As the world faces the global coronavirus pandemic, B2B CMOs face a critical problem.
Not long ago, major conferences were still on the schedule. Your marketing collateral was ready. Your firm’s most persuasive executives were slated to deliver keynotes or speak on panels.
Now, nearly everything that made it easy to get in front of buyers has changed.
Conferences are canceled, and face-to-face meetings are daily less and less possible.
The entire “supply chain of sales” has been disrupted like never before. But, more than that, buyers have entirely new buying criteria to consider. For example, if your enterprise software requires sending engineers to work on-site with IT staff at the customer’s facility, how can that work if most of that staff now works from home?
Shifting to emails, tweets, social media posts, webinars, etc. is an obvious solution. However, buyers—who are struggling with how to do business themselves in this situation—aren’t likely to welcome a torrent of mostly irrelevant virtual sales calls. Yet, as buyers hunker down, sales teams under pressure to deliver revenue at all costs will feel they have little choice but to bang on the door harder.
At the risk of stating the obvious, reaching and persuading buyers will be extremely difficult for the foreseeable future.
To face these challenges, B2B CMOs must work with sales leaders to answer a critical question…