Ojas Kulkarni

Drawing from my years of experience, I’ve found technology and automation to be indispensable assets in driving lead generation. Leveraging tools like lead capture forms, email marketing, and analytics not only streamlines processes but also enhances efficiency and quality, paving the way for higher conversions and better outcomes. Automating sales reporting is essential, freeing up reps from manual tasks. Streamlining data entry for KPIs and metrics ensures accuracy and efficiency. Email workflow automation eliminates the need for manual follow-ups on leads, optimizing sales efforts. Today’s advanced tech and tools empower both managers and teams with mature solutions.

Few years ago, I came across a theory called Modern Marketing Practices, where they claimed marketers to don different ‘hats’. While 4 of them were direct correlation to roles in branding, customer, creative, and data (a relatively newer addition) - two hats stood out for me. Marketers as Cross-Functional Orchestrators and as Innovation Evangelists. Both these require extensive reading about the industry, marketing methods, different customer segments developing in the same market, and even newer markets being established each day!!! Then comes the critical part of this reading. Take what you want in your current role/project/scenario. And store the rest somewhere in your memory for a future use. And all of this can be done remotely.

B2B Services fall in the non-linear decision making subset and are almost always subject to scrutiny from various buyers or buying centres. Differentiation, therefore is also minutely evaluated by your customers. The market changes today are rapid and hence in my experience, innovation and continuously improving the products, services, or even the shifting value propositions to align to current needs is absolutely necessary. This service/product/process differentiation helps the brand stand out, gives avenue to communicate it to the market, and creates what we marketers call 'fuel' to reach out. Plus it enhances customer satisfaction, hence market share, and establish a position within the industry.

Trust plays a key role in B2B buyers’ journey to purchase. In my experience, as against a single decision-maker, there is a community of influencers in the process. These are the people with distinct motivators to your product, service, company, brand, and maybe you! The most common factor is how much does your buyer trust you? Does s/he think you can deliver the value they are looking for? Hence most authentic, direct, measurable output is what they’d look for. If 1-1, you know the buyer - personalize. If 1-few, make it contextual with a use case. If 1-many, be direct. Thus, you have one common thread of trust amongst your ‘buying center’ (community of influencers) and with other faculties and factors prevailing, you have a winner.

B2B is very short attention spans, limited engagement by buyers, multiple buying centers and many influences to the final purchase decision. I have used these following 3 stages to communicate and also create the required urgency in each stage with a CTA. ℹ️ Use the first stage as an informational tool to create awareness. The CTAs: ‘read now’ ‘know more’ or an urgent one like ‘find out now’ 🤔The second stage is to make them think more about your product or service. This is where you can play the benefits and use CTAs like ‘gain advantage by’ ‘benefit from this’ or ‘see what you are missing’ ✅ The final stage is decision making. ‘buy now’ ‘book a demo’ ‘reserve your seat now’ Each above can be separate snippets or one story.

One of the important aspects of experience that a B2B buyer/user/visitor looks forward to is ‘building trust’ on the information and interaction they’d have on your website. Both, information and interaction are key to UX. A well-defined information architecture that provides a visitor the data they came looking for & a clear sense of direction on what you’d want them to do next (CTAs). Once this is established, the user/visitor/buyer ‘trusts’ your website/product to have satisfied their effort of search. Isn’t this the very essence of SEO? The user keeps coming back, follows your page/other content, and you may have a good chance ending up in their final purchase shortlist. In an already long B2B buying cycle, this is key.