Fairmont's Sales and Marketing Blog
Manufacturers... Let's get your marketing and sales running at peak performance!Value Pricing Retains Both Customers and Profits
Your pricing strategy has a direct impact on customer loyalty. Reasonable prices increase customer trust and confidence in your entire organization. If your pricing seems unfair or poorly managed, they lose confidence in you. A solid pricing strategy based on value is fundamental retaining customers and profits.
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Voice of the Customer – Needs Research
Clearly identifying the voice of the customer is fundamental to a strong commercial engine, yet many manufacturers use legacy data and opinions from staff rather than hard facts derived from sound market research. Learn an effective method for uncovering customer needs. Downloadable tools and templates are available as well.
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Budgeting Effectively in Marketing
As we approach the last quarter of the year it’s time to start thinking about budgeting. Do you struggle to get the marketing budget needed to generate leads and build brand? If so, you’re not alone. Learn how to create and justify an effective marketing budget.
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Lead Generation with an Integrated Campaign
Learn how to use integrated marketing campaigns to generate leads. It takes seven to 13 touches to persuade your audience to engage, so make sure you give them the chance to respond.
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How to Generate Leads When You Need Them Most
One of the toughest things to do in business is generating leads when you need them. There are times when your manufacturing company will need to go get some business, and that’s when you need to be ready to launch an integrated lead generation campaign that delivers sales ready leads.
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Aligning Lead Management, Buyer Journey, and 3 Funnels
Organize your commercial engine for success. Learn how to align your lead management and funnels to the buyer journey. This is the third part of a 3-part series.
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4 Digital Transformation Fundamentals
In the past 5 years the digital transformation for manufacturers has accelerated. Every few months advancements in managing big data, connecting equipment through the Internet of Things (IoT), serving customers with relationship software (CRM), and connecting through mobile technology open new doors. The question is, will employing new digital technology open the door to improved business or drained expenses.
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Mapping the Buyer Journey to Your 3 Funnels
Mapping your buyer’s journey to your Commercial Engine Funnel keeps you organized and enables you to provide the most effective interaction at the right time. Buyer needs change significantly during their journey from lead to loyal and so must your content and interactions – if you hope to accompany them.
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Understanding the 3 Funnel Segments of Your Commercial Engine
Listen to a discussion around finding prospects, nurturing leads, and closing business and you’ll find the talk will nearly always get around to funnels. The reference is usually to a “sales funnel.” However, the buyer’s journey from new lead to loyal customer actually has three funnel segments – marketing, sales, and service. Understand how to maximize the volume and velocity of each funnel segment.
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4 ways Manufacturers Can Improve Marketing Performance
If you scour the marketing advice available today, you’ll find that expert marketing advice isn’t always pertinent to a manufacturer. Learn 4 fundamental ways for manufacturers to improve marketing performance.
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Trade shows 101: 14 Ways to Get the Most from Your Investment
Trade shows often get a bad rap due to their high investment cost. However, tradeshows have proven very effective for B2B marketers, especially those selling high dollar products. When done right, tradeshow ROI can be outstanding. They also offer face to face interaction with a wide representation of the market, and provide an opportunity for competitive intelligence. Learn how to maximize your next tradeshow.
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High-level Messaging – Unleashing the Power of Blue Statements
Marketing messages are themes and ideas that are ingredients to be used when creating specific customer facing content. Messaging delivers information and feelings to the marketplace, reflects and builds your brand, and even helps make work meaningful to your employees. Learn how to start your messaging off right, at the highest hierarchy level.
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9 Ways High Dollar Sales Are Different
It’s easy to find marketing and sales advice for commodity products. But what about small to mid-sized businesses selling high dollar products? Where do they get advice? How do you effectively train your sales people? High dollar sales are different.
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A 7-Step Approach to Strong Messaging: Working the Barbell Exercise
To be a market leader you need excellent messaging that’s consistent and persuasive. Your messaging reflects your brand, vision, and core culture of your company. Your messaging should move your audience. Your messaging should propel your brand.
Messaging must not only be consistent in a campaign, but must also stay consistent throughout your entire messaging hierarchy.
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4 Key Elements of Your Sales Overview Pitch
“Sales pitch” is a strange term. It suggests a sales person gets themselves ready and then throws a collection of statements at a prospect. The prospect then either accepts or rejects the pitch.
But, we all know selling high dollar items isn’t like that. It’s about careful, patient interaction. It’s about building a relationship, uncovering needs, and eventually – when the time is right – solving needs.
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Running an Effective Sales Training Meeting
Effective, motivated, successful sales teams for high dollar products don’t just happen. They must be built and developed so that they are able to confidently discuss and convince prospective customers to make a significant capital investment in your product.
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5 Steps to Finding your Best End Markets
When we ask a small to mid-sized company if they know who their best customers are, they always reply that they do. When we ask how they determine their best customers, most say the same thing: the ones who deliver the highest revenue. And which customers do they most want to find? Those that generate the most revenue.
Unfortunately, there are two serious flaws in this strategy. Top revenue generating customers are not necessarily your most valuable and your best customers are not always cloneable.
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5 ideas to help you raise prices
It’s easy to lower prices. The sales team loves it because they see it as a simple way to create value in the potential customer’s eyes. The marketing team loves it because they can now deliver a “good news” message to the marketplace. And of course, the customers love it too.
Unfortunately, however, at some point the sales and marketing group must raise prices. That is not quite as much fun. In fact, it can be painful.
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