B2B: Yesterday’s and today’s prospection
The purpose of this article is to raise awareness of the 15-year change concerning techniques of prospection.
Yesterday’s World
In 1999, when I came back from Canada, I created my first start-up. We designed search engines and software content management systems for website. To find contacts, our prospection relied on former students (via yearbooks) of the top post-graduate National French schools (Polytechnique, Mines, Ponts, HEC, ESSEC,…).
Our legitimacy to reassure our contacts about our expertise relied on our corporate marketing:
- We explained that we were a spin-off company of the CEA (Atomic Energy Commission)
- We used institutional communication supports: website and brochure
When we met our prospects for the first time, we had to show them the legitimacy of the company through a display or a video. It was yesterday’s world.
Today
Prospects’s search
Nowadays, we do not use yearbooks anymore. Social networks provide us thousands of contacts. For every contact, we can have access to the same information that yearbooks provided:
- Function
- Contact details
- Position
- Company
But social networks provide us more information:
- Personal career
- Educational background
- Publication
- Reactions to news
These pieces of information are often centralized in one database in which we can cross criteria thanks to the search engine. Social networks are at the same time:
- A research and qualifications tool of prospects
- An economical intelligence tool
Personal marketing instead of corporate marketing
When we contact a prospect via email, he will wonder: ? who is the person who contacts me? ?
Fifteen years ago, our prospection email had to include an explanation about our company. The company had to reassure our prospect about our reliability.
Nowadays a prospection email can include our profile on social networks. Our profile, our career, our communications allow our interlocutor to evaluate how serious our approach is. A good personal marketing will significantly improve our response rate.
Tomorrow’s World
The customer’s path will start on social networks.
Nowadays BtoB buyers are still looking for solution providers. In a more and more complexe world, expertise is the most wanted solution to face a problem. The customer is looking for:
- An expert
- With the capability to understand his problems
The customer’s path will start tomorrow on social networks.
Expertise has to be justified.
Nowadays, expertise justifies itself with former experiences. But in a world which is always moving faster and faster: Are we the expert of the coach or of the car without driver? Former experience can be totally out-of-date. In the research field, the reflexion of the expert, his analyses, his proposals allow his evaluation. Tomorrow, it will be the same thing for every executive, expert or every talent. Our writings, videos will justify our expertise, or not.
Big data : tool of the future
How are we looking for a new provider?
How do we find an expert?
How would we recruit tomorrow?
Smart research tools will allow us to find the expert specialized on one problem. Personal marketing will consist in controlling our own visibility as an expert via these tools.
Pascal Faucon - B2B: Yesterday’s and today’s prospection
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8 年Indeed how we are able to manage prospection and marketing, reflete how we can express our skills or point of vue. It is a great way to be distinguish in this over-informed word.