B-to-B Marketing: Traits, Tips 
and Practices 
of Top 
B-to-B Retailers

Hire Wisely
Companies that hire educated, bright people are most likely to succeed. Hire the best that you can afford rather than the cheapest you can find. Successful companies follow a strategy of hiring people who are best qualified to take the company in specifically predefined directions. The best companies hire with a plan.

When you hire the wrong person, you can waste precious years and countless opportunities discovering the error. It's worth investing in a hiring system. To help find qualified people, top companies often use metric-driven testing procedures. For example, let's say you're looking to hire a marketing manager who will emphasize 
creative innovation while also implementing proven systems for reporting. At first blush, these two characteristics seem at odds with each other. However, a qualified human resources professional can help you test candidates for the qualities you need in a new hire.

Employee Relations
Great customer service begins with how you treat your employees. If you take care of your employees, your employees will take care of your customers. You'll find that top-performing B-to-B retailers allow their employees flexibility to handle life situations.

Automate
The biggest obstacle to automation in most companies isn't the expense of implementation, it's that key personnel don't believe that tasks can be automated. Earlier this year, "Jeopardy" fans watched IBM's Watson computer clobber the show's top two champions in a highly touted competition of man vs. machine. If winning "Jeopardy" can be automated, imagine what can be done in your company.

B-to-B retailers that stock 
thousands of SKUs use asset management systems. An asset management system will help you automate your product management to ensure consistent identity, message and price across multiple channels. Top systems include pagination and square-inch analysis modules to help you plan your catalog and analyze its results. You should be looking to automate everything from your weekly reporting to creating promotions.

Two of the biggest problems with automation tend to happen a few years after implementation. The first is a lack of documentation. Personnel changes and computers get upgraded, and gradually no one really knows what those weekly reports represent. Maintaining printed copies of the documentation in a binder prevents that problem.

The second challenge is a run-of-the-mill glitch. Perhaps a programmer was tweaking some code for another report and unexpectedly affected something else. For data-intensive reports, it's important to have manual spot-check procedures in place.

Co-Mail
Smaller B-to-B companies often print with local printers. Though you may be getting a reasonable price on printing, you could be losing big on postage. Many smaller printers don't offer the mailing services that provide the best postage savings, particularly co-mailing. If you're not co-mailing, consider doing so immediately. You can probably save 5 percent to 10 percent of your annual postage bill by co-mailing.

Budget for Testing
This is probably the most overlooked item in strategic planning. How often has someone on your team thought of a great idea only to have it set aside because it wasn't budgeted for? Typically you should set aside a portion of your marketing budget for testing. One wry CEO called it his slush fund. For his $80 million B-to-B company, he set aside $100,000 for tests that he would approve. When managers had ideas that they thought were worth testing, they'd submit a budget and a forecast return on investment to this CEO. The system successfully encouraged innovative thinking and it's how the company tested the next big thing.

The most successful B-to-B companies test new merchandise categories, lists and offers. They set up A/B testing on their website for design, copy and presentation. They test reactivating names through outbound phone programs and appending email addresses. They test the next big thing, whether that's online video, mobile applications or something else.