Tuning and returning the positioning and messaging post-Covid is the No:1 strategy for 67% of B2B sales and marketing leaders, according to Bains & Co.
As the Covid-19 pandemic took a grip we looked at how many of the enterprise technology players were talking and positioning – and it ranged from maintaining the hard sell [AWS] through to a empathetic leadership-led storylines and actions [ServiceNow].
We spoke to a range of leading marketeers and watched our own projects closely and two questions emerged quickly:
- When do we know when it’s right to return to a more harder sales-led message without appearing to be jumping on an opportunity and how do we manage this?
- And as industries have to adapt over time to a post-COVID market, how do we ensure we’re positioned to take advantage and sell our portfolio?
In answer to this, it’s interesting to see Bains & Co have been keeping a pulse through a recent web survey with over 100 B2B companies and what sales and marketing leaders most intend to do in the short to medium-term.
And the headline is clearly spelled out – 67% said the action they could more fully leverage in the current environment is to refocus their messaging and make it relevant for today. This was closely followed by 44% that said re-architecting and evolving their existing offerings to be relevant in the current environment is something they will be leveraging. And digging deeper in fact, 76% said that their current approach to their offering positioning didn’t create a significant accelerant to winning more business. Source: Bain & Co insight https://atbain.co/34ywDho
As a result, sales and marketing leaders are needing to react quickly and adjust the market positioning and messaging of their offerings in a scenario where industries and their customers are having to adapt rapidly and deal with continual change.
This is exactly our focus as The Craft, where a rapid and robust intervention is needed at a critical time, and we see four questions that have to be concretely answered at depth for the positioning and messaging to be right for sales and marketing leaders to react in the right way:
- How do you describe what the offer actually is and what it contains – in a way the customer can understand, compare and buy rather than your internal structure or view?
- What value does the offer enable the customer to achieve – as a business end result above the technology benefit and far too often used terms like efficiency and agility?
- Why is your offer really better than the competition – what makes you differentiated when a CFO compares you with the competitors she’s met on the same day?
- What evidence can you provide to de-risk using you above others?
These questions sound so simple, but like everything that looks simple it’s because of the work that’s gone into it. Our focus is answering these questions quickly before any high cost marketing campaigns hit the world – our aim is to make them better, stronger and for you to win faster as a result – and right when you need it most. If you want to know more about how we do it – please get in touch. mwisemansmith@thecraft.consulting