INTERVIEW WITH
Diana Henderson
VP GLOBAL MARKETING
B2B Customer Acquisition: The role of human engagement in a world of digital-first enterprise marketing
When you understand what a customer’s challenges are at different stages of the sales cycle, then you also start to realise what the opportunities are too.
How has digitalization impacted buying journeys in recent years?
Thanks to the digitization, potential enterprise buyers can engage with providers in a multitude of ways. Businesses have had to improve their self-serve sales and marketing efforts to adapt to customer engagement preferences. Many buyers choose to engage digitally, with phone calls to a prospect increasingly seen as an intrusion. (Albeit that customer use of voice-to-voice customer service centers increased markedly during the 2020 and 2021 pandemic years, when people just wanted contact with another human. Numerous studies have pointed to a continuing decrease in customer preference for use of chatbots.) Nevertheless, the digitization of customer channels can be a double-edged sword. Digital channels may be more convenient and in some ways less confronting for buyers, than in-person contact. But they increase the difficulty for organizations to build relationships and personal connections with potential customers. If there’s no in-person engagement from a prospect with someone from the brand organization, then the prospect’s impressions of the organization are reduced to the digital channels they do deal with, and to any potential digital marketing and advertising efforts they may have seen. Granted, digital marketing and advertising helps with reach, but not necessarily with connection and conversion.
A great brand not only represents the company, but also the people within it.
What value does human engagement bring to modern sales and marketing?
It’s important to have a ‘face’ of your brand, not only in your marketing to help build personal connections, but in sales and customer service. Having an individual to talk to and build a connection with, even if via email, provides a prospect with a literal ‘face’ of your organization’s brand. It’s something of a truism that a great brand is not only a representation of the company, but of its people. But the reverse is even more true. Ultimately the people in the company that a prospect deals with are the ambassadors for the brand. This means that businesses need to market their salespeople just as much as their brand. The salesperson’s face is the one that prospects will see throughout the buying journey and will turn to if they face a challenge. It also means having salespeople who are consultative and truly understand the needs of their buyers and the journey that they are on before trying to sell them something. Understanding a prospect’s, or customer’s, daily work life and what their challenges are in order to not only uncover opportunities but to better tailor the offer, product and messaging regardless of where they are in the sales cycle. Striving to provide an offer, message, or conversation that is highly relevant to their current situation, without being creepy or overfamiliar, in a way that engenders trust. Prospects and customers need someone that they can trust and rely on, someone accountable to help them find a solution. Businesses who invest in marketing their salespeople will speed up the rate at which they establish authenticity and credibility with buyers, and ultimately help to create long-lasting, meaningful relationships.
Trust will always be the foundation of a successful buying relationship. Traditional, face-to-face sales gave businesses great opportunities to establish this trust in the early stages of the relationship.
DIANA HENDERSON
VP GLOBAL MARKETING
TELUS AGRICULTURE & CONSUMER GOODS
What role does trust play in an increasingly virtual world?
Trust will always be the foundation of a successful buying relationship. Traditional, face-to-face sales gave businesses great opportunities to establish this trust in the early stages of the relationship, and when this happens it still applies. But now that the early stages of buying relationships are happening increasingly virtually, businesses need to find new ways to establish trust quickly and as early as possible. Simply listening to customers is the first step in building trust early on. This includes understanding preferred communications approaches. Some buyers are tired of long-form content such as whitepapers. Short-form content with video, particularly in social media, routinely receives more engagement. Why? There’s often a person in it; it is brought to a veritable life. So businesses need to think about how to offer short-form content that is quickly, topically and easily applied to a prospect’s work and daily life. By demonstrating an understanding of the buyer at the same time as offering value, i.e. credibility through content, you build trust. And a greater likelihood of them retaining the information. Obviously, organizations need to be able to service prospective buyers in the ways they prefer to engage, whether that is fully digital and virtual, or through real conversations with people in the business. In either case, thought needs to be given to how to best humanize each marketing and sales customer service touchpoint in order to create personal connections enabling trust and therefore conversion, retention, and advocacy.
TELUS Agriculture & Consumer Goods create unified, trusted and sustainable value chaisn to enable the most efficient production and logistics outcomes, while lowering the impact on the environment. They deliver actionable digital solutions and data insights that connect global supply chains, improving the safety, quality and sustainability of food and consumer goods, all in a way that's traceable and clear to the end consumer.
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