Imagine you’re an enterprise spending $100,000 a month on various advertising channels that you expect will generate leads and overall interest in your company through your website. How important would you consider the aesthetic appeal and feel of your website to be in converting those visitors into actual leads? Would you invest in a high-converting website? Of course you would. Sending traffic to a low-converting website is wasted marketing spend. For that reason, many organizations are increasing their marketing budgets or, at minimum, allocating those resources to website analytics and conversion tracking tools that allow for split testing and other optimization. We’ve even seen companies spend anywhere from $10,000 up to $1 million just on conversion tracking and analytics software such as Marketo and Unbounce. These companies understand that they must have an effective website that supports their $100,000/month marketing spend. If not, their marketing spend is not working as effectively as it could.
Now imagine you’re a B2B company and you’ve captured those speed to leads. Do you have the proper marketing and sales enablement tools to convert them at the presentation level? What are you doing to impress the decision makers(s) and close the sale(s)? This is where most companies fall short. They think investments in sales enablement tools and great websites are enough. We would make the argument that an investment in a strong marketing presentation software that could increase your close rate by 10 – 25% is just as important as the website, analytics, and other marketing tools you’ve invested in.
How The Marketing Funnel For B2B Works
We have all seen the many iterations and interpretations of marketing, email marketing and sales funnels. But this is how we’d simplify it:
- Top Funnel – Advertising and marketing channels (digital media, sponsorships, organic search, email marketing, cold calling, sales)
- Middle Funnel – Strategies and tools to turn leads into opportunities (conversion tracking, split testing, content and lead scoring tools, sales enablement and productivity software)
- Bottom Funnel – Turn opportunities into closed business; speaking to decision maker(s)
97% of a company’s marketing budget is spent at the top and middle of the funnel, yet the most critical part of that funnel is the bottom. Once you’ve made all of these investments it’s important to not stop aligning your sales team with marketing tools to improve the team’s close rate and effectiveness. As B2B companies, we need effective strategies and tools to close those prospects. Marketing heads don’t place as much emphasis at the interactive level with the decision maker. But imagine a marketing tool that impacts prospects and performs the following functions:
- Create better looking presentations than your competitors
- Allow for easy access to branded assets that are managed in the Cloud
- A presentation that doesn’t look like a PowerPoint
- Improve productivity and reduce time spent on non-selling activities
- Ability to dynamically incorporate video into your presentations
- A presentation that elevates your brand in the eyes of your prospect
- A tool that can produce real-time analytics on the use and effectiveness of those presentations.
The same emphasis we place on impressing our website visitors is the same emphasis we must place on impressing the decision makers in the room. For that reason, a good presentation tool will close the loop and help improve your close rate at the bottom of the marketing funnel.
Here’s the math to prove it’s worth it
Take the $100,000/month you spend in marketing. Let’s say you get 20,000 visits per month to your website. If 1 percentage of your website visitors convert leads, then you are effectively presenting to or nurturing 200 leads per month. If on average, your sales team closes 20% of leads that come through your website and your average customer value is $10,000, you are earning $400,000 from those leads.
If presentation software could increase your sales teams close rate from 20% to 30%, you’ve increased your earnings that month to $600,000. Is that $10,000 investment worth it?Absolutely. That’s effectively an 6,000% ROI on your investment. The point is that investments in areas at the bottom of the sales and marketing funnel become just as valuable, if not more so, than investments at the top of the funnel. Just like investing money into websites or analytics software, automated lead generation can increase your lead generation rate from 1% to 1.5%, the same value can be placed on presentation software.
According to Forrester Research, 50% to 75% of a salesperson’s time is spent on non-selling activities. In addition, 54% of sales managers are somewhat unconfident or not confident at all about the activities of their sales professionals. The right presentation software tool will induce more confidence, ensure the sales team is spending more time on selling versus non-selling activities, and create more value by closing more deals for the team.
Don’t Have The Marketing Budget For It
Many times we hear the argument that companies simply don’t have the marketing budget for presentation software. These are the same companies spending money on Marketo, Salesforce, Unbounce, and additional marketing platforms. If you want to increase the effectiveness of your conversion and sales funnel, you must set money aside for these activities.
What’s Your Competitive Advantage?
We hear a lot of about first mover advantage and companies looking to find every competitive advantage they can. According to Kuno Creative marketing budgets are less than 1% of revenues, and yet the CMO’s top priority is to grow revenue through a wide range of marketing channels. CMO’s need to expand their thinking about marketing investments and consider other parts of the marketing and sales funnel that provide additive results. We’re not suggesting a elimination of traditional marketing channels but rather allocating a portion of those marketing dollars to presentations tools that can and will impact the bottom line of an organization. Create presentations that impress the decision makers and your bottom line will increase for a fraction of the dollars you would spend on other marketing and advertising channels.
With every good presentation is a good presentation builder that fit the intricacies and identity of your organization. At CustomShow, we believe our presentation software can do just that.