The Buddha’s tenet for modern day sales strategies – Part II

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Closing a sale takes time

 

Every time I pick up the phone and call or come up with a Sales campaign, it takes anywhere few days to few weeks to at least see some measurable results. And it takes weeks and months to optimize to a point where I can get a cost per lead/ conversion cost. People see the results not the point where is actually started the process. It’s like weight loss infomercial. You don’t see the people going to gyms, you just see the before and after result in one second split image.

Buddha had simply stated the fact that it takes drop by drop to fill the jug.

People don’t see the countless hours of endless emails, non-stop calls, fine-tuning, testing, media creation, and all that hard stuff no one wants to do.
So stop focusing on these “I need results NOW” and focus on the little things that eventually accumulate to a big thing. All good things come to those who wait and have the patience to see the real outcome. Don’t be in a hurry, wait and watch for yourself how patience can help you achieve a lot more in business.

The Buddha said be Attached while you are detached
You only lose what you cling to – Buddha

If you are one or have had the opportunity to meet a new entrepreneur or marketer, you will not escape the feeling that they’re often in “LOVE” with their ideas. They put in their heart and soul and get into a complete vacuum to bring this idea alive even if the idea is not validated or it’s a product that no one needs or wants.

What happens is anybody’s guess. The business goes kaput.

The entrepreneurs so in love with their ideas and invention were stuck on the idea of the event and not the process. In such a scenario they lose hope as well as motivation.

Instead, why not lay emphasis and focus on bettering yourself and becoming a better marketer? Throw your ideas around and test them to see if people are willing to pay for them, instead of using all that time and money to make something you THINK people want?

But the most important part is to DETACH yourself from what happens and not get attached to the idea in the first place.

If the idea fails, move on quickly. Don’t dwell in it. Pick up pointers and learn from what happened and try again. There is no dearth of good ideas out there. Pull yourself up and do it again.

Why is using customer data in B2B marketing important

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A new four letter word seems to have taken over a lot of minds these days. It’s called DATA. When it comes to B2B marketing, it is something whose importance cannot be undermined. The four letter word has become absolutely essential to running a successful marketing campaign. If you’re missing out on mining your company’s data to help fortify your B2B marketing efforts then you’re missing out on innumerable resources that are readily available to you.

 

The use of data not only aids in better defining your target audience but also helps you to attract higher quality leads as also assists in personalizing your marketing, allowing you to build long-lasting and stronger relationships with the businesses you’re targeting.
The following are a few examples of how the use of data can benefit your B2B marketing strategy.

Augmenting data from various sources
When you collect first hand data from the interaction that you’ve had with targeted businesses, it is known as First party data. It could anything from their purchase history or their history of downloads from your site like eBooks or white papers. This kind of data is extremely helpful in targeting leads using email marketing.
But there is one other point that you need to keep in mind and that is augmenting the use of first party data with that of third party data. Now third party data is data that is collected from outside providers, which means it’s data that you haven’t collected from your users.
Third party data comes handy if you wish to better understand your customers’ wants and needs. This in turn allows you to create more accurate buyer personas. So when you actually get down to creating buyer personas, please remember to consider customer demographics, psychographic characteristics, values, pain-points, motivations, goals, favorite brands, and preferred channels of communication.

Segmenting and personalizing
By poring over both first party and third party data, you’ll not only be defining your target group but also be able to segment them so that you’re not just marketing towards one of your potential target audiences. Remember, it is a possibility to have more than one target audience.
To elucidate our point, let’s look at startups and medium-sized enterprises. They both fall into the business category but at the same time they have very different pain-points and will require different messaging. Generally speaking, startups would be more interested in some issues such as affordability, whereas medium-sized enterprises would be more interested in reliability.
You can divide your marketing using the data you have collected so that you can personalize your marketing energies more, such as by directly targeting startup companies with a particular email while directly targeting mid-sized companies with another. You can meet their specific needs using this method.

Targeted marketing
It will come as no surprise to you when you start applying the data you have collected from customers, you will notice that your target base shrinks to quite a small number. This does not necessarily mean lesser sales.
This is turn is a good practice because when you focus on a targeted audience, you generally have a much higher success rate. Whereas with a broader target, you’re probably wasting your resources on businesses that won’t be interested in your products or services.
If you look at it closely, you will realize that targeted marketing only helps you go a long way and establish new relations. It’s not just that the use of data can help, it’s that not using data can actually be detrimental to your marketing efforts. By ignoring your consumer data, your message will end up falling on deaf ears, which means a big part of your marketing budget is going to waste.

A Small Team Can Make It BIG

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One of the most significant learnings I picked up while working for a number of startups and running a few of my own is that a startup is extremely different from a large company. In a startup, you’re at it to identify and determine your selling point as well as your proposition and create an unparalleled rapport with your first key customers. This has been even mentioned and talked about in Eric Ries’ ‘The Lean Startup’.

To make it easier for startups to build a team, it would help to take a look at some of the pointers I picked up on the way:

Dream big but start really small
A tight team offers a lot of advantages. They bond faster and communicate much better. With fewer people on board who are supposed to be the corridors of power, the chances of doing experiments also rise. Accountability is also high because the number of people you can pass the blame on it are far less! And who doesn’t remember the ‘two-pizza’ quote. So start small if you wish to make it big.

Make sure everyone can do everything
A small team doesn’t mean limited skills. A lean team has no option but to be cross-functional. It’s the skill sets and diversity of all the team members that can add another dimension to the working atmosphere. A siloes approach will not work with a small team so everyone will have to contribute and pull up their socks at all times. Ask for volunteers if you think the numbers don’t add up.

Articulate assumptions with care
A lean team can only benefit from spending some extra time detailing the assumptions and experiments regarding the business to prove or disprove them. The idea of applying science to a startup is intuitive. But actually doing it takes some real practice, and perseverance. We at Sellosphere have definitely learned it the hard way! We highly recommend looking for examples to compare against your work.

Make your team smart
Invest in team trainings, focus on professional development at each level. Go for some really robust programs for your people and make sure they act as team members and not individuals. It is imperative that employees know and understand the importance of being effective contributors in making a successful team. They need to realize that a team’s collective intelligence can work wonders.

Always observe
It is a no brainer that being in a startup is a learning opportunity. You’re testing waters and charting new territory with a few more people by your side. Once you stop considering yourself as a frontier observing new territory that you don’t fully understand and will take time to conquer, you’ll stop learning. This could hinder your growth and is most definitely a hand brake on your progress that you need to carefully avoid.

Debunking the myths of B2B marketing

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When we, as an agency meet clients, we are more often than not met with questions that are cringe-worthy. When clients want to dig deeper and want to know, “Which of these designs has skyrocketed our competitor’s sales?”, we want to say that along with the design, there definitely was a strategy in place coupled with content as well as creative.

So, we decided to give it a shot and come up myths around B2B marketing and try to solve them in laymen terms for everyone out there.

We at Sellosphere design, create, curate tonnes of campaigns, lead generation programs, and creative assets each month, and we can humbly say that our sphere is that of a fair amount of expertise and domain knowledge. And even though each and every one of those deliverables is culled out from actionable data and deep insights. We believe or definitely would love to believe that our work is customized for each one of clients. It’s not a cookie-cutter solution that we are making available to our partners. We look at our client’s objective, do a proper research of our target audience, and only then do we offer solutions

 

It would be sort of utopic to think that agencies like ours have a bag full of ideas, and our task is simplified to just picking and selecting one or a few more ideas from the bag to suit the client’s needs. Another point that needs to be noted is that best practices, even those that have a proven track record, are not in the least an absolute case.
There is nothing in the world including marketing that works 100% of the time. For every accepted norm and guideline in B2B marketing, there is at least one outlier, one organization, one campaign that has gone against the tide and done well anyway.
Another aspect and an important one is that consumer behaviour is never the same. It is constantly changing. Technology evolves and transforms its surrounding. What worked half a decade ago might or might not work in today’s day and age.
As marketers, we need to evolve and change with the time too. If we just decide to go with the flow and do what has already been done, we might not reach a great height any time soon. We need to take lessons from history, not necessarily replicate them all the time. We need to take risks. We need to think out of the box. And we need to become that one organization that everyone looks up to and wants to copy!

Some pointers you can consider as you climb up the B2B ladder.
Embrace transparency
Investing more in social media
Make an emotional connect with the partner
There is definitely room for silly creativity on B2B marketing
B2B marketing is not too different from B2C marketing