The Social Strategist

Planning for a Sales and Marketing redesign in the Digital Transformation

By Eric Doyle

We meet some amazing leadership teams from a wide variety of sectors and geographic locations, and it is astonishing how different, even companies in the same sector, approach demand generation.

Regardless of the size of our companies, we are all looking for the same thing…

1. Access to markets: Getting to the heart of markets, deep understanding, and presence.

2. Credibility in those markets: We are understood and appreciated in the right places by the right people.

3. Meaningful connection with prospects: A real relationship, beyond brochures.

4. Commercial interaction: Turning all of this into purchase orders and revenue

This it, the Holy Grail, it’s what we all want in some way, shape of form, regardless of whether we are a 250K turnover company or a 250M turnover company.

The way different organisations go about securing this is interesting.

There are those that are very advanced in all the due diligence of mapping out and applying their new routes to market, with diverse and encompassing digital strategies and internals plays. A particular company comes to mind, who are remapping their entire management system to incorporate a digital ‘lead to purchase order’ system designed to accommodate Social Selling & Influence. This is a business that was completely analogue in their thinking about demand generation, they thought it was all about cold calling, email, and adverts.

There are those at the opposite side of the scale that are still trying to use outdated methods to pick up leads with new prospects, get on calls, set up meetings and hope for the best. They have heard about digital transformation but dismiss it something not applicable to them… “But Eric, we are an engineering company, does this apply to us...?”

Then there is the middle ground, no man’s land. Here we find those that are fumbling around trying to make it up. They will tell us they are all over it…, “we are all over Social”, at some point usually someone tells me how many followers they have on their company page on LinkedIn…when I turn the discussion to how they’ve monetised being “all over Social” and the tone changes.

The win isn’t posting page after page of content…the win is being able to consistently apply a process that you can convert into commercial interaction (see step 4 above). You may not know about it or even understand it but there are areas on Social devoted to exactly what you and your company do, you should be leading that conversation.

This puts you in a such a different place that one of our clients recently described it as “an unfair advantage…”

There is a ‘Digital share of voice’ for your sector…who owns yours...?

Who are the leading Technical and Commercial digital influencers in your sector...?

Both answers should be you…

How to make sure your business is on the right side as the Digital Divide grows ever wider… and how to stay there.

Gartner are giving us all the clues for free! “80% of b2b transactions will be completely digital by 2025”,

“33% of buyers don’t ever want to see your Sales team”,

“We need to be changing our Sales Motions to match modern Buying Motions…”

I run a B2B business just like you and all that we do in terms of strategy and preparation is in line with this.

This isn’t relevant only to the Tech industry or people in Digital Marketing, this a current issue for all B2B businesses…yours and mine. Waiting for ‘things to go back to normal’ at this stage is futile and damaging to our futures.

3 questions to ask your team today:

Who are the leading technical and commercial digital influencers in our sector?

Does our strategy for Social Media stretch beyond the marketing team?

Can we link our Social Media activity to elements of our pipeline?

These are board level discussion points for all B2B businesses in the energy sectors today. The discussion about whether this ‘works or not’ is over, it’s now time to get your people trained and expert in digital networking, prospecting, building influence and closing business generated from the application of your Social Selling & influence strategy.