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Lisa Shepherd

than a courtship that blows hot and cold unpredictably.
Unfortunately, many B2B companies deal with marketing in
a reactive way. They ignore it until there is an issue: a trade
show that’s a few weeks away and hasn’t been planned for,
or an article that needs to be submitted to an industry journal
the next morning. This leads to a huge amount of wasted
marketing investment, not to mention stress, frustration, and
poor representation of the company.

The other gap is one of expertise. Very few non-marketing
executives have B2B marketing expertise. Heck, relatively
few marketers have B2B marketing expertise. While there are
many training grounds for B2C marketing, there are few for
B2B marketing. A junior marketer within a B2B company might
know about customers, buying behaviour, and industry trends,
but they rarely know how to put a strategic B2B marketing plan
together or how to manage the multiple moving parts it entails.
There are many elements to a comprehensive marketing
plan—from graphic design, to search engine optimization, to
event planning, and beyond. It’s challenging and rare for one
person to be skilled at everything.

B2B companies are often technical in nature, and sometimes
struggle to communicate the value of their products and
services clearly and effectively. They are founded by someone
who has technical knowledge of the service or product that
the company provides. These founders are exceptionally
competent in their area of expertise, and they are also pretty
good salespeople—they are successful in connecting with the
target market and selling their offering (or else they wouldn’t
still be around as a company). But marketing is not their
comfort zone and they don’t like the notion of promoting what
they do. They often believe that if they make a product that
is very, very good, customers will figure that out and come
running to buy it. Sadly, that just doesn’t happen.

Turnover of marketing staff is another issue for B2B companies.
It is difficult to retain marketing personnel in smaller companies

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© 2012 Lisa Shepherd