The New 5-Ps of Modern Marketing (Part 2)
Coming up next week, courtesy of Catapult Groups, is a great new webinar, “Harness the Power of Closed-Look Marketing,” with Scott Zimmerman, President of Sales Elevator. During this webinar, Scott will share time-honored insights and strategies that you can implement right away in your own sales and marketing initiatives. I urge you to join us November 28th at 10:00 am PST / 1:00 pm EST for tips that will help your business grow.
Previously, Scott discussed the value of his new “5-P’s of Modern Marketing,” which included Permission (“ … if someone gives you their permission to market to them, the odds of them reading and digesting your information increase more than 600%”) and Profiling (“what every smart B-2-B marketer ought to know about their prospects”). Today, Scott offers his unique take on the remaining “5-Ps”.
Partitioned Positioning
Traditional positioning used to suggest that we create a single, “company-wide” positioning for our products or services. I believe this method is no longer viable. Every product or service has different benefits and every buyer has different needs. Partitioned Positioning is saying something specific and interesting about your company, product and/or services that matches the natural buying style for every type of prospect you encounter. Focused positioning helps everyone in your sales chain clearly identify ideal prospects and reduces the chances that your company will take on bad clients.
Effective positioning also makes garnering referrals much easier. When you become known for solving specific problems in a specific way, people tend to remember (and refer) you to their friends and clients.
Process
Our approach to process consists of two phases. The first phase gives salespeople the ability to execute a customized marketing campaign tailored to the profile and needs of each prospect. The second phase is where marketing efficiently mines intelligent data to find profiled prospects and/or clients with specific needs. Using custom-filtered criteria (as outlined previously in the “Profiling” section), marketing can send matched messages to clients or prospects that more closely target what it is they’re looking for.
Patience
Finally, there’s patience. Here’s the principle I want you to pass along to your sales team: Not every qualified prospect needs what you sell when you first meet them. A recent report from the Direct Marketing Association revealed that 78% of business-to-business leads do not make their first purchase with a new vendor until after six months of initial contact. But if they’re qualified leads, they’re your best leads! The selling mistake I most often see if the confusion of “unqualified” and “bad timing.” Salespeople mistakenly discard leads because the prospects say they have no need for their product or service. They’re not lying; they genuinely have no need—at that moment in time.
Join us on November 28th for more insights from Scott Zimmerman. Please take a moment to register for the webinar and learn more about effective B-2-B marketing models.
