The biggest mistake leaders make with marketing is misinterpreting what the business needs from marketing.*

As we’ve discovered through our series, Marketing is the New Sales, prospects are now coming to you through digital channels first. The majority of B2B buyers believe that omnichannel (in-person, remote, and digital self-serve) is as or more effective than traditional channels. B2B buyers are making six-figure purchases through remote interaction.

If buyers now engage with us largely through digital channels, the face-to-face selling model is outdated and ineffective. We need new tools, new resources to upsell and cross-sell our existing customers. In short: we need to sell to them on their turf and on their terms which requires shifts in our selling to entice, enchant, and earn their future dollar.

Selling has become 75% digital.

Since selling has shifted to digital-first and digital (mostly) interaction, we need to not make the mistake with our marketing by relegating it to lead-gen only or reduce it to branding, image, and identity. Marketing is the key driver to not merely drive new business and advance your brand but drive existing client sales. Here are two shifts we should make in our marketing to grow sales:

SHIFT #1: STOP SPAMMING; START SEGMENTING.

In our post The Only Marketing Strategy You Need to Supercharge Your Sales we shared the transformational strategy known as ABM (Account Based Marketing). Boring name; brilliant strategy.

ABM is a strategic approach to designing and executing highly targeted, personalized marketing with specific, named accounts. ABM is treating every single account as a “market of one.”* To simplify: ABM is like taking your biggest customer and creating a marketing plan just for them. To drive future sales with existing clients we need to start at square one by segmenting our clients by category, type, or group. 

Segmenting comes first because, in order to make marketing effective as a sales tool, we need to make our marketing solve a specific problem. To diagnose the problem and apply a cool merch solution, we need to know specifically which problem we’re trying to resolve.

One caveat: In our industry, segmenting a client base gets tricky. Normally, you segment by industry or client type. But within your book of business, the likelihood is high that the 80/20 rule reigns: 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your clients. For some distributors, this means a handful of clients drive the majority of their sales. Regardless of whether your handful is five clients or fifty, segmentation forces you to speak to that audience’s needs specifically. It’s like using your marketing as a surgeon’s scalpel instead of a shotgun. It’s more precise and less messy.

• Average tactic: Crafting a highly creative email and sending the same email to everyone. Yes, sometimes it works (for seasons like holidays) so, it is effective on occasion. But if that is all you are doing all year long, you are hitting some of your target sometimes, when you could be hitting all (or most) of your target all of the time. Yes, it’s easier to create one email, one message, one story, and then send that to everyone. But that’s called spam. Spam is usually categorized as unsolicited emails but if your email is not relevant to your customer’s challenges, it’s something they don’t want (spam).
• Pro tactic: Segment your customers by industry or by title. By industry allows you to speak to specific industry needs. If you were serving the automotive market, you know what volatility that market is currently under (due to supply chain issues) and you can target a highly creative email to evoke empathy and open the door to a relevant solution. By title allows you to segment to a specific audience. All human resource directors were scrambling in 2020 to adapt to a remote work culture, your kitting solution that helped everyone in the company feel connected and get vital information to each and every employee is a great example of how segmentation can fuel your marketing.

Segmenting your list is the starting point, from there, you can activate a marketing plan with laser-point precision. Once you segment your list, it’s time to make marketing magic. How?

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Bobby Lehew is the chief content officer at commonsku, this article is courtesy of commonsku, the work-from-anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more visit commonsku.com.