MARKET VIEW 02
Andrew Moloney
CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER
How does your organisation engage customers throughout the engagement period?
In our industry, which is B2B tech, sales cycles are quite long, approx. 9-12 months and deal sizes are normally a minimum of five figures. We're talking about very long and complex buying cycles with lots of individuals involved across the organisation. Also, the majority of what we sell today is data storage and data storage installations always get bigger. We're often entering into a relationship that will last many years - if we do our job right. To ensure this longevity, you need to be a trusted adviser and customers need to work with a team of people who they actually trust. That will include the account manager but it will also include an extended team of engineers, support and other people, and very often, members of the executive team as well. As marketers, it's part of our role to build out the depth of content to help the wider team engage customers. We spend a lot of time building content which explains what's going on in the industry, market and customer landscape. We have to be able to give sellers the message, but more importantly, they must know when to bring marketing and other specialists from the organisation in, to build out that story and to have those broader conversations.
As marketers, it's part of our role to build out the depth of content to help the wider team engage customers.
Have you set out any guidelines to help sales and marketing engage buyers?
We, as a business, have explicitly built a tone of voice, which is about no-nonsense, transparency, a little bit tongue in cheek, and not taking ourselves too seriously. Now, occasionally, you can go too far with that. So, it’s all about walking that fine line and using appropriate communication channels. For example, on Twitter, we'll take a much more “tongue in cheek'' view of the world than we will on LinkedIn. I think salespeople are very individual and all of them can be successful in very different ways. But there are two things that they all need to have: to be authentic and to be transparent. You can, and you will, get caught out very quickly if you're not transparent and authentic. Does that mean that every one of them needs to be able to tell a story and create an “experience”? Well, not all of them - they have different kinds of customers, they're in different parts of the world and they’re in different buying cycles. So, it all comes down to adding value to the conversation, and one of the ways you can do that is by inspiring original thought and helping to frame a problem or frame a solution in a way that might not have been as obvious.
So, it all comes down to adding value to the conversation, and one of the ways you can do that is by inspiring original thought and helping to frame a problem or frame a solution in a way that might not have been as obvious.
ANDREW MOLONEY
Chief Marketing Officer
SOFTIRON