Is Your B2B Sales and Marketing More Than a Great Dog and Pony Show?

Marketing is a very tricky business. I’ve spent my entire career and adult life working in marketing and I’m still learning. One of the things I’ve seen is marketing from some companies doing TOO good of a job of showing you how great life will be with their product or service, only to discover that their marketing is completely divorced from the reality of their business.

I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences. Take for example, working with a home remodeler. Sure, it’s an old joke, like from the movie The Money Pit about how a contractor always tells you one completion date and it’s always long after that. But, I’m talking about more than just being overly optimistic about dates. I’m talking about setting up expectations and making promises and then promptly breaking every one of them.

Promises about quality. Promises about how the job will proceed and how clean they’ll keep your house. Specific promises about what will be done no later than the end of the week.

All of the broken promises leave us gun shy and scarred. And, we kick ourselves from being taken in by the great presentation that we initially saw.

With that in mind, are your sales and marketing more than a great presentation? It better be. In today’s market, and with the lightning speed of social media, if you’re not following up on your promises, the whole world is going to be reading about it on Twitter and talking about it on Facebook.

When we talk about integrating marketing in a B2B sales program, we’re not just talking about making it a part of every step of the sales process. We’re talking about making sure it represents the reality of how you do business. The worst possible mistake you can make is to over promise or misrepresent your product or service. If you promise that your product can be installed in three easy steps, there better be just three steps and they better be easy. If you say it will take six week for you to complete the job, you better be done in six weeks or less.

It’s always tempting to paint a rosy picture about all of the sweetness and light that your product or service will bring to a customer, but what your prospects and customer really want is the truth. That’s especially clear in business-to-business sales. Consumers don’t typically have their own marketing departments, but most businesses do. When you’re selling to them, they understand how marketing works because they’re marketing to someone else. Most have a healthily cynicism about marketing, so your marketing better not oversell and over promise.

The best possible way for that to be done is to tell stories about your customers. Tell real stories about real customers, and when possible, let the customers speak for themselves about what you did for them.

Then go beyond… over deliver. Surprise your customers by doing more than you promised. Then do one more thing: Make it easy for them to spread the word about you. Make is simple for them to send Tweets praising you. Make it easy for them to Like you on Facebook and become a fan. Invite them to write a letter for you to post on your blog. That’s real integration. That’s the type of B2B marketing that works today.

Are you keeping the promises that your marketing makes? Are you integrating the latest tools into your sales and marketing efforts? Give me a call or drop me a line. I’d love to talk with you about some of the ways we’ve helped our customers do exactly this type of integration, and maybe you can recommend a reliable contractor while you’re at it.