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2/1/2010 - January Dinner Recap: Integration’ a key for B2B marketers says CareerBuilder’s Ferrara
By Tom Kennedy, BMA Colorado President
Don’t be offended, fellow B2B marketers, but the true marketers within an organization are our sales people because they’re the ones consistently in front of customers.
This statement by Jason Ferrara, CareerBuilder’s vice president of corporate marketing, struck a cord with me at January’s BMA Colorado dinner meeting.
Too often, corporate marketers, especially those of us in B2B roles, are far removed from the customer’s voice. Whether this is due to competing priorities, lack of staff or lack of corporate initiative, we fail to make time for the only real reason we exist: our customers. Marketers, said Ferrara, must invest the time to make sales work.
Integration is essential.
Although this wasn’t his central theme, the energetic presentation by Mr. Ferrara highlighted the importance of marketing and sales creating a more integrated bond. Too often, we don’t find the time to talk to each other, let alone work together toward common organizational goals.
It’s also important for those marketers and sales folks who are in front of customers to become indispensable. He pointed out that CareerBuilder gained momentum, and ultimately market leadership, in the early 2000s because the company’s leadership and marketing teams asked the sales force to “get to know our customers so intimately that they couldn’t live without us.”
Making the case internally for integration should fall squarely on the shoulders of marketing. He said it’s up to us to take those steps toward creating a stronger partnership with sales. It really doesn’t take much of an effort to go and talk to the sales people, to find out what they’re hearing from customers, what’s working and what isn’t.
Then there’s integration from a marketing mix perspective. Paid search, email marketing, PR, partnering strategies, social media, print advertising are all things companies must consider in their approach to communicating with their clients and prospects.
“Facebook is great because it gives you an opportunity to humanize your company,” said Ferrara. “It’s also a great way to learn stuff about your customers. And it’s a great way to become more agile.”
Agility – along with ‘candor,’ ‘disciplined freedom,’ ‘passion’ and an emphasis on ‘making it easy to do business with us’ – is one of the core values at CareerBuilder.
Asked if the practice of “marketing” may someday become obsolete because of the rise in social media, Ferrara quickly dismissed the notion. “Marketing will never go away. Give me a message and a way to communicate that message and that’s what marketers will always be needed to do.”
He added that social media today is similar to how corporate people used to talk about the Internet. “Today, everybody is saying, ‘we have to have a social media strategy.’ Ten years ago, we were saying ‘we have to have an Internet strategy,’ even if it wasn’t integrated with anything else the company did.”
Facebook and Twitter are just new ways to receive and deliver messages. Just make sure they’re integrated with the rest of your plan.
Editor's Note: Copies of past BMA Colorado presentations (including Jason Ferrara's keynote from January 2010) are posted in the BMA members-only section of the website, www.bmacolorado.org.
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January Dinner Recap: Integration’ a key for B2B marketers says CareerBuilder’s Ferrara
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