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PROFESSIONAL SERVICES BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AND MARKETING INSIGHTS

| 1 minute read

Customer focused, expert powered marketing

Centralised marketing teams are in a challenging position. Their role is to engage with customers, position their offering and pave the way for a successful sale.

But global marketers are not often in the room with customers and often support a large number of complex service offerings.

So, the team tasked with engaging customers and positioning the offering knows little about the direct, day-to-day challenges of their audience and is not well positioned to understand how the offering solves those problems either.

So, how can marketers produce content that resonates?

The knowledge firms need to engage with their customers at the right level. Internal experts have the understanding of the project; customer facing staff have the understanding of the client and salespeople have the understanding of the commercial need.

Like a young Rio Ferdinand, successful marketers will bring enable and orchestrate their different experts, amplifying their efforts and giving them a voice in the process. In short, good marketing in 2019 will put their experts in the right place at the right time. If the marketing process incorporates content suggestion from customer facing staff, insights from the experts and commercial timeliness from sales - firms can quickly produce very valuable content that addresses the exact need of the people they are selling to, when it matters most.

The end product for marketing is a highly effective and targeted content piece - inspired by the clients challenges and fueled by the experts. Chances are if this piece is relevant for one customer - it will be relevant for others as well.

By acting as an orchestrator of the process, Marketing position their firm and their people as the experts - adding authenticity and value to content.

Jason Goodall, CEO of Dimension Data, was recently nominated to lead the new $20B NTT business outside of Japan (which will include Dimension Data). In the podcast below he speaks enthusiastically about how a "small group of unbelievably smart people" have driven enormous value for their clients. He also touches on modern leadership and how empowering others to lead has replaced older "command and control" models.  Clearly, enabling his "unbelievably smart people" to lead is central to Dimension Data's continuing success. An analogy that I like to think of for this type of leadership is the roads vs railways.

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Tags

content marketing, b2b marketing, b2b content, virtuous circle