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How to Survive
The Great Marketing Wipeout of 2009:
How to Make Yourself Indispensable to
Your Company or Your Client (Part 2)

by Eric Gagnon

Last week, we described some of the tell-tale signs of marketing activities and attitudes that you need to cut, slash, and burn to get your marketing program realigned for success in a down economy.

This week and next, we get to the core of what you need to do to keep your job, or your client, as companies reassess their marketing programs and people, and as they determine which of those involved in developing and executing those programs will make a positive contribution to keeping sales on a steady (and, hopefully, upward) path ahead as we move through this recession.

In marketing, as in other areas, those who can produce will stay, and those who can’t will be let go. If you want to be in the first group, read on . . .

What Works, and What To Do: The Key to Being Indispensable

Even in the worst economy, companies will still need to buy things from other companies, which means your company needs to sell the products these companies need to buy. This also means you must still run ads, mailings, trade shows, online marketing programs, and the other marketing activities required to generate leads for your products or services.

The main difference now is that all your marketing costs will be highly scrutinized and held accountable for their contribution to sales, and no other criteria. This means running marketing programs that generate measurable sales leads, and having the capability, through lead development, to convert these sales leads to sales closed by your sales team, to produce a measurable ROI on the marketing activity that generated the lead in the first place.

The way to make yourself indispensable in B2B marketing is to serve sales. By “serve,” I don’t mean toadying, brown-nosing, or acting like some kind of galley slave to your company’s sales VP and their reps. I mean re-orienting your marketing program to its three core functions:

1.) Generating sales leads;
2.) Developing those sales leads into paying customers;
3.) Executing on marketing opportunities to make more sales

The idea of “service” should never be demeaning to you as a marketing professional. After all, the military serves our country, and no true American sees this as demeaning for those who serve. In business, everyone has to serve someone: Your company’s board of directors serves your shareholders, your CEO serves the board of directors, and your VP of Finance serves the CEO. The job of your company’s sales reps is to serve their prospects and customers, and your job as a marketing professional is to serve sales.

In addition to the attitude adjustment we described last week, here are four tangible steps you can take to reform your marketing program, make it productive in a tough market, and keep your job or your client.

1.) Optimize every marketing program to serve sales by generating leads

One of the first things you can do for your marketing program is to increase the clarity and boldness in the presentation of all of your deliverables used in your marketing program, and re-orient them to the goal of motivating readers (print ads, mailings) or viewers (Web site, video) to take the next step—usually contacting your company for more information.

Your company’s sales team is an invaluable resource for offering the raw content that can be developed into strong benefits you can use to product more effective sales copy. We covered the process of the “sales rep de-brief” in a previous TMN, accessible here.

This means re-working any ad, mailing, or other piece of collateral that doesn’t offer prospects a clear benefit, doesn’t answer the most likely immediate questions they have about your product’s features, benefits, and applications, and doesn’t tell your prospect what you would like them to do next—call your company, visit your Web site, etc.

Here are some links to previous issues of TMN covering effective copy and presentation in marketing deliverables:

Clear Presentation: What You Say is More Important than How You Say It

Getting Better Sales Copy: Three-Step Sales Copy Outline Exercise for Marketing Managers

Ugly Little Ads that Sell: How to Make a Smaller Ad Pull Better Than a Bigger One

Once you introduce clarity and boldness into your ads and deliverables, and assuming you are using the right copy approach, you will have eliminated the doubt that the copy and presentation in your deliverables could have been more effective from the standpoint of selling and motivating your reader or viewer.

Ruling out your deliverable and its presentation as a cause of poor response then places the weight of success or failure on other factors, such as prospect targeting and market selection, or the publication, mailing list, trade show, or other “marketing media” used in the marketing activity. It also allows you to eliminate any marketing activity that doesn’t measure up to your desired return, and replace it with another one.

Always include an offer: While you are improving the clarity and boldness of your deliverables, don’t forget to include the final element required to motivate readers to respond now to your ad, mailing, letter, or other deliverable: A special savings offer, free access to a white paper or other information premium etc., and tell your prospect, clearly, what they need to do to receive it, and how to contact your company.

2.) Serve sales by being highly responsive

The marketer who excels in this new economic environment won’t be the self-styled marketing or ad genius who dreams up a killer concept, but the hard-working professional who wakes up every morning and asks him/herself: “What am I doing for sales today?”

In addition to your primary roles in running lead generation and lead development programs, as a marketing professional there are many smaller things you can do for your sales team that, over time, that can produce big returns for sales, and for your standing in your company, or with a client.

This means looking at sales from your sales rep’s perspective, and helping your sales team with the many smaller, individual marketing-related projects that add up to big improvements in prospect conversions. Here are a few examples:

Making ongoing improvements and additions to marketing collateral and other material in your company’s CRM marketing and sales document library;

Documenting or developing effective voice mail scripts for use by your sales team for various sales situations, problem/solution descriptions, promotions, etc.;

Working with sales to help them make their presentation materials more effective, based on feedback received from your sales team during field sales calls;

Making improvements to ads, mailings, offers, and other marketing deliverables and programs, clarifying key product benefits and features in copy, based on feedback received from your sales team

Throughout each day, there are many opportunities to apply your communication and execution skills as a marketer to make your sales team’s job of presenting your product and closing sales easier and more productive. There are also many opportunities to learn from salespeople, because they’re the ones who’ve learned a thing or two themselves about what it takes to communicate with their prospects and convince them to buy your product, and not someone else’s product.

Listening, learning, and responding to what you learn by providing tangible improvements to the sales process makes you the marketing professional who is responsive to sales, and being responsive to sales helps you develop better, more effective marketing programs.

3.) Support high-level sales initiatives

As you become closer and more responsive to the needs of your sales team, you’ll soon become aware of the major account selling opportunities they are working on. Here, sales reps can gain great benefit from your ability to clearly present and effectively execute the content of the communications and messaging for their in-person contact and ongoing communications with their high-level prospects.

Every major account selling opportunity provides many opportunities for you to add marketing value to improve the clarity, persuasive power, and effectiveness of the case being presented by your rep, for your company and its product.

Common field presentation scenarios that occur in major account selling situations often mean addressing the following issues:

• Making the case for your product or system to dislodge a firmly established product, system, or method the company is using now—i.e., overcoming prospect inertia or the entrenched status quo;

• Clearly presenting your product’s feature set and pricing, comparing these with competitive offerings, and describing why yours is better for the prospect’s specific need or application;

• Making an effective business case for your product to each of the other decision-makers from other company disciplines (finance, IT, engineering, etc.) brought in by the lead prospect as they draw closer to making their final purchase decision, from the standpoint of the job functions, interests, and concerns of each of these prospects;

• Effectively presenting your company’s product as the best solution for the prospect’s unique problem, based on a clear understanding of this problem and confirmation of the urgency and importance of this problem with the prospect

Every one of these sales scenarios above presents an opportunity for you to provide a marketing solution that effectively frames the argument and the response to this argument. These communications can take the form of product comparison and competitive matrix charts, handouts, PowerPoint presentations, white papers, etc., often produced especially to address the specific selling opportunity. Some of these materials, once developed, can be reworked for other opportunities, or made more generic, so they can be made available in your CRM document library or other storehouse for use by the entire sales team for other sales opportunities.

Joint business development opportunities: Another type of major account selling opportunity involves joint business development deals, where your company will be combining its sales and marketing efforts in cooperation with a partner company, to jointly sell products in the other company’s market. These deals may also involve joint product development, where products are modified, combined, and sold as a new solution for their market.

Here, a highly effective approach is to help your sales team help their prospects visualize the end result of “the deal,” by developing prototypes, comps, and other presentation materials that illustrate the marketing programs, deliverables, and product presentation that your company can provide for the deal.

Developing the marketing-focused presentation and deliverables that help your company close and succeed with these major business development projects can literally make your career as a marketing professional, and works very well for scouting possible new business opportunities for your company (below).

4.) Look over the horizon to new business growth

Helping your company by scouting ahead for new opportunities to market and sell your product is one of the most important roles you can play as a sales-oriented marketing professional. Often, being successful at getting your company into new markets and opening up new marketing opportunities can be the ultimate job security for marketers who have already proven their ability to execute competently and well in their day-to-day marketing program.

Even if new business development is handled by others in your company, as a marketer, you bring unique background and skills you can apply to this process. This includes the knowledge you gain by being close to the needs and wants of customers and prospects (and your sales team), and, most important—your ability to reach markets with effective marketing programs that generate demand in areas where new business can be found.

Marketing-related growth: The first step to scouting new opportunities to develop new business starts with assessing the marketing-related possibilities available:

Marketing: Are there new major markets, sub-markets, or niches we haven’t yet reached with a concerted marketing effort? If so, how can I begin reaching these markets and segments with a new marketing test or marketing program?

Pricing: Are there variations we can make to our pricing, or new price promotions we can offer that, in combination with these new markets, can help us build new business outside of our current market?

Distribution: Are there new and untried methods to distribute our products, such as new distribution networks, strategic partnerships, or joint ventures that can build new business for us? Major strategic business relationships can lead to major new business, especially for smaller companies that want to grow.

Product-related growth: Next come new products, or significant changes to products and/or their capabilities, to address new applications and market needs. One of the benefits of being close to sales, and being a good listener, is that it gives you an excellent vantage point to gain feedback from prospects, customers, and your sales team on other problems your product could solve for prospects, with some minor tweakage or major product engineering.

Being an effective developer of new marketing and business development opportunities helps you rise above being seen as a caretaker of existing marketing programs—a “marketing person”—and can give you a seat at the table along with others in your firm making major sales, marketing, and strategic decisions about your company. This approach, along with service to sales, are the two most important ways to prove your worth and insure your position with a company or a client.

Next week, in Part 3, we address more keys to achieving indispensability as a marketer in these times, and the most important key of all . . .

Comments? Questions? Send them to me at: eric@businessmarketinginstitute.com

Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), a director with the Business Marketing Institute, is author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook and The CRM Field Marketing Handbook, and president of GAA ( http://www.realmarkets.net ), a marketing, sales turnaround, and product development consulting firm.