by tradespeopleinsights | Jan 20, 2016 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter
As we start 2016, it may be time to reflect on ways we can do better moving forward. I have found one of the biggest issues and one of the easiest ones to correct is communications between sales and marketing. Here’s a post I did last year that might give you some starting points.
Sales and marketing must work together to define the ideal client and determine how and what to get in front of them. Social media and the internet in general has changed the way people buy. Today, research is done online long before the potential customer identifies themselves to a prospective vendor. So what can you do to ensure that when the buyer is ready, you’re on the list to talk to?
This is an issue that continues to frustrate marketers and sales across the board. Both disciplines have insights to offer and neither should be working in a vacuum.I read an interesting article recently by John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing that addresses this very problem.
He states: “My take is that for organizations to take full advantage of the dramatic shift in the way people and organizations buy today they must intentionally blend inbound marketing, outbound marketing and inbound selling a way that mirrors today’s customer journey.”
He offers some suggestions on how they can work together. Here are some highlights of shared responsibilities:
- Planning – When marketing is creating a plan, involve sales. They have insights that marketing doesn’t. Their insights are invaluable in helping define the customer journey.
- Editorial – Even if sales people aren’t great writers, they certainly can identify pain points along the way and possible solutions for marketing to write about.
- Social – Make sales aware of social opportunities, whether it’s LinkedIn or participating in an industry forum that social is a good networking tool.
- Engagement – Have sales and marketing make calls together or write a proposal.
- Measurement – Forget quantity and focus on quality of lead and how you can take them down the sales funnel. Focus on creating a profitable customer.
If you liked this post you might like:
Are You Getting Your Sales Force Involved in Social Media?
How Does Social Media Impact a B-to-B Purchase?
by tradespeopleinsights | Jan 19, 2016 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Trends, Uncategorized
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter
According to a recent post in eMarketer.com, mobile is continuing to grow in the workplace. In 2014, the average non voice time U.S. adults spent on mobile devices surpassed that of desktops and laptops for the first time.
And by 2017, eMarketer.com estimates that mobile usage will increase to more than an hour a day more than desktops or laptops. This should come as no surprise to us. The next time you’re in a meeting, look around the room and see how many mobile devices are there and how many times those individuals check their devices during the course of the meeting.
So what does this mean for manufacturers who are trying to reach the professional tradesman? It means if you don’t currently have a mobile strategy, you better develop one soon! Here some areas you need to focus on:
LinkedIn, a leading BtoB social media tool, reports that 55% of all its traffic is coming from mobile in the last part of 2015. Google reported that in the U.S., more than 50% of all searches were made on mobile devices .
Similar estimates for mobile use: Facebook (58%) and Twitter (90%) are forecasted by the end of 2016.
Mobile is here to stay and we need to recognize that these are new challenges for our workforces.
by tradespeopleinsights | Jan 13, 2016 | Uncategorized
This post originally appeared on INSIGHT2PROFIT.com
It’s a common knee-jerk reaction for salespeople to focus on increasing volume by offering discounts on every sale – even if it means sacrificing margins. One way to mitigate the risk of excessive discounting is to establish a pricing system that balances volume incentives with well-defined boundaries that sales staff must operate within.
Ideally, in an effective pricing system, the framework should provide guidance for as many as 80 percent of sales. This guidance should consider a comprehensive range of factors, including the type and size of the customer, the market and the nature of the opportunity. The direction should be clear and unequivocal, providing sales staff with “guardrails” that establish minimum and maximum prices or margins. Sales staff can bounce between these guardrails as appropriate, but they should not be allowed to go above or below the established boundaries.
For the other 20 percent of sales, be prepared to manage the pricing exceptions. For these outliers, the framework allows pricing managers to enter the conversation and work with the sales staff and perhaps even the financial team to develop a strategic price appropriate for a specific situation.
By limiting exceptions to no more than 20 percent of the time, you’ll be able to equalize the competing interests of volume versus margin far better than a one-size-fits-all pricing system. Sales staff will still have the flexibility to manage the majority of sales on their own, allowing them to meet the needs of specific customers as well as their own particular quota goals. But the boundaries you set will prevent those individual goals from overriding your company’s high-level goals.
Every business is different, so the 80/20 framework that’s right for your organization will depend on the type of selling you do. If your business is list-price driven, your pricing system may be able to accommodate higher volume incentives. If you’re in a business where price is highly customized, then your framework may need a more aggressive margin component. Implementing this system may take some time, as well. Achieving the right balance of guidance and exceptions is a process that often requires fine tuning. It also requires an extensive amount of data and knowledge in order to put together a sustainable system that produces actionable, accurate and real-time insights.
Whatever the framework you decide upon, the 80/20 structure will provide sales staff with the latitude they desire, while protecting the profit margins your organization needs.
For more details on how to develop guard rails for your team and establish an 80/20 structure, check out this article.
by tradespeopleinsights | Jan 12, 2016 | Marketing Trends
By Rachel Kerstetter, PR Architect
We’ve closed the books on 2015 and 2016 is already off to a great start. If you haven’t already, now is a great time to evaluate what worked well and what didn’t work for you in 2015 to calibrate your 2016 efforts.
The most popular Tradesmen Insights posts of 2015 give us an idea of what content proved valuable enough to you to keep coming back and to share. Our top posts from last year represent many trends and challenges that aren’t going away.
Here were our top 10 posts published in 2015:
- Are you a strategic or tactical thinker?
- For Your Lead Nurturing Programs – Where do you Find Good Content?
- Why Forecasting and Budgeting are Vital to Success
- What is a creative brief?
- Did Your Website Survive Mobilegeddon?
- B2B Social Media Marketing: 5 Reasons Companies Skip Social Media And Why They’re Wrong
- What Will our B-to-B Marketing Responsibilities Look Like in 2 Years?
- What’s the Future of Small Independent Industrial Distributors?
- New Content Marketing Research for Manufacturing
- Listen…Please
Planning, strategy, content marketing, listening and adapting with the ever-changing algorithms that rule the web remain important issues into this year.
Since we started Tradesmen Insights many years ago, it’s undergone some changes, but the goal is still the same: to provide valuable B2T marketing communications information, advice and guidance.
What do you expect to be the top issues you’ll face in this year?
by tradespeopleinsights | Jan 6, 2016 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Trends
Desktop opens are still more than mobile, but the trend is closing the gap according to a recent post in emarketer.com.
Mobile click-through rates for U.S. marketing emails sent by Yesmail clients in the later part of 2015 were up close to 14%.
So what does this mean for manufacturers that are trying to reach contractors and tradesman? It means that whatever you’re trying to communicate to them, it needs to be mobile friendly. Contractors check more than emails on job sites, and the more mobile friendly you are, the better results there will be.
Besides the content they want to deliver, they need to consider apps and mobile tactics. Here are a few.
Possible Apps to Consider:
- Product information
- Engineering or other calculators
- Installation and troubleshooting instruction videos
- Productivity tools
- Competitive cross-reference charts
- Ability to check current inventory levels
- Distributor locator with direct links
If you like this post, you may want to read:
Are you using mobile to share your content with tradesman and contractors.
2016 Budget: How much are you going to spend on social media and mobile marketing?
by tradespeopleinsights | Jan 5, 2016 | Public Relations
By Rachel Kerstetter, PR Architect, Sonnhalter
Sometimes I get scared that others in the industry don’t know what PR actually is or stands for. The textbook definition of PR is simply put as Public Relations, the way that you communicate (relate) with your audiences (publics).
For 2016, I challenge you to think of PR differently than ever before. Banish words like “spin” or “promote” and instead think about PR as Performance, then Recognition.
Meaning, your organization needs to perform, do something, before seeking recognition or media coverage. The articles that practitioners like myself get for your company is called earned media, the “earned” part is very important. PR Pros can help you identify recognition-worthy aspects of your company, but we can’t create it for you out of thin air.
As you go about your business this year think about the cool things your company does, such as launching a product, breaking a world record or being the first to provide a service that adds value, and recognize that these are opportunities to communicate with your audiences.
PR is more than just getting headlines, it’s telling the stories of your company. Make 2016 a year of action stories for your public relations team to tell. Doing this will help you build your organization’s credibility in 2016.
