As a member of the marketing team, are you considered an integral contributor to the revenue stream? Or are you seen as living in your own world—away from where the “real work” gets accomplished?
When it’s done right, marketing has a measurable impact on sales and margins. But all too often marketers get sidelined as the group that is only responsible for communications or for “making things pretty.”
If your marketing group has been off on its own for too long—or if you’re just looking for ways to increase your impact on your company’s bottom line—these five strategies are a great place to start:
1. Make sure your marketing efforts are targeting the right prospects. Imagine you had one potential customer that might buy something from you, but you knew the order would be small, the sales cycle long, and the margins low. And you also had another customer that offered the possibility of a large sale, a short sales cycle, and really high margins. Which would you go after? It’s a no-brainer, right? Make sure you’re going after the right prospects—and turning down the business that won’t be profitable for your firm. The webinar How to Identify and Target Your Best Prospects will walk you through two methods for improving your targeting while avoiding potential pitfalls.
2. Improve your methods for turning targets into leads. Once you’ve figured out which prospects to target, think about what you can do to attract and capture them. Lead gen has become one of B2B marketers top priorities, but it’s a tough task given current market conditions. The DemandBrew webcast Attracting and Capturing Better Leads introduces strategies and tactics that have proven effective for other B2B marketers.
3. Continue marketing to your existing customers. Marketing isn’t over once a customer buys something from your company. Help keep the customers you already have and get them buying more. The training seminar How to Retain Your Key Customers talks about why customer retention is so important—and so difficult. And it discusses the different types of customer defection and offers advice on how to counteract them.
4. Take a look at your pricing. At some point during your marketing training, you probably learned the pricing is one of the “4 Ps” of marketing, but most B2B marketing groups don’t pay enough attention to this key revenue driver. The actual prices that customers pay are usually determined by the sales team—but that isn’t necessarily the best model for your company’s bottom line. The session on Getting Salespeople to Price Better offers real-world, short-term and long-term techniques for improving pricing and margins.
5. Take advantage of simple strategies that can yield quick wins. There are some very simple, inexpensive things your team could do that would have an immediate and measurable effect on margins and revenues. Some of them are outside of the “traditional” marketing arena, but someone has to step up, right? The webinar Identifying and Capturing Profitable ‘Quick Wins’ offers 15 different strategies that have been proven to work at B2B firms.
How to Identify & Target Your Best Prospects
Every year, B2B sales and marketing teams waste millions of dollars and thousands of hours desperately chasing the wrong business. In this on-demand webinar, learn about two methods for making targeting decisions that can improve every aspect of your performance, all at once!
Attracting and Capturing Better Leads
Clearly, lead generation is a top priority for most B2B marketing teams. In this on-demand webinar, learn about a number of strategies and tactics for maximizing the quantity, quality, and value of your sales leads.
How to Retain Your Key Customers
When you lose business from existing accounts, the sales team must acquire even more new business to compensate. In this on-demand training session, learn about seven innovative strategies leading sales operations are using to minimize revenue attrition and customer defection.
Getting Your Salespeople to Price Better
Chances are, the behavior of your salespeople will ultimately determine whether your pricing strategies are effective or not. In this on-demand training seminar, learn proven approaches and strategies for getting your sales team to price and discount far more effectively.
Identifying & Capturing Profitable "Quick Wins"
It’s always good to have a few simple strategies close at hand for boosting margin dollars without having to expend a lot of time, effort, or money. In this three-part recorded training session, we discuss and explain 15 "quick win" strategies and tactics that have proven effective for others.
