Jun 23, 2024 | SaaS Marketing, B2B Marketing
Value marketing and value through marketing… Wait what?!
Doing value marketing for a business revolves around:
#1: Determining what you want to achieve.
What do you want marketing to bring to your business and what do you want to give the customer through it?
#2: Choosing the appropriate information, according to your goals, and supplying it to the potential client.
Determine the quantity, type, distribution channel(s), and time when you will communicate the information.
#3: Stimulating the prospects.
Challenge them to ask questions and explore their goals and methods of achieving them. Provoke the prospects to explore the challenges before them and the tools to meet them.
#4: Maintaining two-way communication with your target audience through different channels.
A conversation is conducted by two people (at least). You are looking to build a community of brand supporters, customers of your solution, and people with a common interest in a specific topic.
In this article, we will enter the dynamic environment of technology companies with their products. We are about to consider how, with the above principles, you can do value marketing and how to derive value through marketing for B2B SaaS product companies. BUT! If that’s not your specialty, stick around because the tactics and mindset can work for you, too. Let’s start.
Deep-dive into the specifics of the tech product company
Let’s clarify some specifics of this type of company. First, we will depict its five main teams as the pillars.
The five pillars of the IT product company
We have the RnD team, responsible for developing the product, exploring new technologies that can be implemented, testing them, and creating subsequent versions of the solution.
We also have project managers and account executives – the experts who drive the work on projects to implement and maintain the product with users. They are responsible for analyzing and preparing the project plan, defining the scope, and working with the client during implementation.
On the other hand, the Sales and Marketing team positions the company and its solutions on the market, develops existing markets, enters new ones, grows a partner network, and takes care of the brand’s reputation and growth.
The Customer Support team takes care of customer satisfaction and their smooth operation with the product. It is responsible for product support after a successful go-live, communication with users for advice and help with a problem, and striving to delight them with guidance and practical advice.
We also have the financial and administrative side of the business. It compiles the budgets, analyzes the results achieved by the various parts of the company, forecasts growth for future periods, and defines the risks before making a profit. To summarize, it comes up with the best plan to allocate and utilize finances to drive the company’s growth and keep margins high.
Finally, we will mention the management of the company. It maintains the focus on the individual units and the overall work in the organization. Coordinates the efforts of team members and provides impetus when needed.
The interaction of marketing with other units
Each team impacts and interacts with the company’s marketing and sales. They influence the strategy and tactics, determine the main messages that the business communicates, and generate information about the products, services, and dynamics in the organization. One of the marketing objectives is to take the essential information and use it to enhance the feeling and perception of the brand.
The SnM supports effective communication between the individual units and increases employee awareness about the innovations in the business, the product, and the services. This creates the synchronicity between solution, expertise, target market, and corporate mindset. Therefore, good marketing is born from the inside out, the root starts from the company’s core and the flower unfolds in front of the market.
Inside-out marketing for B2B IT companies
Inside-out marketing helps to:
- Achieve awareness among the people in it about the novelties along with the product, about the plans for business development, etc.
- Build a unified team spirit and common understanding of company principles and values.
- Stimulate the exchange of ideas and innovation.
All this is evident when company employees communicate with outsiders, be it partners, customers, or brand supporters. It gives the impression that this is a cohesive team with a clear vision of who they help, why they help them, what they help them with, and how they do it. That is, a sense of reliability and professionalism is instilled.
“The Incredible Adventures of an IT Company” as written by Marketing
Another feature of technology product companies is the topics they can generate content for. Life in this type of company has several aspects and a mix can occur between:
- Corporate news
- Content about products and services
- General topics that interest the target audiences and are related to the company’s activities
- Niche topics where the business seeks to position itself as a leading expert
The knowledge that a brand can share loses its value if the information turns into disorganized content.
The importance of human contact
Finally, the technology company provides a product with accompanying services in a digital environment that must not confine marketing only there. The physical and digital spaces must be connected to build a sustainable relationship between the business and the customer.
Here are a few moments from the buyer development journey where person-to-person contact can have a significant impact:
- hands-on demonstrations of the product;
- the negotiation phase of the project;
- training users to handle the solution;
- aspect of the customer support you offer.
Meanwhile, you can leverage physical media outlets to spread your main marketing messages. Such are billboards, print, television, radio, and events. These are places where you can establish the foundation of a deeper connection with potential customers and partners.
3 specifics of marketing in B2B IT companies
After we have studied the specifics of the tech (product) company, it is time to pay attention to 3 features of marketing for this type of business:
- Internal communication, understanding, and awareness between departments in the company.
- How information is generated, selected, and organized for the marketing activity.
- Establishing and maintaining relationships with customers, partners, and brand fans.
Let’s look at them individually.
The birth of marketing starts from within
Internal communication between marketing and sales and Research and Development teams ensures the sharing of information on market trends, customer feedback, and information on product development and competitor services.
This feedback helps R&D adapt long-term product development plans and accompanying roadmaps. In the shorter term, while there is an established roadmap to work on, the team members can discuss prioritizing tasks from it against the input they’ve received from marketing and the sales team.
R&D can provide more specific feedback on product positioning, key messages, and themes that marketing is developing. Since R&D experts are the people who develop the product, marketing, and sales can look to them to double-check that they have mastered the concepts of product processes and functionalities. This will ensure that R&D is involved and that the two teams are working on their communication style.
In companies where marketing and sales work with customer service on training and customer support materials, direct feedback from customer support helps identify recurring or critical issues and plan needed improvements to existing documentation or anticipate the creation of new ones.
This, of course, could be information for both teams to share with R&D to consider how they can make the product more user-friendly. Interactive content, for example, has been gaining popularity in recent years and an expectation has formed on the part of users that software products have their quick tooltips, which contain 2-3 sentences with instructions for the use of a given functionality.
Customer feedback can also be positive. It can give guidance to marketing and sales on what to emphasize in product positioning, key marketing messages, and direct conversations with potential customers.
Communication with the finance department helps with allocating the SnM budget and anticipating their financial limits and goals. This subsequently helps to prioritize projects within allocated budgets. Planning how to leverage the team’s financial resources—at what pace, for what projects, for what elements of the projects—is key to getting the team to relax and work at scale.
Communication with senior management informs marketing and sales about the overall vision, goals, and strategic direction of the company’s development. This keeps team efforts aligned with broader organizational goals. Also with help from managers, sales and marketing people can set specific values against their KPIs. The specific measurable goal helps us consider which investments will move us closer to it for less cost and in less time. It is the basis on which we build our long-term plans make mental simulations and explore “what if” scenarios. It is our starting point when we feel confused and indecisive in the middle of our journey.
Information management for marketing purposes
Can you imagine how much information the teams in a company generate just from the interactions described in the previous section? We are about to share, from personal experience, a few beneficial practices.
First, make the information storage available to all participants in the communication. This is also essential for the following periodical information reviews. The goal is to answer the following questions:
- Do we stick to what we discussed the previous time?
- Is the information up to date?
- Is this still our direction of development?
- Can we add something new?
- Are we achieving the target result guided by this information?
When we have an answer to these and some additional questions, we go to the third step – decision-making. Do we continue with the existing plan as it was up to the time of the review or will we make some changes to move forward?
This three-step process can be described in much more detail. We will probably do it in another article. For now, our goal is to avoid decision fatigue.
To conclude this point, let’s summarize what marketing is getting as information from its conversations with other teams:
- From R&D, the marketing team receives information about upcoming products or features for which to create effective campaigns and promotional strategies.
- Clarifying business goals with senior management helps marketers and salespeople align their efforts with the company’s overall strategy.
- Regular updates from finance allow them to assess the financial impact of their campaigns and initiatives, helping the teams to refine strategies for optimal ROI.
- From the administrative department, the SnM team receives logistical help in organizing events, promotions, and campaigns. This includes coordination of facilities, materials, and administrative processes.
- Marketing’s conversations with customer service provide insight into the outcome of product development efforts and product positioning directly from customers.
Cultivating relationships in B2B marketing through communication
The marketing approach we described aims to provoke the prospect to search. To look for the root of the problems of his business. To seek more information about possible solutions. To also delve into the stories of other companies in the sector to learn from them.
You drive the development cycle from suspect to customer by capturing existing interest or creating a new one. The Lead must then step in by asking himself a question and exploring more deeply his goals and the methods of achieving them.
Content cluster methodology works with such a focus. Initially, we created extremely extensive material on the global topic of the cluster. This material skims the surface of the various subtopics, which we will subsequently develop in detail in separate materials. Thus, the user gradually gets deeper into the topic and gets more and more used to your brand’s presence as a trusted source of knowledge.
Let’s finish the article with another basic principle of effective B2B marketing: Develop relationships with customers, partners, and supporters of the brand by maintaining two-way communication with your target audiences through different channels. Predispose them to engage freely in discussions, share information, and ask questions. For your part, let your beard give them answers, but don’t give it all away. Share selectively and incrementally so they come back for the next conversation.
Communication is like dribbling a basketball. You don’t have to answer every question in a direct way and extremely exhaustively. You can lead the conversation differently, pick up a new topic, and skip questions. The important thing is to keep things interesting with a certain amount of mystery and anticipation for your next move.
Turning Value Marketing into Tangible Success
In the first part of the series “How to do value marketing in the B2B sphere?” we discussed how things are going with technology product companies. We highlighted 5 specifics of this type of business, referring the conclusions to one of the big marketing challenges- to organize the information they communicate internally and to the target user.
If we delve into the content of the article as much as possible, you will see that the described approach is based on this process chain:
Unit in the company > Generated information (format and topic) > Stakeholders (internal and external) > Communication (purpose, channel, format, frequency) > Feedback.
The individual links in this process chain are also (smaller) circuits. For example “Generated information”:
Creating information > Characterization > Classification > Sorting > Organizing > Reworking (reformatting) > Selecting the appropriate recipient > Main message > Selecting a channel > Planning (frequency, time, topics, distribution) > Monitoring > Gathering feedback > Optimizing
Let’s call the first layer that we apply to value marketing “Knowledge management and communications”. From here on in the series, we will discuss in detail topics such as:
- How to organize content creation and position ourselves as subject matter experts?
- Why do we need a content distribution framework?
- How to integrate marketing and sales for exponential growth?
- … and others.
Jan 31, 2024 | B2B Marketing, SaaS Marketing
The relationship between Marketing, Sales, and R&D. Asymmetry of knowledge or lack of communication?
In business discussions, the focus often centers around strengthening the relationship between marketing and sales. We will examine the entire chain of relationships within a SaaS company.
As companies evolve and mature, they typically organize their teams by function. However, that may lead to a tendency to become engrossed in the people’s respective duties and goals, leading to a breakdown in the crucial link between technology and product on one side and the customer and market insight on the other.
A noteworthy study, the ‘BCG Most Innovative Companies Report 2020 and 2021; BCG analysis,’ sheds light on this issue. You might think the data is outdated, but given how hot the topic continues to be, we wouldn’t jump to conclusions. The study reveals that nearly a third of participating companies identified suboptimal collaboration between their R&D and sales teams as the primary obstacle to achieving higher innovation output. These results are valid across various industries.
Our experience underscores the significance of open communication between Marketing, Sales, and R&D. This alignment is fundamental for:
- A precise formulation of your brand message.
- Effective positioning of your company, products, and services.
- Establishing ‘product-market’ fit and ‘problem-solution’ fit.
You need (1) a technologically viable product innovation that (2) meets a market need. Experts in marketing or sales should consider how confident they are in their understanding of the product they’re selling. Conversely, for those in R&D, the question is, ‘How familiar are you with strategies to promote and sell the product you are developing?’
Before the sales and marketing teams unleash their storytelling skills, the R&D team should set the stage with their narrative. All three teams should be well-acquainted with the product’s story, its’ benefits, and use cases. Understanding each team’s perspectives is the starting point for aligning their understandings.
The R&D team can initiate by presenting the initial product concept and its developmental stages. Click the links to learn about the product maturity framework and development lifecycle. It is crucial to introduce the overarching mission of the product and its benefits. Then, teams can focus on specific use cases or functionalities for ideal customer profiles.
Sales and marketing experts can connect this newfound knowledge with the existing – addressing pains, needs, challenges, and the competitor landscape.
Here arises an opportunity to restore another missing link: feedback loops. When both sides actively listen and learn from one another, they can overcome blind spots. Once they understand the product-market fit, it’s time for the marketing and sales teams to turn to the R&D department for a reality check.
Of course, the process should be reciprocal. The R&D team can also benefit from market information available to the sales and marketing departments, revealing:
- The need to upgrade or add new skills to meet emerging market trends.
- Competitor strengths and weaknesses through customer sentiment.
- Market preferences for pricing ranges and additional services.
The R&D, Sales, and Marketing teams should collaborate as co-creators of the brand and product storyline.
These indicate effective communication between teams:
- Proposing a product development roadmap aligned with market needs.
- Planning for expanding in-house skills based on market trends and competitor research.
- A shared understanding of the company and product positioning.
- Coordination of common KPIs.
This teamwork ensures the company’s story is well-received by everyone, forming a cohesive and powerful narrative.
Help Sales, Marketing, and RnD work together
Establish clear communication channels, roles, and responsibilities
Encourage open communication within all three teams. It should be second nature for employees to seek clarification, acquire additional knowledge, or take the time to explain complex situations to each other.
Everything said won’t and can’t be remembered. Documenting information is a practical solution. Teams should establish norms for storing and organizing knowledge. Consider the following questions:
- How can data be lost?
- Where could misinformation originate?
- What risks are associated with duplicated data?
- Who has permission to upload, edit, and (re)organize?
- What is the organizational structure of stored information?
- What might lead each team to hoard data and work independently?
- How can access to necessary information from stakeholders be guaranteed?
- How do we ensure everyone is responsible for the outcomes of information collection, storage, and management?
Build a one-team mentality
Foster mutual respect by acknowledging the roles of each party in the cross-company innovation process, where they act as contributors rather than sole drivers.
Establish initial alignment with shared long- and medium-term product development and go-to-market roadmaps. These roadmaps blend R&D’s technical expertise and research with insights into customer needs, the trajectory of competitive products, and market positioning gaps.
To bring R&D, marketing, and sales teams closer, initiate collaboration from the top of the hierarchy. Imagine unit heads collaborating to manage product development and the business pipeline. That entails common KPIs, shared roadmaps, and role models for the teams.
A more daring approach involves personnel rotation between Marketing, Sales, and R&D functions, exposing each team to the realities of other business areas and enhancing their skill sets.
From a marketing perspective, this involves:
- Participation in sales meetings.
- Developing negotiation skills.
- Addressing sales pipeline bottlenecks.
- Preparing offers and discussing contract terms.
From an R&D perspective, this involves:
- Participating in sales launches.
- Reflecting on customer feedback.
- Involvement in product deployment.
- Participation in customer training sessions.
From a Sales perspective, this involves:
- Crafting targeted content.
- Preparing product collaterals.
- Acquiring technical competencies.
- Quantifying and communicating product value.
This joint approach heightens awareness of each other’s functions and contributions to the company, preventing power struggles. Balancing marketing and sales influence ensures that product engineers develop what customers need, avoiding unnecessary experimentation.
In summary, establish several collaboration pillars, including product roadmap reviews, strategic plan presentations, periodic target fulfillment reviews, and presentations of market trends.
Unite the teams around shared goals and KPIs
Are you familiar with the concepts of hard and soft incentives?
Make business unit leaders great role models. Bring them closer and stimulate collaboration between them. Tangible incentives tied to specific targets may support these efforts, extending them to other team members.
Alternatively, emphasize soft incentives to foster cross-functional alignment. This can be achieved by:
- Allocating a percentage of one team’s overall corporate budget to another team.
- Delegating decision-making authority regarding priorities.
Let them create a shared product vision and roadmap
Each of the three teams has annual plans and goals.
For R&D, the product vision serves as the overarching direction, with the product roadmap as the plan and timeline for product development.
Salespeople set quarterly and annual pipeline projections, aiming for specific pipeline velocity and closed revenue targets.
Meanwhile, the Marketing department sets goals for a sourced pipeline, qualified accounts, ensuring product-market fit, and achieving ROI on strategic initiatives.
To ensure alignment of expectations and actions, consistently communicate these plans. We have found that the product roadmap best embodies the company’s strategic vision. However, the challenge lies in communicating and navigating changes without negatively impacting existing product sales. Long-term roadmaps may undergo modifications during execution, and if sales and marketing have already communicated upcoming updates, it can sever the company’s reputation and pipeline volume.
The objective is to maintain sales traction for existing products while presenting future innovations as the next generations of current products. To stay focused, consider:
- Highlighting key features and their benefits.
- Clearly outlining the product’s goals and how they align with company objectives.
- Providing a timeline for the rollout of new features with specific targets.
Establish cross-functional teams
To form a cross-functional team, the customer should be in focus. Encourage team members to observe and engage with current and potential customers to generate valuable marketing insights. The crucial factor in this process is the relationship between the client and the brand, built over time by salespersons and led by their personalities.
We’ve come across an intriguing thesis:
The ability to cultivate professional and commercial relationships is crucial for sales professionals. Externally, they must construct relationships to create a favorable business scenario, understanding the end customer’s needs and values that bring corporate advantage. Internally, transmitting these value perceptions to the R&D team is essential.
Relationship-building thrives in an environment where professionals have identified and kept in mind strengths and weaknesses, fostering personal development and corporate goals. In my opinion, self-awareness regarding professional attributes is key to an innovation-friendly environment and overall business success.
Begin by creating profiles for your marketing and sales teams, documenting information about their skills, specialized knowledge areas, personalities, motivations, and performance. The objective is to equip them to adapt to diverse market segments, use cases, objections, and competitors.
Next, involve your marketing and sales teams in product feedback and testing. These teams are closest to your customers and can provide valuable insights and suggestions to your R&D team.
Two prerequisites:
- Including representatives from both teams in product demos and beta testing.
- Train salespeople to provide feedback with context, the desired solution, and underlying needs.
This involvement enhances product quality and fit, boosting your sales team’s confidence and engagement.
Ensure effective feedback by training your marketing and sales teams on product features and benefits. They should see product features as the specific attributes and functionalities, while product benefits – outcomes and advantages delivered to customers. Discuss periodic assessments that will validate their competence. Additionally, training and cross-team workshops on articulating product knowledge during client demos and discussions.
Jan 17, 2024 | SaaS Marketing, B2B Marketing
Unraveling the Complexity: Is it Inherent or Self-Inflicted?
These questions have lingered within our team at the culmination of more than one campaign. There were times when we were in turmoil right from the start of the campaign:
- What comes next?
- What were our intended outcomes?
- When did these crucial discussions take place?
Navigating the intersection of industry standards (Technology; Software-as-a-Service) and B2B transactions often presents challenges. This article won’t attempt an exhaustive exploration of all the intricacies. Instead, it will spotlight key elements contributing to the problem and we will share solutions based on our experiences.
Overcomplicated Marketing Plans and Strategies
Let’s delve into marketing strategy and plans—their roles encompass:
- Setting goals for a specific period.
- Describing and justifying tool and tactic choices.
- Specifying marketing channels.
- Defining the interrelationships between these elements.
Complicating matters severs the connections between the plan, strategy, tactics, and tools, transforming marketing activities into isolated events. They are no longer part of a process. Failures and successes are processes.
Things get too complicated when you:
- Go into too much detail. Some things are worked out in motion.
- Plan too many activities. Get a realistic idea of how much time each task costs you.
- Don’t have a theme. Have a storyline at the core of your strategy and plan.
Start with aligning goals, plans, and strategies with your target market.
What do you want to achieve?
How do you plan to do it?
And how did you match the two things with your target audience?
Work backward from revenue to synchronize marketing tactics with your growth objectives.
Consider the lifecycle of a marketing process and activity
Storytime!
Imagine you’ve meticulously organized a virtual conference in the first trimester. For several months, you’ve worked to bring in representatives from companies identified as potential partners and customers. You’ve secured outstanding speakers and crafted an impressive program.
And now?
Failure to consider the lifecycle of a marketing activity might impede achieving set goals or introduce inconsistency in the year’s plan and strategy.
Consider how even after the “formal” execution of the campaign, you can capitalize on it. Think:
- How will you continue distributing marketing collateral?
- How can the campaign’s contribution be leveraged to achieve goals in the upcoming period?
- How do you align current campaign messages with the next ones planned?
The last question ties back to the overarching theme of your marketing strategy. It’s crucial to keep the big picture in mind and see how individual elements of the strategy fit together.
Treat Your Audience Like A Turkey Focaccia Sandwich
Picture yourself savoring a Turkey Focaccia Club sandwich.
You cut the focaccia in half, spread it with a delectable mayonnaise mixture (mayonnaise, whole-berry cranberry sauce, chopped pecans, Dijon mustard, and honey), and layer lettuce, turkey, cheese, tomato, and bacon between the halves.
Mouth-watering?
Now, imagine eating the same sandwich, but with ingredients on separate plates. First, you will enjoy a spoonful of the mayo mixture, a slice of the turkey ham, and a slice of cheese. All on separate plates, while slicing tomatoes on a cutting board.
How would this impact your experience of biting into the whole sandwich? The mingling textures and intertwining flavors – all are lost!
This analogy holds for profiling your target audience.
Imagine segregating demographics, professional characteristics, and behavioral data separately. It’s impossible to capture the multidimensionality of the ideal customer profile (ICP).
Personal characteristics (age, gender, country) hint at the beliefs and characteristics of a person with such a profile. Professional characteristics guide us to the main problems and needs of the persona. Behavioral data validates hypotheses about the ideal customer profile.
Understanding your target audience isn’t enough; delve into the specifics of your target industries.
Reason #1 – the same reason you eat your sandwich assembled.
Reason #2 – a validated ideal customer profile reveals nuances in preferences, problems, and goals when viewed through the lens of a specific industry.
While market research and interviews with people fitting your ICP are beneficial, they can be expensive and involve many team members. A better approach is to start with available data. Refer to existing customers and companies in negotiations. They will reveal your strengths that won them over and why they chose you over competitors.
Pay attention to qualified accounts that haven’t converted. They may have asked for a custom quote, participated in a live demo, or turned down the deal, offering insights into market demands and lost opportunities. Lost deals highlight weaknesses in the sales process or indicate which type of customer is not for you. Of course, the influence of other factors is also evident from them – price, payment method, and preferred providers.
Rely on your customer support, project management, and RnD team. They are the ones who first look at the Requests for Proposal (RFP) and evaluate how your product meets the customer’s demands. They know the workflows of companies from various industries and have (at least a general) idea of the bottlenecks they are experiencing and the business processes they want to optimize.
Lastly, participate in public and private auctions, presenting opportunities to reach a target audience actively seeking specific software solutions. Use auctions to showcase your SaaS solutions, observe market demands, and gain insights into competitors, refining your product positioning and uncovering distinctive features.
Auctions offer an opportunity to analyze the competition as well. You can gain insight into competitors’ solutions in your industry, improving your product positioning and discovering your distinctive features.
Sales and Marketing Funnel Optimization
Engineer your Sales and Marketing to ensure every captured lead is directed to one of the pre-specified final destinations. Remember, though, each person embarks on a unique journey.
A common pitfall is assuming everyone is headed in the same direction. Given that not all leads will convert into buyers, it’s crucial to consider alternative conversion goals.
Failing to prioritize leads results in investing time and money in deals with no return. Some will convert, some early on, and some may never make a purchase.
The starting point for effective funnel optimization lies in traffic acquisition analysis and buyer persona profiling. These serve as the foundation for traffic segmentation. Creating cohorts enables content tailoring that guides leads from a general interest to a specific journey. This, in turn, allows you to address varying levels of engagement, fostering more consistent interaction and stronger connections with your leads.
Such an adapted experience gradually guides leads toward more significant actions, aligning with their engagement level.
Implementing a lead scoring model establishes criteria for prioritizing leads, and determining which ones warrant your time and attention. Continue nurturing leads based on these scoring criteria, offering tailored content and engagement opportunities aligned with their respective scores.
Navigating The B2B Marketing Landscape With Clarity & Vision
At the end of the material, we dare to say that things are as complicated as you make them. A small part of the most mentioned terms in B2B marketing for the past year are Account-Based Marketing, Demand Gen, Marketing-Source Pipeline, alignment, and AI automation.
Stick to the core of your business, and you will always know where “North” is. This becomes possible when you take the time, especially at the beginning of each year, to review the evolution of your corporate brand. This encompasses your values, beliefs, long-term goals, the overarching North Star goal driving your endeavors, and your mission. These elements serve as the compass that ignites inspiration for you and your team, especially during challenging times that might feel like a battlefield.
