This browser is not actively supported anymore. For the best passle experience, we strongly recommend you upgrade your browser.
hero image of people sitting with documents near table

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AND MARKETING INSIGHTS

| less than a minute read

Gartner - the idea of Marketing handing over to Sales is both wrong and damaging

The shift in B2B buyer behaviours continues to drive change in vendor organisations. People are no longer researching online, reading marketing materials prior to being "handed over" to Sales where analogue interactions take over. Instead, people are continually researching online right up to and indeed, past the point of purchase. 

This means that vendors need to assist buyers with relevant helpful content to deal with interactions and questions that would historically have sat squarely within a sales conversation. 

Now everyone has a browser in-hand all the time, vendors seek to verify information received from a salesperson in the quest to establish them as a trusted advisers. Gartner uses the adage "trust but verify" (which by the way, was a favourite of Ronald Reagan). The go-to resource apparently being the vendor's website.

Clearly, if that salesperson's website does not have the information needed and a competitor does, that is a pretty poor situation.

This is why Garner says there is an "urgent need for marketers to move their content marketing portfolio... toward buyer enablement"

You talk to customers and ask them how are they engaged in buying and what activities are they engaged in, when they use digital, and what you find is that customers frankly are far more agnostic as to which channel they use for what across an entire purchase journey. While we as suppliers are set up for digital early and in-person late, customers will tell you, ‘I’m involved in digital buying behaviors early on in a buying process, through the middle of a buying process, and late in a buying process.’ And for what it’s worth, they could be involved in in-person buying activity early as well, depending on what job they're doing

Sign up to receive all the latest insights from Passle. Subscribe now

Tags

abm, sales enablement, content marketing, gartner, goto, evergreen, prescriptive content, shift left