From the two aspects of sales self-extension and inspiring old customers, how to better promote the growth of B2B enterprises.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Stewed Marketing” (ID: Luandunyingxiao), the author Gao Yan.
About [B2B growth challenges], we discussed in the previous issue of “Top” Brand is the most powerful private domain traffic pool for B2B enterprises and “how to drive growth through continuous optimization of market inbound”. These two core tasks are generally led by the marketing department in enterprises. But in the last issue, we said that growth is not just a matter of a department, but a goal that the company must strive to achieve. Therefore, today’s topic continues, we will stew, from the sales of self-extension and inspire the old customers to introduce two aspects, how to better promote the growth of B2B enterprises.
03
Sales and Self-Extension: An Indispensable Extension Force
The ideal of most B2B companies is that as soon as the power of the market’s Inbound opens, new sources of energy are continuously obtained, and then the sales team catches these clues downstream of the funnel, maximizing the transformation, and the company can smoothly realize The clue to get a new extension of the deal has grown.
But in the practice of B2B companies, the division of labor between market functions and sales functions cannot be so clear, what is the real situation?
The fact is that the combination of market and sales as a broad marketing function is a cross-cooperation system in the big marketing funnel of the enterprise. The more the market is in front of the funnel, the more the market should play a leading role, the later the sales. The more the protagonist.
How on the specific part of the funnel, how is the division of labor between the two functions determined?
This depends on the actual characteristics of the business. Taking the two aspects of clue acquisition and business opportunity mining as examples, the differences in the image of the target customers, the complexity of the solution, and the length of the transaction cycle all determine the difference in the proportion of the market and sales. If you give everyone a number that can be borrowed, the domestic enterprise SaaS company new transaction customerAmong them, the market contribution ratio ranges from 15% to 97%. The difference is very large, so B2B companies can’t make a one-size-fits-all approach when they are doing the target of growth.
Specifically, when the target customer is KA-class, that is, the larger the customer, the higher the customer price, the more complicated the solution, and the longer the transaction period, the less likely it is to rely on the online market-based online customer to expand the new acquisition. customer.
This reason is not difficult to understand. For example, the market leader of a Fortune 500 company wants to introduce a new marketing software. He is unlikely to find a docking person simply through Baidu search. Most likely, he will Ask your peers or friends to recommend products, or directly find someone to recommend a reliable manufacturer to sell, in other words, rely on the power of “relationship.” Therefore, the sales team that can directly hear the gunfire must become a very important force in Tuoxin. So what other improvements are there in the sales promotion?
1. Sensitive, “mixed” valuable circles
Social media has dramatically changed the way people connect and communicate. Now the difficulty of finding a KP (Key Person) is greatly reduced in some sense, but the sales consultants need to be sensitive enough to be more Take advantage of these opportunities. Participate in industry events, join the big coffee community, make good use of professional social platforms, and focus on the customer pool of competitors… Needless to say, these conventional extensions are believed to be the sales consultants who have fought in battles. Basically, the tools that can be used are already in use. If you haven’t been on the road yet, hurry to find an old sales order.
2. Arm your social business card with professionalism
The opportunity for openness is there, but the effect of each person is not the same. The difference lies in the professionalism of the sales consultants themselves. Perhaps a few years ago, “Moutai” was a professional tool for sales consultants. Today, in the B2B business, the relationship of sales consultants is still important, but the biggest challenge is to arm their social business cards with professional skills.
For example, the same big coffee community has been added. The sales VPs of a group of companies are discussing how to activate the sales organization in different places. If you can use a customer case of the company to contribute ideas and explain the final results, This is definitely better than if you rush to add people and friends and sell a product.
3. The market is empowered at the right time, and sales extensions are more invincible
As shown in the above diagram, from a generalized marketing perspective, market + sales have a common goal in the enterprise: to ensure that there are continuous leads in the marketing funnel and there are ongoing transactions.output. Among them, the market is like an air force, and the sales are ground-based units, so it must be mutually energized and deeply linked.
The above we talked about the need to be professional enough when selling new products. In addition to the role of the internal system training system, the marketing department can play a more valuable role. “If you want to do something good, you must first sharpen your tools.” If the market can provide enough professional sales tools for the ground assault troops, sales consultants will be more comfortable in this process.
To be a concrete example, many companies will look for contacts in LinkedIn. But perhaps at the moment when the sale sends a message to potential customers, it is already doomed whether there are any stories going on.
As shown above, it is not difficult to see that the first two words are basically untargeted “copy and paste” products, and you can’t see the sincerity for a specific object. This contact action can actually be made more professional. The test shows that an F-type email layout and a targeted opening to a specific problem of the other company’s company are more likely to impress the recipient. Such conclusions and experience must be based on a large amount of data testing. The understanding of the customer’s psychology and the optimization of communication tools are actually the scope of the daily research of the market team. If you expect to be motivated by the sales of “natural talents”, efficiency It is too low.
In this case, if the marketing team is based on more customer research, helping sales consultants to do the corresponding training and provide more “soul” communication, it is not only one or two that can be changed. The sales consultant’s new effect.
This is just a small example. In fact, from Leads Gen to Demand Gen, from business communication to the doorstep, the market’s empowerment of sales can be reflected in the entire marketing chain:
When the initial contact with the target customer is sold, can the company introduction used reduce the cost of understanding the customer and highlight the advantages of differentiation?
When the target customer generates demand, can there be ready-made relevant cases, solutions, or methodological information for sales support?
When the target customer deals, is there any support for external communication resources?
When maintaining old customers, can you give more theoretical + practical advice based on the customer’s needs and current pain points to support sales for up-selling and cross-selling? and many more.
The part-time work in the company is to make the work more effective. In other words, the value of the division of labor is not for the purpose of planning.Clearing the rights and responsibilities, but more rationally let different functions play their maximum value, and finally make the results better through collaboration. Therefore, how the market team understands the needs of business and sales, how the sales team can make good use of market resources, and give feedback to the marketing team, are all issues that B2B companies are paying attention to in the process of achieving growth.
(Note: In the past two years, there have been more and more discussions about the establishment of the SDR team to support the sales team. We have previously built a team like this from scratch, and it has a lot of management. Gains and losses need to be measured, and I will find a chance to talk about it later.
04
Customer transfer: the power of a word to win a thousand words
“The customer came out and said that it is more useful than the ten sentences.” This sentence is a bit of a heart, but it is an indisputable fact. If the old customer is willing to help us introduce the new customer, it is natural to say how much the customer fee is reduced. With the endorsement of the old customer, the good impression of giving the new customer a first-class advantage is not to be neglected. However, although more and more B2B companies have begun to set up customer success departments, the new business brought by the introduction has only accounted for a small part of the growth of most companies. Therefore, the introduction of the introduction of new, there is a lot of room for dividends.
The question is, how can we make old customers willing to open a mouth to help us say a few words?
1. Customers who want to succeed first will be able to help us.
The concept of “customer success” is almost accompanied by this wave of SaaS craze to enter the Chinese peers’ vision. NPS (Customer Net Recommendation) is recognized as a gold indicator of customer success, and its core issue is one: “(Old customers) Are you willing to recommend this company’s products/services to others?” It is not difficult to understand: If customers have achieved value and business success after choosing our products and services, they will not only renew their own contracts, but also recommend or refer other customers.
Is it simple enough? The problem is that many companies say that “customer success” is the lifeline of B2B companies (especially SaaS companies), but the focus of actual action is still on the self-reliant newcomers.
For example, in the face of the majority of enterprise-level market, the maturity of customers is still relatively low, and many of their own products and services are still iterative. B2B companies need more professional services to help customers realize business value from products. . The first step in this is to help the customer to use the product first, and to improve the customer’s internal Adoption Rate. What business value does it not use?
If you go back further, the success of the customer depends on whether they are “right” customers at this stage. In the past few monthsMany start-ups have found us, but for most of them, we finally chose to provide some professional advice or training for their core issues free of charge. There is no suggestion to establish in-depth project cooperation now.
Frankly speaking, the reason is that, first of all, when the company realizes that it needs to upgrade its system capabilities, the value of the deep project is more obvious. Secondly, the resources of the start-up enterprise are limited, and there will be congenital between the ability to pay and the expectation. The contradiction cannot guarantee the maximization of customer value. It is better to keep in touch and to post-cooperation.
Only focusing on getting customers, not paying attention to customer success, not paying attention to retaining customers, is tantamount to using bamboo baskets to fetch water. The customer has not succeeded in itself, and it is possible to introduce the customer to us. It is already benevolent to do nothing to other customers.
2. The willingness to trigger a customer’s introduction: Customer’s psychological insight
Customer success is a prerequisite for customers to be willing to introduce, but not all customers who say “willing to recommend” can finally make a referral. Therefore, the premise is in place, and we need to delve into the psychology of whether the client is willing to make a referral. Think about it, each of us is also a customer of other companies in many fields. Under what circumstances are we willing to recommend the products we are using?
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Respect and cherish customers who “give a rose, have a handful of fragrance”
If I am a person who loves to share and love people, someone asks me, I will introduce, and sometimes even share some experience in the group of friends or friends, undeniably, help people It will make some people feel valuable. If we find such a customer, we must be treated as “baby” to ensure that they are satisfied with our products and services and feel our value. If such customers are dissatisfied, they must respond quickly and actively.
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Brand equivalence, behind the scenes is the need to maintain people
Just as people will consciously operate in a circle of friends, customers also have their own psychological secrets when they introduce them. Is the customer’s corporate brand equal to the brand of my company? Can I represent my own professional image that I want to maintain in a particular field? These may be inconvenient to say, but they are secretly playing a psychological secret.
Of course, brand equivalence does not mean that our corporate brand must be as well-known as the customer’s brand. Not every company can become Alibaba, nor is it necessary for every company to become Tencent.
The majority of domestic SaaS companies are young,The scale is still small, how to make brand reciprocity with your big customers? In fact, we must match our customers’ “broadness” with our own “depth”. In our own deep-rooted fields, we have truly unique value propositions, deep understanding of the future development of the industry, product design and service details should be professional enough. To put it bluntly, in this field, we have enough ability to empower our customers, and we can achieve the equivalence of the brand position, “small but not rough.”
Or, back, branding is not the same as advertising. Startups also need brand building, but the different stages of development of the company have different priorities. Regarding the issue of brand building, we have covered several articles in the previous articles, including the “Topic” mentioned in the “Topic” is the most powerful private domain traffic pool of B2B enterprises.
3. Take into account the business needs of customers and the personal development needs of KP
The brand peering we mentioned above and ensuring customer success are all fulfilling the customer’s business needs, that is, helping customers achieve business success. But what we can’t ignore is that whether it is a B2B or a B2C company, we will eventually contact and communicate with each other. Since this is the case, they will have some specific needs from the outside of the business needs. In the professional scene, the most typical one is professional growth and personal brand building.
So if we are able to help KPs better achieve personal needs through the professional cooperation process, it will be easier for them to become advocates and promoters of our products and services (Advocate). .
As shown in the above picture, if we meet the business needs of our customers, it is more likely that they will provide us with endorsements when they are asked, that is, passive sharing; but if KP’s personal development needs It can also be better met by us, and they may become proactive sharing that actively endorses us.
Talk about specific ways, such as holding a high-end salon, providing a platform for communication and learning for these KOLs, helping them to build their own circles and connections; when engaging in large-scale brand events, invite these KOLs to share (of course this event The value must be higher than his expectations), which has certain advantages for the brand image of his company and individual. veryTowards, you can also plan some interesting and meaningful projects, linking them and the corporate brands behind them to achieve more integrated value. These are the things that companies can manage and operate according to their own resource advantages at different stages. Win-win is always the theme of this era.
Well, write here, about the way companies achieve growth through new perspectives. We have introduced a four-in-one systematic thinking: branding, market inbound, sales auto-expanding, and customer referrals. In the end, we still have to return to our consistent position. The company’s resources are limited, which work should become the focus of the moment, or return to the thinking of the evolution of the company’s life cycle. Our previous articles have been mentioned many times.
At the end of the day, marketing is not a tactical function. I always think that it is the core strategic function of the enterprise. Therefore, we should think about and deploy marketing practices from the perspective of strategic needs, if your company is still facing strategy. The challenge of choice, welcome to discuss it with us.