INTERVIEW WITH
Kevin Rippon
DIRECTOR OF PLATFORM MARKETING
B2B Customer Acquisition: The role of human engagement in a world of digital-first enterprise marketing
It might be the C-suite executive that ultimately approves an order, but within enterprise sales there will potentially be lots of end-users who have an influence on the decision making process.
How can marketers get ‘smarter’ with their efforts?
Persona-based marketing has helped our team become a lot smarter with our marketing. Anything we produce, be it messaging or visual, always ties back to tightly-defined audiences. Understanding your broader audiences outside of the final decision-makers in the sales cycle is an important challenge to undertake and is often overlooked. Yes, it might be the C-suite executive that usually makes a buying decision - but within enterprise sales, there are usually many end-users and business advisors who have an influence on the decision-making process. By understanding the distinct challenges of each stakeholder who influences the purchasing process, you can then create and serve digital content that resonates with different stakeholders.
If selling companies can nail this early stage of the process by serving relevant, persona based content and organise a physical meeting with different stakeholders from the prospect, then sales representatives have a unique opportunity to shine like never before.
How has the rise of digital sales journeys impacted sales representatives?
Digital and virtual touchpoints have opened up doors for selling companies to reach prospective stakeholders at scale, and without the logistical challenge of organising numerous face-to-face meetings. Creating sales momentum with prospective customers means delivering the right message to the right people, at the right time, and the digitisation of the sales process allows for more timely touch points which can often speed up the sales cycle. To do this well, marketing needs to facilitate a lot of the early-stage discovery in a sales process online. Ideally, warming up a prospect with digital content speeds up the time it takes for a sales representative to build a solution hypothesis for the prospect account. It will certainly help validate the solution with many influencing stakeholders in a physical meeting setting. We believe - in fact, we know - that being onsite with prospective customers to validate a solution is extremely important to getting consensus with stakeholders and closing deals. But the physical meeting should almost be an event in and of itself, rather than it being the setting for a series of many conversations. If selling companies can facilitate a lot of the early-stage discovery online, it gives sales representatives a unique opportunity to shine throughout the rest of the journey.
The regular, mutual sharing of insight and knowledge will make sales and marketing teams far more effective when it comes to pushing deals across the finish line.
KEVIN RIPPON
Director of Platform Marketing VTS
What can sales and marketing teams do to avoid working in silo?
This may come as a shock, but sales and marketing teams perform best when they work together. For marketing, this means working closely with sales teams to understand the day-to-day conversations that they are having with prospective customers. How do they interpret the value of our solutions? What are their challenges and blockers? This insight is vital to creating personas that are based not just on market research, but validated with real-life context. Marketing can then reciprocate this insight with sales by providing information about industry trends and arming them with useful content that will position the sales representatives as credible industry experts. The regular, mutual sharing of insight and knowledge will make sales and marketing teams far more effective when it comes to pushing deals across the finish line. Alongside this, sales and marketing teams should also collaborate on outreach tactics to establish credibility within their industry. A great example of this is hosting a webinar that is co-hosted by existing customers. Together, sales and marketing teams can line up a timely topic that will do two things. First, provide value back to the attendees - this is crucial for getting people to sign up in the first place! And second, establish your company as an authentic partner in the industry. Of course, now that we’re continuing to emerge from the global pandemic you can apply the same logic to running an in-person event or conference - which gives the added benefit of relationship-building opportunities.
VTS is the commercial real estate industry’s leading technology platform that transforms how strategic decisions are made and executed across the asset lifecycle. The VTS Platform is the largest first-party data source in the industry and delivers data insights and solutions for everyone in commercial real estate to fuel their investment and asset strategy, leasing and marketing automation, property operations, and tenant experience.
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