Back to Basics - don't be "bound" by smoke

"Does outbound even work?"

"Inbound-led-outbound is the new way"

"We are doubling down on in-person, curated events and conferences"

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Chances are that in your linkedin feed, one of these discourses is appearing frequently. The beauty in these is that all of them can be as right or as wrong as you would like them to be.

Ready for a long read?

A few days ago, I was on a call with a prospect pitching the B2Brain for Events offering and their use case looked quite different:

- They go to trade shows mainly to have conversation with existing customers

- The main source of trade show leads are people that show up at their booth and get the badges scanned

- Historically, their trade show leads converted at 5% to opportunity!

- They are doubling down on digital marketing spends in advance of a trade show, to prime their calendar with meetings

- Since historical lead-to-opp conversion has been poor, their focus is on trying to generate more revenue/more opps from existing customer base

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In the course of the discussion, we uncovered a few interesting points:

1. While their next trade show has close to 550 companies of interest (mostly upper mid-market or enterprise), their 4 people contingent has been specifically working on about 65 of those accounts only

2. Marketing has been under pressure to deliver better qualified pipeline, hence increasing the number of contacts in those 65 to run their linkedin campaigns, in order to hit the threshold 1000 contacts mark

3. Sales has been tasked to "fill up the calendar" and hence is scheduling multiple meetings with several contacts from same accounts - though helpful, this could discount the possibility of meeting as a team and engendering greater trust in person, all at once

4. With a few weeks to go, and action picking up, the $78K (quantum of investment or sunk cost depending on how you decide to look at it) into the event was staring at the leadership's face, and showing up during pipeline reviews.

What about exploring new opportunities from the 485 accounts (550-65) not being targeted?

1. Marketing was having cold feet about which ones to put their advertising dollars on - the company had recently moved over to another platform for intent data and was still putting processes in place to use it.

2. Sales was not confident their efforts would be worthwhile - the classic trade off between known devils and unknown angels.

3. Going by their past experience, 1 in 10 prospects was known to generate meaningful meetings at trade shows.

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Trade Shows and Events are

High investment + High effort + High impact +?Time sensitive

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The best time to prepare for these?

All the way up to when the trade show actually begins.

The best method to prepare?

Be data and insight driven, execute systematically, maximise coverage (aka "back to basics")

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So where did we get to, in this discussion?

By knowing which accounts amongst the 485 are exhibiting signals and compelling events relevant to the prospect's business, their Marketing could prioritize campaigns for those accounts - running this, we have identified 147 of those accounts.

By learning about the specific insights and compelling events in these companies, Sales can execute highly targeted outreach, and set up conversation with as many of those as possible. This task is underway and initial results from their sales team are very promising.

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It is the nature of markets to be unpredictable, choppy and volatile - like the Wall Street this past Monday :)

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Yet, it's imperative for business leaders to look beyond the smoke screens and be grounded in their approach. In this case, the problem statement was:

- People from several accounts of their interest will be at the trade show

- The company needed ways to shortlist the ones most likely to engage with them and possibly kick off a buying journey/evaluation

- Without one such tool to unearth these compelling events in each account, the Marketing and Sales teams felt like flapping in waters, and felt safer in the kids pool

- Once the tool to accomplish this objective became obvious, they were emboldened to get into deep waters, knowing full well they have a way to swim ahead (by now, you'd know or have guessed that I've been watching Paris 2024 ...)

We concluded the call with the reiteration that used intelligently, all these methods, channels and approaches can amplify impact. What do you think?

When you are selling into vertical markets, the opportunities are both massive and complex. Nothing works better than having strong execution foundations, that we see with and enable for customers of B2Brain ?? .

Few conversations on LI that add color to the prevailing GTM landscape - 1, 2, 3

Check out "Compelling Events", our new podcast around selling to vertical markets. The first two episodes feature Billy Sturgis and Dan (Daniil) Gridin . More in the pipeline.