The New 5-P’s of Modern Marketing

Catapult Groups hosts a new webinar, “Harness the Power of Closed-Loop Marketing,” on Wednesday, November 28^th at 10:00 am PST / 1:00 pm EST. Scott Zimmerman, President of Sales Elevator, will offer great insights into sales and marketing that you can implement right away in your business. Among his topics are “The New 5 P’s of Modern Marketing.”

Scott shares the first two of these “5 P’s” in this blog post:

We all know the traditional 5 P’s of marketing: product, price, placement, promotion and people. Lately, I’ve had difficulty seeing how these five categories apply to the real-world challenge of helping our clients get more business for themselves. I hereby propose new categories for an effective business-to-business (B-2-B) marketing model, including:

Permission

Grab a copy of “Permission Marketing” by Seth Godin and you can master the basic premises in a couple of days. Godin claims that if someone gives you their permission to market to them (sending them information about your products or services), the odds of them reading and digesting your information increase more than 600%. Think about your feelings of invasion when you receive unsolicited SPAM in your business email box or form letters and junk mail at your office. Permission works; find ways to use it to your advantage.

When I meet prospects at network functions or through referrals, I ask them about their business interests. Once they share their wants and needs, I ask if they mind if I occasionally send information that might be helpful to them. After sending out a few useful articles, I often have made a new friend. Once someone likes and trusts you, they start asking questions about what you do and what you sell (friends always prefer to buy from friends). I get referrals from people who have never bought from my company before. This is the power of the “law of reciprocity.” Trust me: it works like magic.

Profiling

Everyone’s definition of profiling is different—and should be. However, I can narrow down the field(s) by saying that every smart B-2-B marketer ought to know the minimum about each prospect:

• Which of your products and/or services should they be buying from you?
• Which of your products and/or services have they already bought from you?
• Which of your products and/or services will they never buy from you?
• What types of information do they prefer to receive (case studies, stories, data, flow charts, etc.)?
• How often do they prefer to receive your information?
• Where are they in the educational (or buying) cycle for the next product/service they most need?
• What types of information would help them achieve their goals (even if totally unrelated to your products or services)?

Once a sales rep nails down each prospect profile, marketing should only send them information:

• About the benefits of the one product/service they are most likely to want/need
• In the medium they most prefer
• Containing the types of data/details or concepts/overviews they respond to
• In the frequency that matches their preferences and timing within the buying cycle
• Articles, tips and ideas that help them achieve their personal and/or business goals

Any other information you send may not help prospects buy from you and it could damage your relationship by causing “attention erosion.” We all experience some attention erosion each time we look at our in-box and quickly delete emails (unread, of course) from people we don’t know, like or trust.

By sending you unsolicited, irrelevant information, bad marketers infringe upon your personal space. I hope you’re not doing the same with your clients and prospects.

Join us on November 28^th 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.