Call to Action: The Pandemic-Driven Sales-Support Marketing Audit

A high-level B2B Sales-Support Marketing Audit can help rebuild your program to achieve growth while ensuring a much higher degree of resource efficiency – dollars and human

Ed Pierce, ITA Communications. Fleet

October 2020

The pandemic has forced almost every business to slash budgets and trim staff in order to deal with the abrupt business disruption.  While the knee jerk reaction provides a quick fix to improve the short-term financial picture, it also guarantees long-term slowdown of future growth.

That’s why many companies are returning to strategic planning.  They are updating their SWOT analyses. They are identifying new strategic competencies based on re-aligned internal and market conditions.  As a result, they are establishing revised goals or re-confirming old ones. Finally, they are adjusting departmental actions to support those goals.

Sales & Marketing Resources In Play

In evaluating B2B sales-support marketing’s contribution to the updated strategic plan, resource needs should be decided based on a marketing audit of the current situation.  While a company may have been happily sinking dollars into extraordinarily compelling social media videos and sophisticated award-winning digital graphics before the pandemic, now is the time for some basic qualifiers of success: How full is the portion pf your sales funnel?  What portion of the lead bank are MQL leads vs. SQL? What percentage of leads have moved from evaluation to intent?  Since downloading an e-book does not translate into sales interest, how do you measure content marketing success? And, on and on.

The B2B Sales-Support Marketing Audit

A high-level B2B Sales-Support Marketing Audit can help rebuild your program to achieve growth while ensuring a much higher degree of resource efficiency – dollars and human. An audit can help prioritize problems that need to be fixed in order to improve lead generation and thought leadership. An audit can also uncover opportunities to further accelerate sales and marketing results and take a business to the next level.

More specific B2B Sales-Support Marketing Audit criteria:

• Marketing Communications: website, content marketing, SEO, SEM (AdWords) campaigns, advertising, PR, videos, events, and social media
• Products & Services: roadmap, product management, target markets, differentiation, and market segmentation
• Distribution Channels: sales and marketing programs, discount structure, recruitment, and marketing
• Pricing: market value vs. cost-plus pricing, end-user vs. channel pricing, and competitive intelligence

The Six-Step B2B Sales-Support Marketing Audit Process

Step 1:   Review all information about the company, including the most basic, including contact information, company employees, common processes, and sales cycles.  Study the efforts made in the past to reform marketing. Review your products or services

Step 2: Review marketing goals and objectives. Examine your past goals. Evaluate how company priorities have changed. Create new goals that will more appropriately match new priorities. List long- and short-term goals. Focus on growth and improvement.

Step 3: Current audience profiles. Describe the qualities and traits of the current client base, including gender, age, location, and job description if available. Evaluate client roster by value and size. Is the current audience the ideal audience?

Step 4: Target audience profiles. After creating current customer profiles, create an ideal customer profile with information that best fits the profile of a company that wants to purchase your products and services. Determine what changes need to be made in current processes to reach that ideal audience. Ensure that the goals correctly take into account reaching that target audience, and even change the goals if necessary.

Step 5: Analyze past marketing strategies and expenses. Are they sales-support driven? Review internet and non-internet marketing strategies. Have past strategies been effective? What strategies haven’t been tried yet?  Identify strategies that might be tested and implemented.

Step 6: Competitor descriptions. Identify multiple competitors and study their sales and marketing strategies. Compare competitor strategies to your company’s current strategy.  Create new marketing strategies that may be more effective ways to attain better results.

As a result of the afore-mentioned cutbacks, your marketing team may not be in a position to benefit from a sales-support marketing audit.  I can help, and invite you to reach out to me at 215-839-1306, or results@ITAcommunications.com .