The business environment in 2020 has changed rapidly which is influencing how B2B tech and telecoms companies sell. While COVID-19 continues to disrupt our lives, B2B organisations are playing a critical role in keeping the world connected and moving forward.
Harvard Business Review stated in their article ‘Don’t Cut Your Marketing Budget in a Recession’ that the companies that have bounced back most strongly from previous recessions usually did not cut their marketing spend, and in many cases actually increased it.
In this challenging new time, B2B organisations must accompany their customers on their new journey, shifting their messages and reconsidering their value proposition. This isn’t a time to stop spending marketing and sales budgets. Instead, it is a time to change how you are spending it. Organisations that are willing to adapt and evolve their marketing and sales processes will certainly be the ones to succeed and cement the loyalty of new and old prospects.
The challenge has been to adapt B2B tech and telecoms marketing and sales strategies in a post COVID world, where there are few in-person meetings or industry events and fewer opportunities to engage with customers and prospects. Many businesses over the first six months of 2020 tried the ‘wait and see’ approach but are seeing that they need to take action.
You need to look at new ways of reaching out to prospects by changing the way you sell. Otherwise, you face losing prospects to more savvy competitors or becoming irrelevant. You need to change and adapt your marketing and sales to determine the capacity for growth and to position your business against competitors.
By adapting marketing and sales with automation, your business gains the ability to move forward with confidence in a challenging market. Digital platforms such as HubSpot provide a comprehensive suite of sales and marketing tools, with a solid CRM at the core. This can really unite your marketing and sales teams by providing insights and intelligence from the marketing side, and automatically updating the sales team as a result. The outcome will be more successful marketing campaigns with relevant content according to your prospect’s stage in the buyer’s journey, and a smoother sales process that takes the lifecycle stage into consideration.
With the right agency partner, this can be made simple with full support and expertise every step of the way, from onboarding HubSpot, right through to creating and executing marketing campaigns, and utilising sales tools and automation.
It’s important to remember that a sale is an ongoing process. From attracting, engaging and converting a lead into a customer, you must continue to nurture this customer into the future to exceed their expectations. The organisations that truly thrive in a rapidly changing and challenging business environment are those that work hard to not only please their customers but delight them with a customer-centric model.
You can’t increase your sales and revenue without your customers, so equip your sales and marketing teams with all the tools they need to put your customers first and engage them with content and communications that really matter.
At Ilex, our expert team are here to help you adapt and evolve your marketing and sales to increase growth and move forward in the future of B2B tech and telecoms. Book a meeting today.