Sales and Marketing? No, Consulting.
Session: Optimize the Buying Process (Transactional Vs. Consultative Marketing Models)
Todd Forsythe, vice president of global marketing for Oracle Corp. wasn’t able to make it to Ad:Tech, but his proxy, Bill Carper, senior director of global marketing, stepped up with fine style and a solid, last-minute presentation about Oracle’s approach to transactional and consultative marketing.
After quickly riffing through the primary differences between transactional and consultative marketing, Carper used several campaign case studies to highlight the tactics and strategies Oracle applies to consultative marketing. While the value of transactional marketing is clear, I’m much more interested in and fascinated by the nuances and complexities of consultative marketing. Your organization becomes a consultancy of sorts. You focus on solving business problems, not merely selling a product or service. And you approach existing and potential customers in a very different way.
While Carper covered a lot of ground over the course of almost an hour, the key takeaways from his session are as follows:
- Identify a pain point.
- Focus on business needs and solutions.
- Be prepared to walk away. “Some stuff is not worth winning,” he says. “It behooves you to walk away from accounts that just won’t work. It’d be smart to spend your money somewhere else.”
- Synchronize customer contact. Connect your marketing and sales efforts by aligning activities to the stages in your sales cycle, enable one-to-one account-based communication, and market to and through sales. “Market through sales,” Carper said. “As a marketer, that’s a little hard to swallow, but if you’re smart, you’ll realize that field sales have a lot of enterprise knowledge.”
- Influence the influencers. “Influencers are either subordinates in an organization or peers - or a third party outside the company. Enlist them as advocates to generate awareness, interest, and add credibility to build demand.”
While BzzAgent’s Dave Balter might challenge the importance of the role of the influencer, Carper’s consideration of working with the sales team - and outside partners - is as insightful as his comments on surrounding potential clients by targeting multiple executives within a company. In fact, the closing statement of his presentation could warrant a session of its own: “Develop strong agency relationships,” he says. “Work to develop partnerships. Don’t approach agencies as vendors.”
The parallels between agency partnerships and consultative marketing are intriguing. And Carper may have said it best himself: “We essentially played a service bureau role in this case.” Is that the future of consultative marketing?
A full transcript of this session is also available.
