have an effective social media strategy. Within 90 days, a lead generation plan and a monitoring plan must be prepared. At the start, our executives, subject matter experts, customer service and sales teams will all be involved. It will not be perfect, but we will improve it over time.

We will also implement a social sales strategy, and the sales team will show how to effectively use LinkedIn to find and locate key decision makers in target customers.

B2B Marketing Strategy 4: Predictive Marketing

An accurate target potential customer database is critical to the success of our marketing automation program. The marketing department will provide these potential customers. However, together with the sales department, we are defining the ideal prospects and creating an optimal point matrix, so we all agreed to build a database. But the database has just begun. We will also implement predictive analysis tools to compare each potential customer in our database with our best customer’s common feature matrix. Through the use of big data and artificial intelligence, we will scientifically know that our sales team should focus on breaking down super users.

B2B Marketing Strategy 5: Content Creation

Our content creation plan has two goals:

• Create a lot of powerful content to answer the questions of our potential customers and bring them closer to the results they expect, whether they buy from us or not. This strategy makes us a trusted advisor.
• Make sure that we have the appropriate technology and processes to evaluate and train potential customers who interact with our content until they are ready to pay.

The content we create will be used with our marketing automation platform and new website (you will see below) to attract, educate and certify our potential customers. We believe that this is the full-time responsibility of marketing, not just something that happens outside of other tasks, so we created a new role of content director and established a formal job description based on the best practices of good content marketers.

Our blog and website will be the center of our content, but it will also be integrated into our social media strategy. Of course, it can also provide our external marketing work when we start to cultivate a new database of potential customers. Of course, People need to pass our new marketing automation platform!

B2B Marketing Strategy 6: Adaptive Website and Account-Based Marketing

The website has changed. In the early 1990s, typical corporate websites advertised how brilliant the company was and how many awards they won. In the early 2000s, websites became more “educational” as the company recognized the shift from talking to sales representatives to online research.

“In the era of Sales 1.0, in order to obtain information about our products and services, potential customers must talk to salespeople. Today, they first check our website and quickly form a first impression. And, if we finish our work, we “‘S website will become their “steer” resource throughout the buying cycle, and often exceed expectations.” Anneke Seley, author of Sales 2.0 said.

We know that our website needs to do a lot of work to become a “preferred resource” and provide these results. We will achieve this goal based on our sales in market segmentation, as well as the new features of our marketing automation software, as well as social media integration, and all the outputs of our new content plan. All of this will come together on a new website that will be launched at the end of our planned 90 days.

Once we modify the content, we will develop an account-based marketing website where customized content will be provided to specific audiences. I have provided a list of recommended marketing tools and platforms, and I told my team that if they need external help to find the right account-based marketing software and put everything in place, please go get it. I also told them to be familiar with these 11 strategies that drive your ABM process.

This brings us back to where we started: “Sales and marketing together!” As far as the marketing team is concerned, sales themselves are our customers and we will do everything we can to make them successful. When they win, we win, and the company wins.

Contributed by Chel Sunkiss, Sales Executive at FashionTIY (2014-present)