thefunnel

What does field marketing do and how can field marketing create value? This is an interesting question, particularly in engineering focused companies, where there’s sometimes a lack of marketing understanding, and marketing at its best is often marginalized to entry level marcoms, like production of specification sheets, etc. So how can a marketing organization in these situations justify its existence, and achieve a higher level recognition? One way to do this is to partner with sales, because even the most engineering minded organizations needs sales to survive. This might feel like marketing is taking a sub-servant role, and in many organizations, unfortunately this is the case, but played our right this could be only a start. One way to think about the marketing value is to use the sales model concept from solution selling. In solution selling, the sales process (focus, value, relationship, intent, etc.) is generally thought as being in one of four phases or levels. Level one selling is where the relationship with the customer is casual, the focus of the efforts is the product, and the only intent is to get the customer to consider buying.  Level four selling, on the other hand, is a place where the sales person is an insider, in a symbiotic relationship with the customer and through a thorough understanding of the customers’ business can provide strategic advice, while making a sale. Similarly, marketing on level one is normally limited to lead generation, providing presentation material and general assistance, while a level four marketing is a partnership, enabling, equipping and providing sales with strategic leadership. Using a model like this can benefit marketing in many ways, but most importantly by aligning the marketing efforts to whichever level the selling is done, “sales support” can be optimized for maximum fit, which helps build the relationship with sales providing a good platform for success. In addition in knowing the maturity level of sales, marketing can help push the organization to the next level of sophistication and value, and ultimately be able to use more of its brainpower and earn the recognition it deserves.

I came across an interesting article about brand loyalty. Basically, the notion is that in the current “participation economy” traditional marketing attention and interruption marketing paradigm) is obsolete and that “movements” needs to be generated instead of communication. The reason for this is that most products are good enough, for what they are intended to do, and the way you succeed in branding is to “achieve or create a loyalty without reason”. This means finding that emotional connection by attaching a level of mystery to the brand (the more the consumer knows about the specifics of a brand the less interesting it becomes), because people are today looking for things beyond rational value. The article claims that this applies equally to B-2-B products, and that intimacy, a story, a relationship leads to “unreasonable loyalty”. In addition marketing should be aiming to measure the return on involvement, rather than the return on investment. The above is one of the reasons, for example, why traditional approaches to market research, based on information, knowledge and data, often fails to provide an accurate prediction on the success of a new product. Marketers should forget about focus groups, because in a focus group environment, customers hide their real feelings towards a brand, and therefore, aspects of “unreasonable loyalty” are never uncovered.

Same post as yesterday, just testing out the twitter feed feature. I apologize. Anyway, here’s the link to the white paper / case study Web Case Study