A few years ago I was sent to a meeting in Singapore with one of our most important prospects - a 10-hour flight. My colleague, James, flew from New Zealand - an 11-hour flight. I was there to give advice on how our solution worked and hopefully close one of our biggest deals ever. 

As a company, we needed to demonstrate our value - how we, uniquely, could deliver the solution they needed. So there is no way that we would have outsourced that meeting, no matter how experienced the external expert - only we knew the intricacies of our niche as well as our customer. 

Though we never did close that deal in Singapore it shows the lengths that companies will reasonably go to do show their expertise. We would never outsource the “close” meeting, but as a company we were often guilty of outsourcing the “open”.

The early stages of the marketing and sales process are just as important for expert buyers. Outsourced PR and outbound agencies typically lack the depth of understanding that internal experts have. It is expertise that expert customers need to see before they can buy with certainty.  So the sooner you can include it in your marketing efforts, as well as your sales - the more effective they will be.

Marketing needs to take that experience of wheeling the subject-matter expert into the "close" meeting and apply it to the rest of the business development process.

There are four real steps to Expert-To-Expert marketing:

1. Align sales, marketing & the experts around an important account
2. Listen as a team to what your prospect cares about - if you are providing a solution, you must know the problem
3. Provide a relevant commentary linked to your key selling point
4. Tag & name check your prospects or send the post directly to them

The commentary and insights from these Expert-To-Expert campaigns can be reused across marketing and sales to target other prospects and generate leads. They can be used in social selling, email marketing, sales follow-ups, marketing nurture, event promotion, event follow up and a host of other areas.

To learn more about Expert-To-Expert, visit home.passle.net/workshops