What is marketing? Like MPS, it seems to mean many different things to people. We spoke to Dominic Pontrelli, Executive Director of the Business Products Council Association, and longtime industry marketing professional, to get his thoughts on the subject as well as some insights on how the dealers can improve their marketing efforts.
If you ask a broad sampling of people to define marketing, they might cite the more obvious aspects such as advertising or social media or sales literature. For many, marketing is making these materials or tools and then utilizing them as sales support to help drive revenue. But according to Pontrelli, this is a case of the tail wagging the dog.
“That’s certainly an aspect of marketing, but really marketing is creating a strategy of how to go to market and how to be successful driving the strategic initiatives,” he says. “That’s the piece of marketing that’s missing in the dealer community.”
Dominic Pontrelli
According to Pontrelli, the first thing that dealers need to do is identify how they want to grow their business. After that, a marketing strategy will help them understand the customer base and the target market that will have the highest probability of success.
“You start by taking a good look at your business plan,” he says. “Look at the different components of the revenue stream and how you plan to grow your business.”
An example business plan he cites could be to increase hardware sales, expand managed services and add content management. Within those elements it is necessary to determine what Pontrelli calls the strategic growth initiatives.
“Over and above the MFP hardware and aftermarket, you need to determine how you are going to strategically grow the business,” he says. “That’s the beginning of a marketing strategy. You need to identify each of those areas and then tackle them on an individual basis to determine why you haven’t been as successful as you thought. What are the barriers you need to overcome?”
After that it’s necessary to determine the markets. Pontrelli says that it’s important to have a targeted approach to determine where you have been selling successfully and which markets you should really focus in on.
Once you’ve determined your strategy and markets, it’s time to work on your campaign. Pontrelli says that you can look within your organization for the skill set needed to fulfill these steps, but you can also leverage your manufacturer, supplier or software services provider. In most cases they offer a portal with a wealth of sales and marketing content.
He cited content management as an example of how to leverage this type of marketing support.
“Regardless of the vendor, they will have specific applications in the portal that talks about the decision maker and the vertical and horizontal applications for content,” says Pontrelli. “If you use that content for sales training, you can position the solution around pain points in your customer’s environment.”
Pontrelli says that this allows you to go to a customer where you have an MFP or a managed print solution relationship and talk about specific paper-based processing and how to automate those processes.
“That’s the approach we want to take, and by leveraging this content I can change the conversation from commodity to supporting those key applications,” he says.
What are the biggest marketing mistakes? Pontrelli listed two. One was to create a bland message that goes out to the entire community.
“You’re not going to capture the audience,” he cautions. “Determine your target audience and their pain points. Put relevant messaging in place because you’re going to get a higher level of acceptance and ultimately drive them to your website.”
The second mistake was putting all of the strategic initiatives on the backs of sales reps. He suggests that this is a key reason why many dealers are not as successful as they would like to be.
“In today’s world, we do a training on software, and then a training on managed services, and then a training on MPS, and then a training on the new MFPs that are coming out,” bemoans Pontrelli. “All of this is being put on the backs of the sales people, and it’s up to them to go and communicate to the customer. Historically 20 percent will go out and actually talk about these things. Eighty percent will not.”
Pontrelli suggests that the solution is to determine the target market and application and then to train the sales representative on the specific application. Then the marketing services team can either create or utilize the vendor portal to employ relevant messaging to the decision makers. This enables the sales rep to approach an educated buyer with the right tools and questions.
“It’s going to be a much more focused discussion,” he says. “It’s going to be much more of a consultative discussion based on their business need or their pain point and we can now provide the desired business outcome.”
Pontrelli says that he sees a tremendous amount of paper-based processing that is still in play in the SMB and mid market.
“Dealers can capture more wallet share by providing an automated document workflow in content management versus their current paper-based processing,” he says. “Ultimately, we need to understand that. We need to know what we want to say to whom and what we want to sell to whom.”
To do that, you’ll need a marketing strategy.
