Three Days Can Make Your Year

A typical trade show gives you a brief three day window to capture attention. After months of planning, the show comes and goes in the blink of an eye. And you may have little to show for it but a stack of leads that may in fact lead nowhere. 

Companies focusing their trade show efforts on customer acquisition are bound to be disappointed. However, those that complement their sales efforts with a carefully planned media strategy will realize significant returns before, during and long after their booth has been dismantled…and turn a single three day event into a year’s worth of invaluable exposure.

Leveraging Trade Shows for Maximum Media Exposure

A well orchestrated media program–one that gets the right message into the right hands at the right time–can turn a trade show into a uniquely powerful marketing opportunity. Where else can you get in front of all the top editors and reporters from the leading publications serving your market, demonstrate your products and share your company vision?

BackBone’s  trade show media relations program encompasses the following:

  • Writing and distribution of a media advisory two months prior to the show providing a “sneak preview” of key announcements to be made at the event.
  • Securing appointments at the show for product demos or interviews.
  • Formal press release distributed on the first day of the show. Follow-up after the show, including placement tracking.

The coordination of these activities gives us the best chance of arranging as many face-to-face media briefings as possible. Additional services include the preparation of a press kit and the writing/submission of speaking proposals.

 

Exhibits with Lasting Impact

Too many companies squander the unique opportunities high profile trade shows offer. BackBone will implement a program that gets you coverage before the show, during the show, and develops media relationships that will put you on the editorial map going forward.

January 7, 2019 11:16 am | No Comments

It Takes (Convincing) a Village…to Make a Sale

Sales enablement

(Smarter with Gartner)

 

There used to be at time you’d home in on the needs/fears of a single stakeholder and tailor your sales and marketing message accordingly.  But decision making, even at the highest levels, has become more of a group effort.  According to research in The Challenger Customer by Gartner, the number of people involved in B2B purchase decisions rose from an average of 5.4 in 2015 to 6.8 in 2017.  

“With buying decisions increasingly committee-based, marketers must leverage enterprise personas to deliver marketing messages that drive higher-quality (and quantity) leads,” says Noah Elkin, research director, Gartner for Marketers.

In “Improve B2B Lead Generation With Enterprise Personas,” the author concisely lays out how to develop these personas.

An enterprise persona reflects market segmentation choices and places them in a context that makes it easier for both marketing and sales to apply in a consistent manner. Enterprise personas focus marketing and sales on the impact their value proposition has on the client’s larger strategic objectives, rather than a single stakeholder’s goals.

“Building an enterprise persona focuses the conversation around your customers and their needs rather than your product or service,” says Elkin. “This will go a long way toward building credibility and trust with your customers and prospects — two essential ingredients for generating sales-ready leads.”

We’d add that this is also a good internal exercise, where you gather company stakeholders at every level to crystallize your own enterprise persona, aka, brand, beyond your products or services.  This is actually a key element in the sales enablement support we provide to our clients.   

Developing enterprise personas adds considerable complexity to an already long sales cycle.  It requires a pretty demanding set of skills, including data mining, pattern recognition, behavioral psychology and forensics. That’s not easy to find for any company, let alone a mid-sized one with finite marketing and sales resources. But given the time and resources an enterprise sale already requires – and considering what’s at stake – it’s worth the additional investment.

October 3, 2018 8:41 am | No Comments

Sales Enablement: Content, Technology & Support that Shortens Sales Cycles

In most companies, sales produces more content than actual sales. But every minute a sale rep spends creating content is a minute he or she is not selling. Sales enablement helps organizations streamline the sales process and shorten sales cycles by improving buyer interactions with better, more relevant sales content and equipping sales teams with the tools they need to be more informed and productive sellers.

We know that nearly 60 percent of the buying decision is made before a lead will talk to sales. That means marketing is already participating in sales enablement.  Yet, according to Hubspot, only about half of the organizations surveyed align their marketing activities with their sales objectives.

Sales enablement

BackBone’s Sales Enablement Service:   

  • Sales and Messaging Diagnostic: web-based self-assessments that enable organizations to “audit” their sales/messaging processes.
  • Content marketing and sales automation to support all phases of the sales process: developing timely, focused content to improve – and sustain – communications with prospects and customers (case studies, product sheets, white papers, ebooks, articles, emails). Helping customers select and use the most appropriate sales automation platform to streamline the targeting and continuous improvement of their sales outreach.
  • Implementing sustainable, flexible systems to more efficiently find, hire and onboard top salespeople, and building a high performance team.

Sales enablement is about uncovering inconvenient truths by asking the hard questions: what’s working, what needs fixing, who should we be talking to and what does she want? Also: what’s your story, and are you hiring the best people.

Let us know if you’re ready to be asked some tough questions. You might be surprised at your answers. We’re offering the first 10 companies that respond a free sales content and technology audit. Please take a moment to fill out the form below and we’ll contact you to set up a call.  We look forward to meeting you!

 

September 13, 2018 11:52 am | No Comments