Are you looking to generate more sales ready leads on your B2B website? As B2B Marketers, we are all feeling the pressure to do something, anything, to generate more B2B leads. But have you ever stopped to think about what marketing’s role really is? Hint, it’s not selling products or services.
Before the explosion of internet based marketing tools, marketing’s job was to generate customer interest and channel those prospects to the sales team. By taking early ownership of the corporate website and populating it with lots of product information, marketing has taken on the burden of selling products, even on a B2B website. Tasks that were handled by sales (presentations, customer references, etc.) are recorded electronically by the marketing team in the form of webinars and case studies respectively; sales usually isn’t even involved in these activities.
Less sales involvement puts more pressure on marketing to “sell”.
To reverse this trend, marketers must rethink the goal of their marketing programs. Since most B2B companies do not sell products directly on their sites, the first goal should be to sell the sales conversation, not the product. Let me clarify that I am not talking about social conversations created on various community platforms; those are very important. In business, however, the most important discussion is the sales conversation between your sales team member and the potential customer. I call this the “un-thought of” conversation because it seems to be taking a back seat to blogs and twitter.
Take a look at your B2B website. Are you promoting the sales conversation or your product? Are you providing ways for the end-user to alert you that they want to have a sales conversation or are you flooding them with product information?
I would be happy to give you a quick opinion about whether your site is creating the curiosity needed to start a sales conversation. Just give me a holler.
Link to original post