If selling is difficult, your marketing is flawed

If trust is not established with potential customers first, they won't be open to any communication or sales transaction. Even if your sales team successfully establishes a connection with a potential client, if they fail to develop trust, the sales process will be considerably longer and have less chance of success.

How to build trust

The most critical components of trust are honesty and transparency.
If you want to build trust, start by sharing your company's values. Discuss how you apply those values to daily problems. Focus on the shared experiences you have with customers. Create online content that connects emotionally using implicit messaging. Look at ways of demonstrating you share the risks of a relationship.

Digital-first

Almost without exception, all potential customers will connect with you through your online touchpoints.  New customers discover your brand, product and services through online searches, social media posts, and review sites. If you have the right strategy, you can provide prequalified sales leads to your team; however, you need enough quality content to achieve this result.

In the B2B space, it takes an average of five connections with your online content before leads will self-qualify. Although It's hard to measure the extent of loss of opportunity of not having the right content strategy, it's safe to assume it's much more significant than expected.

Fee resistance

People buy from a trusted provider. If they don't trust you, your offers have no value. The inverse is also true. Trusted brands can command a premium on fees, as the risk of the transaction is regarded to be lower than a competitor's offer. Selling trust first reduces the fee resistance many salespeople battle to overcome. If sales team conversations are distracted by a lack of confidence in your company, they become much less effective and efficient.

Target the right people and the right client

If you had potential customers' data, you could target the right people in the right organisations with your marketing. In reality, people are becoming increasingly resistant to providing both personal and professional information.

There are other ways you can target leads. One increasingly effective way is inbound marketing. The success of inbound marketing depends on a knowledge of search and other target audience activity. Organisations Like Digital Storytelling Collective are experts at researching your target audience's online activity and using that information to build search-driven marketing and content strategies. We use our knowledge of this space to drive content strategies that help align your messaging with your client's needs. 

Filters out the duds

Search Engine Optimisation marketing is an effective way to filter out the time wasters and deliver highly qualified leads without work from your sales team. A well-planned and executed SEO strategy allows leads to connect with your brand and prequalify. Digital Storytelling Collective uses a data-driven process to ensure the vast majority of leads your sales team receive will convert to quality clients.

Let marketing do the heavy lifting

Good sales teams are expensive to build and maintain. Commissions play a significant part in sales teams' remuneration. A new business development manager's ability to earn commissions depends heavily on the quality of the leads they receive. Marketing should be doing the heavy lifting of sales, allowing your team to focus on building and maintaining relationships. 

Let's say you haven't prioritised the development and resourcing of a 'digital-first' marketing strategy. Are you cutting off the chance of your sales team's success? Are you also strangling future growth? Are you creating opportunities for competitors to take your market share?

Risk vs. reward

With B2B marketing, the stakes are much higher than most management teams recognise. A well-funded and resourced 'digital-first' marketing strategy is the smartest (and most cost-effective) investment you will ever make. Ignoring the reality of the current sales paradigm has a genuine and immediate impact on your business's ability to succeed.