Deal-based marketing is all about differentiating a company's products or services so that they can create a better chance of winning a live customer pipeline opportunity. There are several deal-based marketing services and tactics that Viewpoint Analysis helps our customers with to challenge the status quo and increase their chances of winning the deal.
Deal-Based Marketing Services
Account and Contact Research
The first step in every DBM opportunity is understanding the client inside and out. We need to understand the business, its strategy, culture, and terminology. We then need to know who the key contacts are and how they are likely to interact and make decisions - both generally and specific to the products or services they want to purchase.
If this step is not completed, the rest of the deal-based marketing tactics will collapse, or at best they will fall on deaf ears. Take a look at what our deal-based marketing research looks like and decide whether this is something that can be conducted in-house or by an external party.
Bespoke Content and Positioning
Now that we know the key contacts and understand the basic terminology and culture, the next step is to consider bespoke marketing content and the importance of taking our brand and positioning it with specific context to the opportunity and the customer profile.
Content can be created in-house or via third party creators like Viewpoint Analysis (learn more about our marketing content creation). Creating content and sending it directly from the marketing or sales team can bring some risks as clearly this will be seen as interfering with the process, or, at best, it will be viewed as biased and potentially disregarded. As such, it is best to try to use a third-party or find existing content that can be repurposed.
Partner Marketing and Content
As mentioned, sending content directly from the sales and marketing team will likely not be effective. Another approach is to surround the account with key partners and build a messaging framework that drips content to the key influencers over the duration of the sales engagement. This has the advantage of creating a regular drumbeat of positive content without being overtly partisan.
External Deal Review
If this is a critical deal, it is worth considering bringing a third-party to conduct an external deal review. Without any emotion invested in the deal, they can quickly assess it and help build tactics that the internal team would potentially struggle to see. Having a third-party assess (or at least chair the deal review) is a proven technique and something that Phil Turton engages in regularly and he brings a unique perspective with his sales and procurement experience.
Competitor Analysis
An often overlooked deal-based marketing tactic is to assess the key competitors. This can be a game-changer in any deal pursuit. Competitor Research is ideal if we either know the competitors that are included in the process, or if we can make an educated guess about the usual suspects.
By researching the competitors, we can find lots of key information:
Messaging and terminology they are likely to use
The sales lead and his/her team
Likely partners they may be using
What their product or service do well
What their product or service is missing compared to our solution
Customer references - or lack of references
Financial stability and risks
Once we know more about our potential competitors, we can change our messaging to amplify the areas that are important to our bid.
Customer Events
Creating timely events to invite the customer to can be a real differentiator. The key thing is to ensure that they are timely and useful. If there are existing events in the diary that the customer can be invited to, that is ideal, and they should be leveraged. However, in most cases, the timing simply does not work. In this case, consider running 'pop-up' events.
Pop-up events are exactly as the title suggests; they are events that are quickly convened and benefit from the fact that we can make them 100% targeted at the client's requirement. It could be a webinar or an on-site event - but the key is make the content as aligned as physically possible.
Summary - DBM Services and Tactics
If your team are working on an absolutely critical opportunity, changing the game and investing in deal-based marketing services and new DBM tactics can be the difference between winning the opportunity or not. Our experience suggests that research is the most important thing to get started - and then use that information to build events, content, and plans.
-----
If you are interested in Account-Based Marketing Services - services that help the ABM team to improve performance, our blog 'Account-Based Marketing Services - What They Are and How They Can Help' might be useful!
Comentarios