Anja Leipold
MENZEL Elektromotoren GmbH
Marketing and Industry Awareness Committee Member
Sales and marketing departments often work alongside each other instead of performing as a team. If marketers and salespeople don't pull together, your company will never exploit its full potential. Many B2B industrial companies suffer from an old problem; there is hardly any acceptance, appreciation and support for their own marketing department. Marketing departments are often seen as money-guzzling machines, pure sales supporters, or PowerPoint nerds. “Could you just make a quick PowerPoint presentation on that?” or “Could you quickly post this online?” “How much work can that be?” These are comments frequently made to marketing professionals.
There is a lack of understanding of why marketing is firstly so important and secondly a complex and time-consuming area. Marketing is unfortunately rarely perceived as a specialist department. In addition, B2B marketing in small and medium-sized enterprises is often a one-person show (i.e., one single person takes care of all communication and marketing issues for the entire company). These circumstances have a negative impact on the performance of your marketing and finally on the motivation of your marketing experts. The consequence is that your competitors will pass you by if your marketing specialist is not supported, and that will harm the entire company. But why do marketing departments in B2B companies often have such a hard time? Where does this internal conflict between sales and marketing and lack of support come from?
Usually, marketers are neither engineers nor motor experts. They have different ways of thinking. Their work is subject to trends, which today are determined primarily by modern online platforms and social networks. Engineers, on the other hand, put all their knowledge into complex product solutions and services. And now marketers come along and want to tell them how to communicate these products to the target group. This leads to friction and a lack of understanding. The solution is to ensure that both departments exchange information with each other. Have product managers review marketing materials for accuracy. Incorporate their expertise into communications strategies. At the same time, salespeople need to be able to understand how a marketing strategy is formed and how it can support their sales job. In addition, sales staff need to develop an understanding of how complex and expensive individual marketing measures are.
Modern online marketing measures have often not yet fully reached the minds of our conservative B2B industries. Instead, many companies rely on the tried and true: "Our customers know us; they don't google us." or "Our target group is not on social media.", etc. General managers should create a fundamental understanding of modern marketing within the company. Without internal acceptance for online marketing measures, it will be difficult to implement them. Marketers, in turn, should use statistics to justify the use of communications tools.
Without good content, there is no coverage and no leads. If the input from the specialist departments is lacking, it becomes difficult to market complex products to complex target groups. Marketers should educate their sales colleagues as to why they depend on them for information. Monetary approaches might also help here. For example, a bonus for content contributions from the specialist departments might be convincing.
At the same time, the management department has a duty to create a continuous surrounding in which marketing and sales can exchange ideas at eye level. They should act as a mediator, initiating joint workshops and open rounds of exchange. After all, all departments of a company want to achieve the same goal: company success and increased sales.
What becomes clear when marketing and sales work together is that the cooperation brings significant benefits to your business. But there is another challenge for small and medium-sized B2B companies that is likely to diminish their marketing success; small marketing departments have almost no chance of successfully covering the complete range of B2B marketing. This problem has grown over time because many B2B companies disregard the fact that digitalization and the changing information needs of B2B target groups now also result in numerous additional fields of marketing activities: content marketing, social media, website, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine advertising (SEA), online advertising, marketplaces, newsletters, blogs, etc. If you must omit measures because your only marketing employee simply can't manage them, it becomes clear at the same time how much marketing potential your company is not using. Consider investing more budget and hiring additional marketing staff. It pays off! Alternatively, outsource parts of marketing, especially time-intensive topics like SEA or social media. Agencies may not understand the complexity of your product as well as you do, but they understand the target group and their objectives.
Remember that the largest and most successful companies focus on marketing! If you invest more and make the marketing department part of your team, you will soon be able to reap the rewards.
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