Joel Lessem (CEO of Firmex) tells us how their marketing team has taken on new sales responsibilities and increased their influence on Firmex’s ability to find and close new business.
What out-dated ideas about the abilities and goals of your marketing team are holding your company back? How can you re-invent, re-assign, or re-build your team to do more of what your customers really need?
Joel is CEO of Firmex.
From their website:”Our products enable our clients to securely share large volumes of highly confidential and sensitive documents for commercial and financial transactions, litigation, clinical studies, procurement and regulatory compliance.”
“One of the things, when I think about marketing success, you have to think about the context of the business specifically.
So, Firmex is a B2B software-as-a-service [SaaS] business that distributes a niche product, and by its nature distributes it in a very broad geographical range…We also have a very high value product, so it’s a product where people are doing mission critical transactions, or transactions [on] large volumes of highly confidential documents. It’s not typically something someone tries out for free because, you know, the value of the transaction is typically in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and they want to make sure that it’s right. You tend to tune your marketing to the context of the business.
What’s really exciting now, I think for marketers, as opposed to before is the internet is allowing – it’s changed the entire distribution model…It allows you to essentially leverage yourself.
So, in the old days, I worked for a B2B company, the marketing person was good at putting your company name on pens and other chachkas that you could hand out at events, right? Which was generally fairly useless, and it was really left up to the sales people to do the marketing, make phone calls, travel, that type of thing.
Now, what we’re seeing, even here at Firmex, we’re a B2B company, instead of 90% of the business development budget on sales and 10% on marketing, it’s 50/50. Because we do sell around the globe, although we primarily sell into the U.S., we sell in a very broad geographical area. We have an inside sales team, their role has changed to strictly closing the sale. And the marketing role has changed from just making us look, you know, pretty, to actually engaging customers, doing some of the pre-selling.
And what you’re finding is that customers are much more open and comfortable buying from – software anyway – from organizations that they’ve never heard of before that are in some far-distant city, that have compelling information on the internet. They make a lot of their decisions, as far as whether they’re going to evaluate this product, based on that information.
So marketing’s role has in fact I think increased dramatically since the internet has become a primary channel for information about products and services.”