So, you want to explode sales, enter new markets, step out in the global arena? You may have gotten this far with zero marketing – in which case, congratulations! It’s proof that your product truly rocks and is ready for prime time – ready for a much wider audience.
If you have great ambitions, you will need marketing. So, you talk to marketers but you yourself have never done it and are unsure about what freelancer/agency would be a good fit.
We want to help you be able to tell who is a good B2B marketer, and who isn’t.
Here we discuss how to tell whether a marketer or agency can be a good fit for taking on a serious B2B growth-challenge.
These are actually “warning signs”. We’re going for warning signs because they are easy to spot early in a conversation – if you know what to look for. So, here we go:
- Going for leads above all: when a marketer tells you, it’s all about getting “a lot of good leads”, you know their mindset is off. You want a B2B marketer talk about “ideal customer profiles”, “target accounts” and “pipeline” and “marketing/sales collateral” that supports sales. If they’re just talking about leads and automated emails, you’ll know they haven’t marketed any complex B2B product recently.
- Going for digital funnels with only – a one-legged stool: when a marketer wants to build you funnels and email sequences, maybe SEO, social and nothing else, you’ll know that they’re up for an ugly surprise in competitive B2B markets. You can’t just rest on funnels+automation in most B2B growth programs, you need to involve biz dev, sales and other marketing channels.
- Measuring the wrong things, not asking about CRM data and pipeline: a good marketer should always want to analyze your data first. If they do and they’re caught up with lead quantity, see #1.
- Obsession with software, martech: when the conversation often steers to tech and software in relation to your problems, ambitions, challenges… that’s also a warning sign. Marketers who rely on tech and build their tactics around software with little analysis and research tend to get “ungood” results in the long run.
- Not syncing with sales: marketing has got to be married to sales and really in sync. This means marketing should accept KPIs that are very closely related to revenue. You should evaluate marketing’s contribution based on how much revenue are the marketing-originated leads are creating. Beware, if sales and sales initiatives hardly comes up in a marketing conversation. Yellow flag there.
- All inbound, no outbound: many marketers swear by inbound – that is, the practice of doing content and SEO and social media marketing, and refraining from direct outreach, direct mail and most forms of advertising. In many B2C markets and less mature B2B markets, you can get away with this. But if you’re not utilizing outbound, if you don’t have business development in place, you’re leaving opportunity on the table.
Use this list as a guideline to “gauge” marketers you’re looking to work with. If you’d like to gauge Klear, be our guest. 🙂
