Everyone knows the value marketing has on the sales cycle. Marketing puts forth an incredible amount of effort to warm clients and accounts. Sales members strive to close deals, often under immense pressure to meet quotas. When these two teams work together, it’s magic.
So this week, we’re listening to Faye Hawkins from First Base Unlimited. Their goal? To help you strategize and determine who your real buyers are, and understand how you can best access and serve the market. On this episode of the B2B Revenue Acceleration podcast, Faye delivers these answers and more.
She’s been defining the face of tech brands for almost 20 years, specializing in B2B software.
Let’s get inside her head:
This Is How Marketers Make It Happen
The landscape of marketing for B2B tech companies changes extremely rapidly. To constantly stay on top of the marketing game and “make it happen,” as Faye said, these are the skills the best marketers maintain:
- Deliberate
- Seize every opportunity
- Willingness to get your hands dirty
- Constantly learning
- Drive
- Adaptability
- Good decision-making
Navigating Complex Conversations With Clients
Marketers and salespersons alike know how difficult it can be to convince clients to act in their own best interest.
Further, clients often want a degree of certainty from marketers. They want assurance if they complete a set of tactics, they will receive certain results. If only it were always that simple.
You can buy as much traffic as you want, but the question is: how expensive should the traffic be?
Faye Hawkins
If you’re helping a company with their go-to-market strategy, you often have to market first, just to know what benchmark to measure against. Start somewhere, derive metrics (cost-per-lead, cost-per-click, etc.), then set goals around those metrics just to have expectations. But be ready to adapt.
Also, empathy goes a long way here: Client’s have bosses, reports, and responsibilities just like everyone else. They want expectations so they can make decisions. Don’t discount the human need everyone has of being understood.
The Fluffy Stuff: Balancing Short Term Wins & Long Term Brand-Building
Other departments (sales is a huge culprit here) often accuse marketing of fluffy work — the long-term brand-building that positions a product, service, or company in a specific light, but that often doesn’t directly have an impact on sales in a short term.
This is a tricky tightrope to walk, she said. Ultimately, the philosophy behind the decision-making is this: The long-term brand-building makes the short-term sales work so much easier. Also, the short-term demands or goals of an organization are often what fuels the long-term mission of marketing.
So, not only do they work together, but they’re necessary for each other.
In the short term, tactics that engage buyers quickly are highly necessary to hit quarterly and yearly benchmarks. When the long-term marketing vision is also calibrated correctly, it makes the sale so much easier — because the decision-maker already understands their purchase and appreciates the company. If trust and recognition are already established, the short-term tactics have increased firepower.
The short term requirement is often the justification to invest in marketing.
Faye Hawkins
Inevitably, the first question any potential buyer has after being targeted is, “Who are these guys?”
To bear both the weight of Q2 and steer the vision of year 10, takes some real grit and perseverance to navigate. Ultimately, Faye has found that the best marketing plans run on 24-month stints. This allows both the short and far-sighted goals to blend together and complement each other, and, it also gives agility to respond to future unknowns.
This post is based on an interview with Faye Hawkins from First Base Unlimited.
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