A salesman and a marketing guy walk into a bar…

This really happened. Well, the bar was at a country club. I had the pleasure of spending a Fore-Hour Nature Meeting with Larry Long Jr ? where we spent hours trying to hit a little white ball into a hole.

I love this kind of meeting because we get to pick each other's brains. Larry is a profound sales trainer and author whom I got to ask questions of to get inside the mind of what salespeople think about marketing.

If you're wondering, sales beat marketing. This is not only true with that golf round, but I think it's also part of the small to mid-sized business culture. After all, sales are directly tied to income, and marketing is there to support sales. However, marketing can be a second-class citizen and viewed as an expense.

But I want to make the case that marketing can be an income-generating activity when approached as a sales support system.

The Budgeting Black Hole

B2b marketing budgets generally range from 5-15% of the company's total revenue. Some larger companies in competitive industries might allocate a higher percentage to marketing, while smaller businesses might spend a smaller percentage. So let's use 10% as a benchmark.

For every $1,000,000 in the budget, you should be allocating $100,000 for marketing. As a marketing guy, that makes me happy and sad. It would be great if companies actually did that, but I tend to see something more like 1-5% or $10,000-$50,000 for every million. Let's look at that $100,000 and see what it gets.

If a company spends just $5,000 a month on advertising, that leaves only $40,000 for everything else. That can easily be spent on technology, tools, and talent, with little to nothing left over for quality content creation.

Advertising without quality content eats money, while quality content becomes an asset that can be reused and repurposed to help your sales team turn prospects into profits.

I believe that every marketing dollar should be tracked to create at least $3 in sales to break even.

What we have found is that creating quality content and distributing it to help promote quality business relationships can give you a $10 to $15 ROI on every marketing dollar spent.

The Outsourced Conundrum

If all that sounds familiar and makes sense to you, then why do many B2b businesses falter with marketing? It is because sales have a greater business impact, and marketing becomes an afterthought rather than an integral business system.

A quality CMO will easily make six figures, and quality Business to Business marketing takes a wide variety of skill sets.

• Marketing Strategy
• Project Management
• Systems Integration
• Writing
• Web Development
• SEO
• Advertising
• Data Analytics
• Email Marketing
• Social Media

Generally speaking, small to mid-sized businesses don't have the desire to build an internal team with all those functions. They tend to hire a few of them and then outsource the rest.

In many cases, they rely on an agency to fill in many or all of those functions. Since there are more opportunities for business-to-consumer customers, agencies tend to build their teams to service that industry, and then try to apply those tactics to business-to-business customers.

The issue here is business-to-consumer marketing focuses on transactional relationships, while business-to-business focuses on more synergistic long-term relationships.

Let's explore the holes (which all begin with “A”) that happen when you try to use business-to-consumer tactics for B2b marketing.

Aspiration

Marketing is often tasked with improving sales. With that being said, business-to-business sales companies will set their marketing focus on generating leads.

Business-to-business marketing is most effective when you stop focusing on leads and start preemptively answering customer questions. That means creating content based on what concerns your customer needs at the moment they need what you sell.

Asymmetry

The bigger the business, the more sales and marketing become segmented and divergent. While marketing is focused on generating leads and sales is tasked with relationship nurturing.

Business-to-business marketing is most effective when you tell your story in a way that helps your sales team create conversations about building a strategic business relationship where both parties see and feel mutual benefits.

Alignment

When marketing is focused and tasked with generating leads, it becomes a quantity-over-quality game. Even highly qualified leads are still cold prospects and not a customer.

Leads are then handed over to the sales team to create contact and generate interest and potential sales.

Business-to-business marketing is most effective when you align sales and marketing by integrating the sales team's experience, interaction, and input into what will help them build better relationships.

Analytics

What gets measured gets done. If your marketing is focused on traffic to your website, growing your email list, and impressions on your social posts, that's what becomes a priority. Is that what you really want your numbers to reflect?

Business-to-business marketing is most effective when you measure current, past, and prospective customer interactions, versus how many hits your website is getting or how many likes your social posts get.

Advertising

Advertising is a consumer and e-commerce tactic that works to get traffic, generate leads, and increase sales. The real issue in B2b is not more traffic and leads, it's getting the RIGHT traffic and leads.

Business-to-business marketing is most effective when you use quality content to drive traffic back to your website and capture names and data on a property you control and own. Content that generates traffic can then be used in your advertising.

Final Thoughts

The problem with generalizations is that they do not reflect the fact that all marketing has the goal of generating sales. Most companies and agencies do what they do with the best of intentions.

I also fall prey to the lure of influencer and consumer marketing techniques. Who doesn't like likes and interactions? It's just that most of those tend to be friends and fans, but rarely my target audience of perfect customers.

Prospects will view and lurk, but rarely interact. So, use your marketing skills and budgets to encourage them to engage in one-on-one personal conversations, if possible.

One last point, Sales Support Marketing. At the end of the round, Larry helped me by making four quality introductions to people I needed to meet. This was not to generate any sales, but to help me meet some industry leaders who help me to learn more about how sales and marketing can work together for success!

“The first step in exceeding your customer's expectations is to know those expectations.”
– Roy H. Williams

Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas, or questions about your love-hate relationship with sales and marketing! Do you feel your system is working for you? What tips or techniques can you share that worked for you and your business?

To learn more about this and other topics on B2b Sales & Marketing, visit our podcast website at The Bacon Podcast.