B-to-B Cataloging: Four Ways to Coordinate Marketing and Outbound Sales

Want to increase sales? Increase the frequency of contact with your customers, and coordinate catalog marketing and outbound sales efforts. In B-to-B especially, it can be a powerful, one-two punch. But without a well-planned strategy, one effort can unintentionally undermine the other.

Here are four key ways to ensure your sales and marketing efforts are in sync.

1. Brand. Controlling brand in print and online can be relatively easy compared to controlling it in outbound sales efforts. Use gatekeepers to assure that you maintain a consistent look and voice in your catalog and on your Web site. If a wrong font or color slips into a design, make the correction in a preliminary layout before you publish the error.

Phone channels require gatekeepers, too. Sales goals, training levels and employee understanding of your brand promise can all create “brand drift.” This is a subtle and unintended change of brand positioning that’s introduced to answer a perceived need.

In print, brand drift can occur because copywriters get bored and introduce a new copy voice. In outbound sales channels, your brand can appear to have multiple personalities, taking on the personalities of the individuals in the department.

Enter Brand-washing

If this is the case, you may need some internal brand-washing in which you create employee buy-in to your brand promise. Consistent, credible and sincere communication from your senior management team, backed by action and training are key. Your sales staff has to know that what it’s saying is true. It must feel confident that it’ll be supported by the product and service.

If your brand promise is to match the lowest price anywhere, your sales staff buy-in is straightforward. Set parameters for confirming prices and give your staff the authority to match it. For another example:
Brand-washing Checklist for Cataloger XYZ
Brand Promise: Innovative solutions for the lawn irrigation industry
Ask the following:
• What does the phrase “innovative solutions” mean?
• What are the benefits of your solutions?
• How do your solutions differ from the competition’s?
• What is the higher-order benefit that your brand offers?
• What personal benefit does a customer receive by purchasing from your company, compared to the competition?

2. Call lists. Direct marketers know the value of recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) segmentation from their response metrics. Although outbound sales forces know the same principle, it’s more intuitive. Though they may not succinctly articulate it, they usually know their best customers in terms of frequency of purchase over a given period of time.

When you ask sales professionals how they develop call lists, they often say they use calendars to reflect the frequency purchases, e.g., Company X orders every month, Company Y orders once every six months. They then mark their calendars for sales calls. This process delivers sales, but it can skim the cream. Potentially good customers might get overlooked.

B-to-B marketers can give outbound sales short- and long-term insight into customer lists by applying RFM scoring. For the short-term targets, such as hitting the month’s revenue goal, the sales staff uses RFM scoring to identify customers from top to lowest segment; it’s a quick and easy checklist to scan for potential sales.

For long-term goals, such as customer reactivation, the direct marketing team identifies customers for reactivation by RFM segment. These are customers who won’t buy very much. So a commission-compensated sales staff won’t be excited about them, and rightly so. If your paycheck was commission-based, you’d want every phone call to count, too. In these situations, smart sales directors offer an incentive that’s not necessarily based on sales dollars.

Sales managers set time limits for reactivation calls. Typically, a one-hour block each week and a realistic “close target,” meaning number of sales, not dollars. Beyond regular commissions, those who exceed the target receive an award, such as a pair of movie tickets or a gift card. The staff enjoys the change of pace, but doesn’t feel like the effort encroaches on its commissions. Eventually, it’ll appreciate the monetary value of reactivated customers, but that benefit takes time to become apparent.

3. Product launches. Product development is high-profile and capital-intensive. B-to-B catalogers are justifiably eager to see how the market responds to their new ideas.

When launching a new product, remember: You only get to launch once. Falter in your marketing and sales efforts, and you leave customers doubting.

Coordinating the timing of sales and marketing efforts is essential. When you introduce the product, everyone must be ready. Typically, the direct marketing side has more information regarding a new product launch than the outbound sales team. That’s because the copy and graphic production staff members, which usually are part of the direct marketing team, produce the product information sheets, instructions and packaging designs that accompany the product.

Too often, outbound sales staff is left in the dark and has to scramble to get product information. So hold a product introduction meeting to educate the team. It builds excitement and primes sales — and the new product — for success.

4. Sales-channel tension. Who is generating the sale? Direct mail or outbound sales? The outbound telemarketing sales side claims its selling skills generate the sales and the catalog is just a tool. With the recent increase in postal rates, inevitably the debate will reignite, sparked by the temptation to cut back on mailing quantity and frequency.

B-to-B catalogers should run tests to determine the incremental differences between their catalog marketing and outbound telesales vs. the combined effort of the two. They’ll likely find that the whole is greater than the two parts in terms of both sales and ROI. Regardless of whether the sales staff or the catalog effort can lay claim to the bulk of the sales, there probably will be elements in both that need to be improved. That’s where coordinating the two efforts pays dividends.

George Hague is senior marketing strategist at J. Schmid & Associates in Mission, Kan. You can reach him at (913) 236-8998 or georgeh@jschmid.com.