By Mike Casey
As I write this, I’m one of several thousand people who went to WINDPOWER 2017, the big annual wind industry trade show, to sell products and services and are now heading home.
My firm’s a bit different than others at the show. We sell marketing communications services that support those sales teams. It gives us a good reason to pay attention to what they say and experience. And over and over sales people at this show told us how much more challenging they are finding making and sustaining buyer contact.
I’m paraphrasing a good 20 conversations here, but most clean energy sales teams are finding themselves squeezed:
Clean energy sales teams are finding traditional, retail sales approach is becoming more like a desert – long and potentially fatal dry spells.
That desertification is being driven in part because buyers are increasingly self-guided in their purchases, making more of their decision online through browsing and research. They are looking for insights. They want to be educated.
That’s the lesson of your own purchase behavior, as well as the marketing research – which we summarize here. You can browse the material we drew from here, here, here and here.
But most clean energy companies are still relying on legacy marketing – direct sales contact and little proper use of the digital tools that work with the trend in buyer behavior. We’ve documented that most clean energy companies are treating treating digital tools as just a cheap form of distribution, not insight-based engagement.
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Content Marketing: No Longer Take it or Leave it
If you’re crossing the sales desert, then you need to bring water. In cleantech sales, insightful content is the water.
Customers are searching and researching online. It’s just a question of whether or not you’ll choose to exert influence over the information they consume. If they want to be educated, and not sold to – then educate them with sights that provide value for their time.
And for cleantech companies, that’s good news. A key driver of cleantech’s momentum is the influx of data and analytical capability. Cleantech companies are awash in smart data and smart people that are often being used not just in operations and product development but in retails sales contact to estimate product performance, benefits, savings, etc.
The bridge to build is to get those smart data and smart people helping their companies create market-facing insights that can be used for online content. Basically, the same stuff cleantech companies are using, just deployed differently.
Note that the number one recommendation from Salesforces’ 2017 tips is to use content to sell. Prospects now expect that every time they open your email it will be worth their time.
And, if a cleantech company starts producing content that’s useful, they are drawing the water that the salespeople can use to get through the desert by enriching sales touches. Imagine the difference if every time a sales team contacted a prospect, they were delivering an insight that the customer actually found useful? And, what if the way that insight was delivered enticed the customer to visit the website of the sales team’s company?
That’s what my firm is doing with pieces like this.
Why aren’t you doing the same?
