At one of the places I recently consulted, both the CEO and VP, Marketing referred to marketing collateral as “documents”—most callously. The attitude was “The customer needs a white paper. Do we have something to give them?”

There are no prizes for guessing how well the company is positioned in the market or the degree of its mind-share!
The most common way companies build collateral is ad-hoc. It is tactical and reactive. As a result, the benefits are deal specific and short term.

Marketing collateral comprises many different items – Web site, case studies, white papers, data sheets, power point presentations, press releases, contributed articles and more. It is important that every piece of collateral that you develop has a core idea/theme/concept that you are trying to communicate or emphasize. The message framework you build (refer to March 2005 article) is essentially your guide to develop collateral.

In order to build strong perceived value in the marketplace, the approach for developing collateral should be both strategic—theme based and scientific— customer life cycle based; refer to figure 1. As the CMO, you need to think, worry and be paranoid about how your company/brand is being perceived during the entire customer life cycle. The marketing unit needs to help the company communicate “brand and value” at every stage of the customer life cycle, right from when your inside sales team is calling on suspects to when your customer support team is supporting the live/active customer.

You need to be paranoid about how your company and/or products are being perceived at each customer touch point. This approach will result in the customer receiving a more integrated message about your company and products, resulting in higher perceived brand value.

The other common error most B2B companies make is to build collateral that is rigid. For example, the VP of marketing who builds a single continuous 70 slide deck for the sales team doesn’t help the sales team much, as he is indulging in an exercise of self-gratification. In reality, the slides make little sense to anybody but himself, his marketing team and his CEO. What a colossal waste of resources!

Collateral should be modular. For example, build a slide library that has slide sets of 3-5 slides each—each of which communicate a message and/or answer an objection. Hire smart salespersons that build their own presentation by piecing together different slide sets. For instance, you could provide sales with a master template to insert the appropriate slide sets depending on the real-life business scenario they are dealing with.

The common refrain in marketing is that salespeople are dumb and that they “just don’t get it”. In reality, marketing must be smart enough to communicate in a way that sales people and the rest of the organization can understand and internalize the message. The collateral thus developed is delivered to the market using one or more of the following vehicles depending on the occasion and the objective:

1 Direct Marketing—tied to sales cycle—white papers, data sheets, case studies, ROI analyses.

2 Seminars and Webinars

3 Web site

4 Press releases and contributed articles

5 1-1 Suspect and Prospect Calls

6 Training manuals and user guides

7 Product look and feel

Finally, it is important to realize…

You can’t improve what you can’t assess …

You can’t assess what you can’t measure …

It is important to constantly monitor:

l Is price a big differentiator for your product or service? A good marketing team diminishes the effect of price in a prospect’s mind and gives the prospect some critical base points on which to make a decision.

l Does price come up as the final differentiator at the end of your sales process?

l Do you automatically make the initial call list of most G2000 organization when they consider buying products/services that you offer? Or have they not even heard of you?

l Does your marketing department integrate well and work tightly with the sales department, especially in complex and lengthy sales processes? How much value does marketing add to the sales process?

l Does your marketing department function as the “gearbox”? Does your organization have synchrony between external promise and internal operational execution?

l Is your message consistent? Is their consistency and commonality in the messages articulated by the engineer, the salesperson, the receptionist and the finance function in terms of what the company does?

Navin Nagiah is a senior business executive in the Silicon Valley with extensive experience taking technology products to market in the U.S., UK, India, China and SE Asia. Nagiah can be reached at navin35@yahoo.com