The battle lines for order intake, revenue and ebitda in your sector are drawn, and they are online…are your team ready?

We meet Sales leaders, Marketing leaders and company leadership teams every week to discuss social media.

1. Some are stuck in the mud. Closed minded and not prepared to open their minds, not prepared to change, stuck rigid in one set of ways to work.

2. Others are more open. Aware of the shift in how things work these days. Curious and taking the first steps to find out how it all works.

3. Others are ready.

When we started to out at CRUX, we met more teams that were in mode 1, now we meet more and more professionals who are facing up to the truth.

Marketing leaders telling us that the ‘traditional’ methods that world 10 years ago, now don’t deliver the intended results. They tell us that their management teams just want more of the same and are not open to modern approaches.

We meet sales leaders who tell us they cant deliver on the goals set for them by using ‘traditional’ methods they used for years, as they “just don’t work”.

We now meet leadership teams who are open armed, welcoming in a new mindset and completely prepared to shift to meet modern commercial operating principles.

We work across sectors, vastly different markets and product offering and its amazing to see completely different organisation in completely different spaces all suffering from the same issues

We ask a simple set of questions, questions we see as the root of all of this:

Do you have access to your markets?

Do you have credibility in those markets?

Do you have meaningful connection with your prospects?

Can you convert all of the above to commercial interaction?

The first 3 areas are what your marketing should be helping you but unfortunately most marketing has lost its way.

What used to be the one of the most important functions in the business but is now generally confined to brochureware. Burning cash for the sake of 'visibility' and being 'really busy' preforming activities that cannot be measure against pipeline attribution.

In many cases the leadership team are applying pressure to keep doing more of the same “the markets will eventually come round”, “once covid is over it will all go back to normal”, "all we need is the rub of the green"...

Running the hamster wheel of modern sales and marketing

We need this creative talent, experience, and business energy back on top and working properly again. Marketing focussed on access to markets, credibility in those markets and creating meaningful connection with prospects, working hand in hand with finance and sales.

Its time to give Marketing the confidence and knowledge that their efforts are directly contributing to the success of the business and get away from 'doing things' and hoping for the best...

If you are serious about order intake, revenue and ebitda in 2022, you must dig deep on these questions. If you dig deep enough, you then realise it’s impossible to avoid the topics of Social Media and Digital transformation.

Let’s look at these questions in more detail and I ask that you hold a lens up during this and look closely at your own organisation.

Question 1: Access to markets

"We have established we have useful products and services and now need to take them to market. Where can we take them and who are the businesses we should target?".

This is the market analysis piece and working out how we get into those markets. Market analysis isn't done with maps, its done digitally.

Using Social Media well allows you to dissect markets and pinpoint 'who is who' and where they are - Its a free source of market information. We now have a list of tier 1, 2 and 3 targets and we can begin creating early stage capture plans.

Now we can see the people we are interested in and begin the process of bringing them into our digital networks.

Question 2: Credibility in those markets

Beyond "visibility.."

Once we have established where and who, how do we show them that we are a credible player?

How to we demonstrate this in ways that get them interested in us..?

This where we need to start to build influence. Put the corporate content and brochureware away...we must start to build influence.

The aim is to create 'Qualified relevance' where your prospects know you and understand that you are the leading technical and commercial influencers in your sector...

So much time is wasted by people doing things for the sake of visibility, its a waste of time. Anyone can have visibility....its temporary, its not actionable and it doesn't change a thing...

Qualified Relevance gets you the credibility you need to create meaningful connection with business prospects.

Question 3: Meaningful connection with prospects

We now have the right people's attention and they understand who we are , what we are and that we are specialists. We have Qualified Relevance....what now?

We must establish trust and build relationships within those new accounts?

Focus on thought leadership...

The 2021 LinkedIn-Edelman B2B thought leadership impact report is an excellent report which saw Edelman and LinkedIn collaborate on the fourth annual B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study to examine how thought leadership influences perception and buying behaviours among B2B decision-makers (link below).

The report says…

"64% of buyers say that and organisation thought leadership content is a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities and competency than its marketing materials and products sheets".

It then goes on to say

“63% of buyers also say that thought leadership is important in providing proof that an organisation genuinely understands or can solve your business challenges".

Thought leadership in sales and marketing

This is where we need to be aiming, it doesn’t come easily. There is no afternoon ‘LinkedIn Training’ course that can teach this and you cant get it by sharing the company page post that marketing put out.…this takes expertise and understanding.

This is about improving the financial performance of the business for the long term…not tinkering around with content to see what ‘works.

Question 4: Create Commercial Interaction

It all hinges on this. If we do well in the first 3 elements, it should position us perfectly to take advantage of this crucial next step.

This where we need the sales team doing what they do best, creating conversations and moving all of this to the point of sale.

In 2022 we need this machine working well, a slick, modern digital process which gets the very best for our businesses.

Does all of our activity in questions 1-3 provide us with measurable, bankable and scalable return?

As we try to answer these questions moving into 2022, it’s impossible to avoid Digital and Social regardless of our sector.

Regardless of how complex this sounds, no matter how many techniques and methods are employed at each stage…these are the basic elements we all need to be good at.

In 2022, it’s impossible to have this level of analysis and conversation without turning to digital. In fact, these days its front and centre.