In the recent past, industrial manufacturers would hunt new business by identifying their prey and commence on the great new business safari. How many times have you heard the phrase, “We should be doing work with that company.” Most industrial manufacturers know who they should have as customers. This is the low hanging fruit for marketing but is often forgotten or not fully capitalized.
With the onset of new digital technologies and channels, the task of targeting specific customers in a given organization with specific campaigns has become more effective. ABM (Account Based Marketing) has always been a mainstay for expanding an industrial companies business. Historically, salespeople would pitch a tent in a lobby of a prospective client and develop a relationship with the receptionist or even the janitor – whoever would drop the slightest information about what the company was planning. Today, every industrial manufacturer should have multiple strategies developed and in play at all times to define the key players at certain target accounts and develop a highly focused digital marketing strategy to nurture their interest. The lowest hanging fruit should be the easiest to pick.
List Your Low Hanging Fruit
Start with a brainstorming session with your sales team. Ask them to define and identify the clients they think are good fits for your products/services. Collect as much information as possible about each (make sure they are truly low hanging). It might help your process to first develop a checklist for the data collection prior to the session to standardize the information and set criteria for what kind of intelligence would be valuable.
Once you have a healthy list of companies, do a little more research about each of the companies so that the information about each company is as in-depth as possible. You should find this process easier than most prospecting since most salespeople have a ‘hit list’ of prospects.
The objective of this exercise is to glean a better understanding of your missed or forgotten opportunities. The next step of claiming these prospects has been traditionally reactionary. The sales manager or owner then states, “Who do we know there?”. This is where the sales person usually gets nervous and fidgets trying to create a narrative as to why you have never done business with each company. The newest technologies remove these squeamish moments and replaces it with a reliable process that discovers who is at each of these companies and what their roles are. MARKiT’s proprietary AI tools take your general list of companies and discovers who is the appropriate contacts that need to be addressed. The next steps are to have a proven strategy to build a relationship with those contacts with pertinent content that will build your companies brand awareness and highlight the reasons why they should engage with your company. MARKiT Manufacturing will strategize with you and your sales and marketing staff to develop digital marketing campaigns pinpointed to these prospects and elevate your efforts to convert your prospects into qualified leads.
MARKiT Manufacturing specializes in developing and implementing strategies for industrial companies to embrace and succeed in the new horizons of digital marketing.