Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest blog from Dave Landry, professional business writer and personal finance advisor.
Building strong client relationships is perhaps one of the most important things that any marketer can accomplish, especially given the increasing importance of having a popular and well-known brand in today’s cluttered B2B landscape.
Branding For Unity
A powerful brand can help lead to the development of a community that has a positive effect on customers and employees alike. Strong emotions regarding a company will affect purchasing decisions from potential clients, but will also promote pride in their work from employees. And even more importantly, customer support really is everyone’s job, particularly in high-end B2B markets where solutions are hardly a one-time purchase.
The Marketing Department Is Your Biggest Ally
The marketing department can help unify a B2B organization internally. Sharing customer insights, working on common problems, and allowing all employees to discuss their own ideas for promoting the brand can lead to the development of a more connected team. Make sure that your marketing team is all about brand awareness and is looking ahead into what trends could change and influence your industry within the next five to ten years. Work with them to develop and simplify an effective budget plan for your marketing.
Building internal common bonds via marketing can have a strong positive effect on external sales and relationships, and a team that takes pride in their brand inspires customers to become more loyal as well.
Use One Voice Across Platforms
Quality B2B marketing campaigns require one voice from the whole team across all platforms, from social media and customer service to email marketing. Having unity as the foundation goes a long way towards ensuring this cohesiveness. Empowering internal teams with the ability to collaborate and develop on their own (including time to develop new concepts and projects) is also essential; you never know what spark of an idea might become your next great solution.
Unite People Through Education
Knowing the right questions to ask during B2B inside sales calls and internal calls can also help unify the team. Working together to establish common customer pain points and problems and determining how to solve them might be one of the most valuable activities that a sales team can engage in.
Also, sharing best practices internally can be remarkably helpful; internal discussions can empower team members. Potential topics include how to get access to the most important person(s) at a client brand by asking the operator the correct questions, using LinkedIn and other social networks, and even ways to leave voicemails that actually garner a response.
Accordingly, collective education is valuable for any company, and peer-to-peer education is perhaps one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways for a company to build shared knowledge. Unfortunately, it is most often one of the more overlooked internal resources, but it can definitely help unify a team and the whole company. We can all learn from each others’ experience, but perhaps nowhere is that more necessary than within a B2B organization.
Knowing When To Say “No”
At the same time, saying “no” to the wrong projects or clients can also unify your team along with making them appreciate your existing client roster even more. Keep in mind that it is a much bigger risk to engage with a client that you felt wrong about from the beginning, so trust yours and your team’s intuition. You want everyone in the crew to be excited about working a given account!
And this doesn’t necessarily mean that said clients or projects are bad - they just aren’t a good fit for your company at the current time. It’ll work out better for everyone if you turn them down early and both you and the potential prospect can find a solution that works better for them. Consider the mental and emotional well-being of the entire group before you say “yes” to new projects or when you turn down bad business.
Connecting the dots and finding the elements that make your company - and your relationships with your clientele - develop a sense of unity is one of the most important tasks that any business owner or manager can accomplish. A unified team has a stronger sense of purpose, cares more about the overall success of the project, and is capable of creating much more positive growth for a B2B company.
Dave Landry Jr. is a professional business writer and personal finance advisor living in California. In addition to sharing his research about B2B growth and optimization, his writing also covers virtual technology, business telecommunications, and the impact of globalization on the economy. Check him out on Twitter today!
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