By : Admin

Being in business-to-business (B2B) means need of a lot of continuous efforts to be put in. You can not afford to sit idle as the main focus, today, is not only the revenue generation at all cost but to be as aggressive as possible with the cost saving strategies. It also applies to the marketing and sales operations. Here are seven great low-cost, high-impact initiatives that could transform your marketing department into a lean, efficient, and deadly effective organization.

1. Develop and monitor the performance of your channels.

   Grasping your marketing and sales operations as a set of processes will enable you to evaluate efficiencies in the chain. Eliminating weak links can save your company significant amounts of cash. It is important to know the relative performance of each of the channels. Pruning nonproductive business relationships will improve the health of your organization and enable you to focus on your most profitable channels.

2. Retain and augment your most valued customers.

   The cost of acquiring new customers in these choppy waters is very expensive. Initiatives focused on mining current relationships will prove to be very effective in these lean times. The cost of gaining incremental sales from a current relationship can often be less than that from a new customer. Treat your current customers as assets that must be protected diligently and keep your current franchise of customers productive and well served.

3. Measure value creation for your customers.

   The current macroeconomic downdraft has created a heightened sensitivity to value. Companies are carefully looking at all operations and their impact on profitability. So, take the time to quantify the value your business has on other businesses.

4. Collaborate with customers.

   Product development geared for an existing customer base is a lot easier than trying to launch new products into an uncharted market. Making key customers influence the future of your business model or product pipeline is a great way to build trust. Customer apathy is death. Do whatever it takes to engage your customers in decisions that affect the future of your company’s product or service.

5. Get industry focused.

   Industry specialization or domain expertise is a mandate under tight market conditions. The growth of competition in every space required companies to develop specific capabilities for discrete industry segments. Developing deep expertise within a target market is more effective that attempting to do everything for every market. Execute a marketing strategy that is an inch wide and a mile deep versus a mile wide and an inch deep.

6. Integrate customer contact points.

   Support, delivery, and maintenance activities should be viewed as cross-selling or up-selling opportunities for your existing customer base. This strategy places greater emphasis on your organization to have a cohesive view of the customer. And the only way to achieve this goal is to integrate information collected throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Distribute the sales responsibility across the entire organization by integrating and distributing customer data.

7. Break out the measuring stick.

   The emphasis on delivering tangible value requires marketing organizations to quantify results. Improving a relevant set of performance metrics for your customers should be the central objective of your business. Signing off on performance metric improvement may sound risky, but in these times it’s a risk that must be taken to survive today’s downdraft.

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