Getting your marketing strategy just right is critical for B2B marketing success. On the “too broad” end, lots of B2B companies, desperate for recognition and revenue, try to be everything to everyone. One of our Fusion Marketing Partners teammates worked for a company whose small C-level and business development team had dozens of potential deals cooking, not one of them anywhere near the one-yard line. The company’s core position changed with every potential new partner. In the excitement of infancy, they were saying “Yes” to anyone who would pay attention to them, rolling out pilot programs whose execution was burning cash and burning out the staff.
Aiming too narrowly is equally fatal. We encountered one software company who based their revenue success on scoring massive deals with partners. If it worked, the company would have been awash in cash. But it didn’t, and there was no Plan B. Another marketing CMO focused all of his efforts on winning plaudits from big-time analysts like Gartner and Forrester, but there was no effective strategy in place for generating leads when this approbation didn’t materialize.
True marketing leaders take your team to market with a clear idea of what differentiates you and who needs to hear your message. They then direct a multi-dimensional mix of content and collateral, social media and PR, tradeshows and webinars, to fill the leads funnel. They also create consensus with other leaders in the company around how many of those leads they need to get, and how many sales need to close for the company to hit its revenue targets.
Positioned for Success
For the company who has its sights on growth, it is critical to avoid the pitfalls that condemn an enterprise to extinction or mere subsistence levels of revenue. Avoiding these mistakes means seeing marketing as a vital addition to your growth strategy, driven by a marketing expert whose has the proven, hard-won knowledge to conceive and manage a real, quantifiable campaign for awareness, leads and revenue. Thus armed, you’re separated from a universe of talented also-rans who were dragged down by all-too-common mistakes.
This blog post was excerpted from a longer article titled Fatal marketing mistakes for tech companies, published by ColoradoBiz Magazine.
