Post-pandemic, are people embracing or shying away from the return of face-to-face meetings?
As we continue to move out of the global pandemic, there has been a renewed appreciation for face-to-face business meetings. To be able to see colleagues and associates, some of whom may well be friends too, after such a long period of time naturally brings a sense of joy and delight. We’re still in the stage where face-to-face meetings are a novelty and therefore people are far more receptive to them than they perhaps were before the pandemic.
This is welcome news to sales representatives, many of whom do their best work when face-to-face with their prospects. Face-to-face meetings help sales representatives to quickly build rapport with prospects and ask them the right questions to establish their challenges in a way that doesn’t feel forced. If a sales representative has a deep understanding of their prospect’s challenges and pain points, that’s when they are in a powerful position to sell a solution, i.e their products or services, confident in the knowledge that it will directly address a known pain point.
Is the potential for large reach offered by digital marketing a distraction?
The world is a big place, and if you really wanted to then you could have your content seen by millions upon millions of people. But it wouldn’t be relevant to the vast majority of those people and would cause your brand more harm than good. Instead you have to distill your audience as much as possible to ensure that your content only reaches the people it is relevant and valuable to.
Once you’ve identified your audience, it is vital that you track every single touch point with each individual prospect. Doing so will allow you to build a picture over time of what different types of content work best for different types of buyer, and also the frequency at which each type of buyer needs to receive content in order to stay engaged. Tracking this data and making small improvements as you go is the best way to generate warm leads for your sales representatives. When making these changes, make sure to keep your narrative consistent throughout - if you make too many changes at once then it can create a disconnect in the buyer’s journey, which ultimately reduces the likelihood of you winning that sale.
You have to distill your audience as much as possible to ensure that your content only reaches the people it is relevant and valuable to.
Speaking with another human provides a level of reassurance and tangibility that digesting a piece of digital content can simply never match.
Will digital marketing replace the role of human sales representatives in B2B sales?
If you are selling complex B2B solutions, there will always be a need for human interaction within that sales process. Speaking with another human provides a level of reassurance and tangibility that digesting a piece of digital content can simply never match. It also makes economic sense to have dedicated salespeople when you have a large average deal size, say £50,000 or more. This is because your conversion rate of closing deals will be noticeably higher when a human is involved over a fully automated, self-serve sales process.
Digital content and marketing is most effective in the early stages of a buying journey. The more digital touchpoints that you can create with a prospect before a sales representative gets in contact with them, then the sales representative has a higher chance of converting that prospect into a customer. Make sure that any digital content you send out is engaging, tells a story that is relevant to the consumer, is easily digestible and most importantly, shows the consumer how you could help them to solve a problem.
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