Generating Revenue through Campaigns and Events-Part Two

Ted Levitt defined marketing as "getting and keeping customers". A campaign must be engineered and executed with this in mind. When engineering a campaign you must take into consideration your two core audience members: your customers and your sales force.

A campaign must create value for your customers, your sales organization, your business units and your CEO. Let's look at each one of these stakeholders:

Customers/Prospects - A campaign is an invitation to customers and prospects to learn how your company, service, solution (look for an article on what a "solution" should mean) or product will solve key problems in an organization......PERIOD. Problems in business typically evolve around: productivity, protection, profit, communication, competition and culture. Remember, time is the knowledge workers currency..it is precious....a campaign must have a compelling reason for them to invest their time to learn more about what you have to offer.....PERIOD.

Sales Organization - Whether you have one rep, a sales force, sell direct or through partners these people must be motivate to execute, support and participate in your campaign. It's pretty easy to do this! Help them retire their quota and strengthen relationships with their accounts.

Business Units (BU) - Your campaign will be promoting the services, solutions and products that BU's are responsible for. Tie in your campaign to the areas that are of most value to them (be careful on this because conflict does happen between BU and with Sales Organization because there can be conflicting agendas and priorities).

CEO(owners, shareholders, "C-suite etc) - I don't know any CEO who isn't concerned about Cash, Profit and Revenue. Make sure that your campaign factors in these three key metrics.

Here ares some additional things to think about:

1) "Tarket Markets" - be careful how you define these

Contrary to what many say going "vertical" is time consuming, expensive and narrows your potential audience. While vertical marketing (targetting specific industries on their own, e.g. healthcare or finance etc) can work for niche products my preference is to market how you are solving key business problems that Executives and Department leads can relate to cross industry. Only large enterprises have the resources to truly go "vertical". Leave other B2B marketing instruments for vertical alignment. Define the three top problems you can solve and for who and engineer and create compelling story that people want/need to hear.

2) Remember the 4 R's of B2B Marketing- Campaigns must be build around this marketing framework. If you don't you'll alienate the key stakeholders you server as a B2B marketeer.

3) Attendance or Appointments - Revenue generation campaigns should focus on event recruitment or sales appointments. You want customers/prospects to express interest in learning more about how you can help them be successful. This works best through conversation and interaction. So you either want them to attend an event (in person or online) or meet with people from your company (sales rep, snr. execs, experts etc.)

4) It's always a conversation - A campaign begins and ends with a conversation.

Telemarketing is not a "dirty word" unless your selling windows to consumers during dinner time! Most B2B "buyers" accept telemarketing as a necessary way for "suppliers" to promote themselves. It is cost effective and if you have something meaningful to offer it is very productive.

Whether an event or appointment(might as well consider it an event too) conversation and interaction is a must. Questions you pose in your presentations for example should stimulate discussion and clarify whether you can help them or not.

5) Measure, measure, measure - as is the case with events all campaigns must(not should) be measured. You need to achieve a 10:1 ROI. Ensure that all sales opportunities uncovered, advanced or closed due to this campaign are tagged to it.