What do marketing agencies do?

What's the best way for a B2B service to approach marketing agencies in order to sell or market a service through them to their clients?

• Hey guys, I recently started a service that provides monthly blog content for small businesses (typically ecommerce, blogs, or other internet-based businesses). I've had some success advertising to my target demographic directly... but recently a small marketing firm noticed my service, and ended up utilizing it for a bunch of their clients. I realized that getting referred (and essentially whitelabeled) by agencies has made the marketing/selling process much easier. What's the best way to approach marketing firms? Do I try to "sell" them on my service, or just try to make contact and build a relationship? Also do you have any advice on the best platform to accomplish this (media buys, cold calling, etc.)? Thanks!

• Answer:

  So you want to build a partner channel.  Great! This is a LONG post - so fasten your seatbelt. You've definitely got a service that is currently in demand - blog content is critical in an inbound marketing campaign.  Now how do you sell it? Well, you already know how to sell it - you have existing customers.  It sounds like you're really lacking a pre-sales process.  We call it your lead cycle in the CRM biz. Partners must have complete trust in you AND your ability to deliver before they're willing to put their name on it.  If you've been in business for any length of time, you've established the second part by continuing to be in business and having employees. The first part, not so much.  Welcome to the world of the relationship sale. There's a few things you should know about the sales process that every highly effective salesperson knows. First, you should definitely understand the buying cycle (and I'm going to assume you do) because inbound marketing is all about writing content that targets the buying cycle.  I call it the 5 vowels of Buying - potential customers go from Unaware, Aware, Interested, Evaluating, and then hopefully they place an Order. In case readers don't, I'll include some background information. Marketing generally focuses on people that are unaware, aware, and interested.  As soon as they detect a glimmer of a hint you may be evaluating, they send you to their sales team. Sales wants to target people in the interested, evaluating, and order phases of the buying cycle. Know that not everybody comes to your business as Unaware.  The buying cycle is about the customer's interest in your product - not in you.  Someone can be evaluating blogging services and not know who you are.  In fact, they may have heard of you and may be evaluating you without you even knowing it. In your industry and with your product, 99% of your target audience will be directly interested in what you do - unless they are completely ignoring social marketing and inbound marketing - or offering a competing product. Ever have someone try to immediately sell you when they first meet you?  Like a door-to-door salesperson?  Not an enjoyable experience, right?  How about that buyer's remorse you had if you bought - which I'd guarantee you had because it was an impulse buy - did that encourage you to refer friends? I know I'm going to get a ton of heat from experienced sales execs for what I'm about to say, but as for cold calling, most sales people are incredibly ineffective at cold calling.  On average, 1 in 100 calls generates an interested buyer? Really?  Those are rediculous numbers.  I'd love to see a business thrive on just a 1% conversion rate.  Sure, some good execs can get better numbers than that.  But most execs aren't effective at cold calling - and most of them hate it. But if you're taking away your basic strategies (that haven't evolved since the 1960s may I add) - how do you penetrate a new market for partner accounts without breaking toes on the way? Here's what I would do if I were you: First, start using inbound marketing to slowly drag marketers in.  This is a no brainer - this is essentially what you're selling.  As you know, it takes 6-12 months to see any serious traction, so start now - but know it won't do anything for a little while. Then, establish pricing that will make your product profitable to resell for partner accounts.  You can't expect to maintain the same profit margins for sales coming through your partner channels as you do regular channels.  Your partners are now doing the work for it, so keep that in mind, and you have to do a lot less work.  Mmm, I love residual pipelines. Third, you'll want to build some (more) initial resellers through a targeted partner sales strategy. Fourth, get your case studies, testimonials, and feedback - and adjust your pricing and positioning appropriately. Finally, increase your market pressure by using appropriate inbound marketing strategies and slowly remove the networking requirement.  As your reputation builds, your brand will have a certain amount of trust from the beginning. What does that Sales strategy look like? Well, if I was doing it: Preparation - Articles of Interest First, find some articles and other content that someone in marketing would be interested in.  This is important.  The whitepapers should come from you, and the articles should come from external sources.  Make sure the articles are timeless - meaning, their content doesn't expire with time. You also might want to find some articles about more personal topics.  Separate these into two piles - lead nurturing, and sales. Write a Whitepaper.. or Two Whitepapers are incredibly valuable in marketing - and the content should be incredibly valuable to marketers.  Prepare at least one, and make sure you stuff it with amazing content that your target market wiill be interested in reading.  It must be valuable information.  And you'll want it to be as timeless as possible. As a marketer, my attention, time, and contact information is worth something -  make sure that you provide enough value in your whitepaper to collect that information. A guideline I use for whitepapers is that the length should be between 10 and 15 pages - and should focus on your area of expertise.  Remember, if you're selling value and not volume, people hire you for your experience and efficiency - not your "secrets".  People don't have time to do what you do, and even if they did, they wouldn't do it as effectively as you would.  Use this to your advantage. Prepare for Lead Nurturing Only 5% of your target market is ready to buy.  Why ignore those who aren't immediately ready?  Build out at least one landing page targeted specificly at marketers.  Connect this to an automated marketing platform, full of fancy beautiful drip campaigns.  Or do what I do and build out a single drip campaign that will last a month, and then next month, expand on it, and continue following that process until you have a massive labyrinth of drips. Fill the drips with your own content, articles you found that you put in the "lead nurturing" pile, etc.  Find a way to be in front of your customer at least once every week.  And provide value in every single email.  Don't try to sell a customer that is only INTERESTED in your product.  You want to continue to educate them until they are evaluating your product. Pre-Sales 101 First, you would want to do networking sales.  Select a few local targeted agencies and prepare a sales kit.  Use LinkedIn to find out who your target decision makers are and who the potential influencers are (and what they look like).  Find out trade shows, events, networking events, or award shows they will be attending.  Hint: check their blogs and social feeds.  Remember, they're in marketing - they want to be found. Get a CRM.  If you drop the ball - even once - you'll lose some trust.  And trust is hard to recover. Identify their interests based on their social media profile and research enough so that you can hold a conversation.  Attend the event and conveniently strike up a conversation while they aren't busy.  Nonchalantly mention what you do, BUT DO NOT SELL.  You are building awareness and interest, NOT convincing a customer to purchase today.  Strike up a conversation about one of those "sales" articles you've cleverly preselected based on their social profiles.  By the way, don't forget which article that was.  Write it on their business card if you have to. Get their business card.  Now we enter the sales part of lead nurturing - relationship development.  Remember, the fact that they gave you their business card is not giving you permission to market to them, so you can't immediately add them to your marketing drip.  You'd be violating CAN-SPAM, and that would suck.  And no one wants to be unsolicitly spammed. Add Value, Build Your Relationship, and Get Permission to Market Schedule 4 emails to them a span of 45-50 days - you can do this in a drip, but be incredibly careful to make sure they look like normal emails.  These aren't marketing drips, these are sales drips.  Sales drips are not expensive to set up - if you chose the right CRM, you can probably build automated time-based email workflows; if not, something like Yesware can schedule emails, too. The first one - send as early as you can saying it was great meeting them, and here's that article you were talking about. The second one - use one of those articles from the "Sales Drip".  "Read this article and thought you'd be interested" kind of thing; make sure it's connected to the first article.  Remember, you're building rapport here - you're not trying to convince the customer to buy...yet. The third email, "We just prepared this whitepaper for our marketing partners, and thought you might be interested in the content.  How To Use Blog Posts in B2B Marketing"  or something like that.  Here, you're showcasing your expertise and your skills. And, more importantly, you're going to link to a landing page which collects their information and gives you permission to directly market to them on their customized, industry specific drip campaign that you set up in your lead nurturing campaign. The fourth email, "Have time for a coffee?"  Objective is to get the personal attention of the prospect to measure how close they are to buying. It's a Lead Cycle, not a Lead Funnel In Marketing, we call it the Lead Funnel, because we want to slowly move customers to a better place to buy.  In Sales, we call it the Lead Cycle, because we are constantly trying to build rapport and trust and determine if they're evaluating services similar to ours - regardless of how close they are to buying. Rinse and repeat as many times as it takes to get a sale.  And to get a repeat sale.  And to build the customer to a champion of your services. Other Notes Check your competitors in the space - such as copywriters, or even marketing agencies who do what you do.  Remember to determine if they're effectively targeting their target persona.  How they market themselves can give you clues on what works (and more importantly what doesn't). Most entrepreneurs try to get the unaware to buy and wonder why it's so hard to convert a sale.  It's incredibly difficult to get a prospect to move from being unaware to evaluating your services.  It takes time - and patience.  You CANNOT effectively move a customer from one spot in the process to two or three spots ahead in one swipe.  You might get a few sales that way - but you'll destroy a ton of relationships and opportunities if you do, Why do I stress inbound marketing?  Well, first of all, it's really what you sell.  Further, you don't want to force your salespeople to travel to new markets in order to build sales every time - and, you most likely don't want to "rent" another businesses audience (Traditional ads).  Build your OWN list. PS:  Part of inbound marketing is SEO - and duplicate content anywhere online is a critical sinker for your positioning.  Make sure you address this in your materials, otherwise most knowledgeable online marketers will dismiss you quickly. Oh.  By the way, I should mention that all this stuff takes time to set up and you really need to have technology in place to enable 100% efficiency.  If you don't get it right the first time, you could damage your relationships. If you don't have time or that scares you - give me a call.  We'll have a little chat.  ;) ^--- example of ineffective inbound marketing.  Totally didn't force you to give me your name and email for all that valuable information; no way for me to continue to build our relationship and prove how valuable I would be to you and your organization. Jeez - I need to turn this Quora post into a whitepaper.  lol