IMEC Webinar | April 2022 | 60 minutes
How does a manufacturer keep sales growing on a limited sales and marketing budget when buyers do their research online? Parin Mody walks through how to build trust with prospects digitally, which channels to start with, and how marketing automation lets a small team hold thousands of personalized conversations and hand sales only the prospects who are ready to talk.
Parin’s central message: it is not about sales or marketing, it is about building a relationship. Manufacturers have always won long-term customers by being honest, dependable partners. What has changed is the channel. Instead of leading with years of engineering experience, lead with being a trusted resource, then support it with proof.
He compares it to a trade show booth, where every conversation is one-on-one and both sides qualify each other. Marketing automation makes it possible to hold thousands of those personalized conversations online and let prospects raise their hand when they are ready.
Persona: who you are talking to, what motivates them, whether they decide or influence, and what objections they raise. Your frontline sales team already knows most of this.
Message and cadence: what you say at each stage of the buyer’s journey, from introducing your company and sharing educational tips to comparing your approach with a typical competitor’s.
Technology: a marketing automation platform that tracks engagement across email, website, and phone, scores it, and passes qualified prospects to sales with full context.
Email works when it is personalized, educational, sent from a real person, and paired with phone conversations. SEO keeps adding new prospects to the top of the funnel because search engines do the referring for you. Run together, an email can drive a prospect to a page that also ranks in search, so each channel strengthens the other.
Marketing is the starting pitcher and sales is the closer. Agree with sales on what engagement makes a lead hot, send only those leads, and include everything the prospect has done so the salesperson can pick up the conversation. Leads should be called within 24 to 48 hours, and sales feedback should flow back to marketing to sharpen targeting.
From a blank slate, a basic program can be running in one to two months. Parin recommends a crawl, walk, run approach: move the emails your sales team already sends into the platform and track your website. Choose a platform based on who will run it, budget, timeline, and the results leadership expects.
Marketing should build it, but the substance should come from sales. Salespeople know the questions customers ask, the objections that come up, the competitive landscape, and why deals are won or lost. Marketing’s job is to turn that knowledge into a storyboard of useful touch points.
