My fellow blogger Paul Woodward commented my yesterday’s post and said,

… big business out there right now (Ali vs. Global Sources) is a battle of the sales forces, not technology… capturing marketing $$ online as well as offline surely can’t be that hard if companies organise themselves around the challenge.

That’s very true. Technology can’t work alone without a great mind. And the great minds out there in the B2B arena, when they are battling in sales, should also manage to use technology and benefit from the cost efficiency instead of pocketing the profits from the inefficient sales.

What I mean for the “inefficient sales, ” in particularly links to the B2B models (online sourcing portals, trade show organizers, and trade magazine publishers) in this region, happens because of the disintegration found in the value chain, when the service providers miss the opportunity to engage the customers.

I remember eight years ago when I was evangelizing trade show and online convergence in China, it was quite prevalent at that time many trade show exhibitors still believed face-2-face marketing was driving the actual sales, and telephone call was more effective than email.

Today I am sure even the exhibitors who believe in face-2-face marketing are looking for solutions to improve the closing rate, generate more leads, and shorten the sales cycle. Those solutions, are nothing but the hybrid of exhibition stands, phone calls, databases, emails, and the web, all being integrated to fulfill the customers’ needs.

Cartoon by Dave Walker.
Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog
at We Blog Cartoons.

Opportunity and business arise when demand meets supply. The service providers always need to find an insertion point to engage their customers. Let’s say a typical trade show life cycle is 3 to 4 days, the marketing cycle lasts for 6 to 10 months. In this period, both the service provider and the customer are moving along with many many business engaging points.

A typical example would be when a trade show organizer is recruiting visitors, the exhibitors are looking for leads. The master trade show marketing plan can actually be designed to facilitate the exhibitors’ leads generation as well. To build such a versatile service without the help of technology will be the mission impossible, but as I’ve said, we don’t need rocket science neither.

The “inefficient sales” happens not because of the sales team isn’t strong enough. It happens when the service providers fail to engage the customers because of the disintegrated service so they also lost the bonus sales derived from the cross selling.

 Subscribe my feed