By Winfield Salyards, Marketing Coordinator at Heinz Marketing
A few days ago, I read Jill Konrath’s short piece 7 Paradoxical Sales Principles. It got me thinking about the marketer’s equivalent to the 7 principles and what that would look like. So, here’s my take on 7 marketing principles for ABM success:
To drive more leads, lead with content.
People can get skittish of blatant ads or marketing attempts. Develop and push value-adding content that addresses the issues of potential leads and helps build brand thought leadership. Let that content and thought leadership lead your marketing.
Ensure your lead scoring is aligned correctly
To give sales the best opportunity to move a lead to the next stage, make sure your lead scoring is optimized. Ensure leads are really ready to move along the funnel.
To make selling easier, ensure the messaging is clear and straightforward.
Support sales by giving them clear and simple messaging that helps prospects make decisions easier—no need to overcomplicate things.
To be heard, prepare like crazy.
Your potential customers are smart. Meet them at their level. Make sure you’re preparing, understand the buying committee, the pain points, and messaging. Only with relevance will you reach the most qualified leads.
Start small
Don’t try and throw everything at the wall to see what sticks. Take your marketing campaigns in chunks. Optimizing the messaging and growing out your tactics in a manageable way.
Test and re-test
Embrace opportunities to fail fast and grow. Test everything you can, and take what works and move forward. Each test is a new opportunity to understand your buyers better.
Create the space for your offerings to shine.
Practically straight out of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, with online feeds flush with multiple and similar messages, the best way to be heard in the long run is to make your own space. Develop your own thought leadership space and have prospects come to you, such as a blog. This will help differentiate yourself from your competitors.
Aside from these 7 Principles, always make sure your marketing and sales teams are aligned and communicating. Without that, you will have significant cracks in your funnel.
