Today’s buyer is information overloaded, bandwidth constrained and fiercely independent. A recent survey by the Corporate Executive Board reported that 57% of the new B2B sales cycle is DONE before the buyer’s first formal contact to the selected vendor. Understanding that simple fact requires a radical rethink of go to market strategies and tactics across sales and marketing. I call this new approach, “Velocity Marketing”. Those who adopt Velocity Marketing approaches can see dramatic increases in Marketing ROI and significant compression of sales pipelines. This drops real dollars into the bottom line.
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| Figure 1, The Three Stages of Velocity Marketing Achievement |
There are 3 stages to moving to Velocity Marketing, depicted in Figure 1. In my experience, 90% of organizations are mucked and mired in the Status Quo stage, slugging out a content marketing battle based on features and benefits. This is shown in Figure 2. Viewpoint is diverged from the customer, Value is the usual and Velocity is low.
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| Figure 2: Stagnant, Content and Benefit Centric Marketing |
In order to get to the next level of Impact, we must get our Viewpoint and Value aligned with our buyer’s view of the world. We must create a Viewpoint that converges on the biggest business changes impacting our customer and the most disruptive response that our solution delivers in response to those changes. (Read more about Viewpoint here) Once we do that, we can then go on to articulating unique Value that is differentiated, meaningful and aligned with our Viewpoint. This state of Viewpoint and Value alignment get us to the Impact stage, driving significant effectiveness and efficiency in our in market communications, creating ROI and reducing sales cycles. (Read about Value and tilting the playing field with Viewpoint here) This is seen graphically in Figure 3.
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| Figure 3: Converged Viewpoint and Unique Value Creates Impact, The First Step to Breakthrough |
However, if we can then drive to higher levels of Engagement and Experience as discussed here, we can move our marketing execution from low to high Velocity, we create Breakthrough as shown in Figure 4. (Read more about Engagement, Experience and Velocity here.) Breakthrough Marketing can be seen when we have high levels of unique and compelling value communicated in high velocity, engaging and experiential ways.
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| Figure 4: Increasing Velocity with Engagement and Experience Creates Breakthrough |
Where are you on the Velocity Marketing Evolution?