It’s often said in business that the “left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.” This is especially true when it comes to the marketing and sales teams in larger organizations. The challenge is that such a disconnect is incredibly unproductive, and in many cases, unnecessary. The opportunity for collaboration is monumental and is the secret behind this article that focuses specifically on B2B marketing.
Over the course of a dynamic 20-year career in marketing, Stacey Cummings has spent a majority of her time with Canada Post and Purolator. As Head of Customer Marketing for Purloator, Stacey has led the B2B marketing strategy for the last three years. With effective leadership, this multi-faceted B2B organization has become one of Canada’s premium couriers and freight shipping providers. Stacey’s team focuses on a wide range of measurable, revenue generating activities in the business-to-business space. Specifically, the team delivers on acquisitions, small business marketing, content, events, vertical strategy, retention and growth marketing.
In this interview, In Partnership With seeks to explore the nuances of the Canadian B2B marketing landscape. Diving deeper, we examine the role of inter-departmental collaboration to gain alignment and how to deliver on success with a relationship-first approach. Plus, a look forward to December 2020 for the busiest online shopping season in history.
How B2B Marketing is Different than B2C
It’s different, but it’s not that different. And that surprises a lot of people. In both cases, there is a seller and a customer. The nuance is that the business-to-business (B2B) customer is not the end consumer. They’re the intermediary who may sell to another business in the value chain (B2B2C) or to the consumer directly (B2C). At the end of the day, there is still a marketing funnel to proceed through and there is a relationship to be established, nurtured and strengthened.
B2B marketing sales cycles can often be very long versus B2C.
A notable exception to this is for certain high-involvement B2C verticals, such as automotive. Additionally, with B2B, there are often a lot of stakeholders in the decision-making process versus a single consumer or household.
Building Relationships to Secure Success
Stacey’s team is incredibly focused on relationships. Client organizations with broad scale and complexity means there are a variety of different customer segments. The marketing channel mix goes across the board and it varies depending on what type or what size of business and its opportunities.
Relationships are always about listening, building trust, understanding customer needs and delivering on them.
The marketing plan is a crucial part of that relationship. In the translation of marketing activity to suit customer needs, Purolator delivers events (live and virtual these days) to bring people together and support collaboration among clients and the internal team. An equally important component is sales enablement, providing talk tracks and presentation material that helps deliver a consistent and trusted message.
For less complex businesses or some small business customers that have two or three employees, the approach changes. In this case, Stacey’s team will deploy social engagement and more digital with that channel. Whatever the size of client, there is always a certain level of personal relationship with them. In doing so, her team gets feedback from customers to optimize their marketing strategies together.
To support relationships more effectively, Purolator leverages Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud. This ensures team members can understand client perspectives. This is helpful when building marketing campaigns broadly or even for customers specifically (and customers like them that may have the same needs). In addition, this allows for comprehensive assessment of client interactions which allows for knowledge to be shared within the organization.
Collaborative B2B Marketing Starts Internally
Fortunately for Purolator, there is strong and effective alignment at the executive level. All staff live a “one team” approach. There are streamlined goals across the executive team and that makes it easier to deliver on them. As proof, there’s not a lot of independent KPIs from a marketing team perspective.
Stacey lights up when she’s thinking about collaboration. It’s really about the breadth of opportunities available to the marketing and sales teams when they work together.
The strong and effective relationships built across teams make success in this new world possible.
As a result, when annual corporate strategy is developed, Stacey works internally to build backwards to establish the tactical marketing plan. Knowing her colleagues are aligned to the same vision, collaboration comes easily to achieve the required business outcomes and the means to make them happen. That alignment is soon going to be more important than ever.
Record Courier Volume Expected for the Holidays
Undoubtedly, there’s been an incredible amount of change in 2020 on a global shipping scale. COVID has forced a lot of very large companies to be quite agile in their approach which has not been easy. Early on, many factories closed causing shipping disruptions. We live in a globalized environment where we have supplies coming from around the world. Clearly, the worldwide supply chain is in a different place than it was pre-pandemic.
More locally, the 2020 holiday volume will likely hit a new record. In normal years, shipping volume increases dramatically during the holiday season – from Black Friday to after Boxing Day, shipments are at their highest level. In past years, Purolator has processed over a million packages daily throughout the holidays; and the company anticipates the overall volume in 2020 to be quite a bit higher. So the team across the country continues to ramp up with new hires and training them properly. Plus, in partnership with its customers, Purolator is working to anticipate what their shipping volume may be.
Globally, the largest couriers have experienced five years worth of planned growth in the last six months.
You can imagine what that does to a business model. It’s like playing catch up every single day. It’s been a crazy time for the industry and continues to be shifting weekly.
Making B2B Marketing Work Today
Preparation and communication with customers has been critical. The approach has been to be as transparent as possible with people. To let them know what’s happening and why.
The decision was made to shift during COVID from a marketing-focused model to a communications-first model.
The evolution was that the marketing team began to focus on creating communications that helped customers understand the evolving situation. It was changing every day. At first – when COVID shut down North America – there was a bit of irritation among some end customers. With proactive communication, that switched very quickly to appreciation for what the courier business does which is to connect communities. That’s what allowed Stacey’s team to make a stronger connection and a deeper relationship which will continue to be valuable as they go forward together.
Of course, none of that would have been possible if it wasn’t for collaborative and aligned internal partners who ensured that the left hand knew what the right hand was doing.
In Partnership With
Stacey Cummings is a 20-year B2B marketing strategist with transformational leadership skills. As a professional storyteller, Stacey helps the companies she works with engage their customers. In doing so, she not only impacts that audience, but also delivers on measurable business goals in innovative and compelling ways.
Tim Bishop, CM is a multi-disciplined executive with a proven record of optimizing strategic efforts to expand the influence of leading organizations, such as the Canadian Marketing Association, Cineplex Entertainment, Lavalife.com, IMI International and Northstar Research Partners. In Partnership With is his latest focus to curate Canadian marketing experts to celebrate the power of strategic partnerships in a perspective-based content series.