The B2B marketing story thus far…
Historically, organisations have always been aware of the terms ‘sales’ and ‘market’ but special focus on ‘marketing’ is relatively a newer concept that started coming into focus only in the 30’s. Marketing has since evolved to a point where it plays a strategically important role in most medium to large organizations and continues to evolve at a faster than ever pace.
In this overall rapidly changing marketing paradigm, business-to-business (B2B) marketing, despite being a very large section of market, has begin carving a special focus as a dedicated function that contributes to company top and bottom line.
What’s wrong with most of current B2B marketing approaches:
The hidden dumping wells of B2B marketing campaigns, product launches, re-branding and rejuvenating exercises, is found full of well known company names, good-to-great products and services and very smart, very educated (and seemingly very experienced and prepared), people.
Why is it so and why so many CEOs, Presidents and investors in B2B space are left scratching their heads when these all too common failures happen to their company?
5 Key reasons B2B companies fail at Marketing:
- Marketers that are B2C educated and trained marketers invariably fail at real B2B marketing challenges
- Early success based on non-marketing factors puts/keeps Reason #1 in place
- Marketing isn’t respected as an experts-only discipline and “walled off” at B2B companies
- Skipping the sometimes painful “What business are we in?” and “deeply understanding our target audience” drills
- Less than full commitment to implementation and tuning of a specialized B2B Buyer’s Journey demand generation engine and an effective marketing-to-sales “handoff”
If one or more of these 5 sound familiar…
- Your company is likely wasting 65-75% of your marketing resources.
- You are not alone and real B2B experts can be hired and/or trained.
- Unless there is a fundamental shift in your approach, your company (like most B2B firms), will repeat the mistakes unless you accept and address all of the reasons above that apply.
Efforts to get off the junkyard will make you to fundamentally change how you treat marketing and will like many changes, might be time consuming and painful, but making this level of commitment, while painful, isn’t inordinately expensive or impossible.
Over the years, Saberni Software has helped many organisations define and streamline their marketing strategies and goals. If you would like to hear from us, please contact us.
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