Sellers from Mars and Buyers from Venus - V

Excerpt from my upcoming book at amazon.com - "Sellers from Mars and Buyers from Venus - Elements of Nature Meet B2B Sales" 

How a Marketing Manager will engage with others 

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B2B Sales Stakeholders and Their Activities

The sales team or a sales representative, engages various internal and external stakeholders, with the intent of growing the business underpinned by positioning a compelling product or a service. The following list gives a good view of various stakeholders engaged by the sales team or a representative.

● the internal marketing and corporate strategy team for research, positioning, and pricing 

● internal product engineering or service design team 

● internal legal service team for defining contractual agreements, terms, and conditions

● procurement at the buyer’s end

● sponsoring C-level executives like CEO, CFO, CIO, CDO and their team members at buyer’s end

● internal HR, legal, quality, security and sales team  

● and others like a third-party product or service partner 

These stakeholders will vary with vertical, geography, type and size of a prospective buyer like an SME or a global player. This is not an exhaustive list but highlights the magnitude of complexity and multiplicity involved in executing sales and business development activity. 

With the intent of supporting a sales team or a representative, different activities at each stage of the value chain are executed by various stakeholders, some in parallel and some in sequence. 

Let’s explore how a Marketing Manager will engage in various activities with its stakeholders at the seller's or buyers' end by applying the lens of five elemental attributes.  

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Next: Coming up 

• Cheat Sheet for Sales Planning and Execution using Five Elements   
• How a Procurement Executive will Engage
• How B2B Sales are different in Service vs Product 

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Previous articles can be read here

• Part 4 on How a Sponsoring Executive will engage can be read here
• Part 3 on Negotiation Styles in B2B Sales can be read here 
• Part 2 on Persona Mapping in B2B Sales can be read here 
• Part 1 on Marrying Elements of Nature with B2B Sales can be read here

Market Your Way to Growth

Template for driving growth.

• Grow by Building Market Share 
• Grow through Developing Committed Customers and Stakeholders 
• Grow by Developing a Powerful Brand 
• Grow by Innovating New Products, Services, and Experiences 
• Grow by International Expansion 
• Grow by Mergers, Acquisitions, Alliances, and Joint Ventures 
• Grow by Building an Outstanding Reputation for Social Responsibility 
• Grow by Partnering with Government and NGOs

Source: Market Your Way to Growth by Philip and Milton Kotler

Characteristics of Creative People

Personal Characteristics 

According to Gilda Waisburd, a specialist in creativity, the traits of creative people are as follows:3 

• Flexible (they go beyond the obvious) 

• Fluid (they generate many ideas about a problem) 

• Elaborative (they expand the task in detail) 

• Tolerant of ambiguity (they stand up well to conflict) 

• Able to see the whole (they take a systemic approach) 

• Inquiring (interest in many disciplines) 

• Sensitive to the interests of others (they understand others’ needs) 

• Curious (interested in “playing” with things) 

• Independent (they come up with ideas of their own) 

• Reflective (they think about what they see and hear) • Action-oriented (they go beyond thinking and the idea to act) 

• Able to concentrate (they work in a consistent manner) 

• Persistent (they don’t give up easily) • Committed (they get involved with things) 

• Sense of humor (they are able to laugh and use humor to put things in perspective) 

Personal Qualities Frank Barron, Howard Gardner, Calvin Taylor, Robert Sternberg, E. Paul Torrance, and Robert Weisberg, all distinguished theorists on creativity, generally concur that creative people exhibit the following qualities 

 • Verbal fluency 

• High IQ 

• Imagination 

• Ability to influence others’ and one’s environment 

• Ability and propensity to take risks 

• Interest in properly defining the problem to be solved 

 Common Resources of Creative People 

• Use metaphors 

• Use images 

• Use logic 

• Usually ask themselves the “why” in what they observe

How to make Marketing Platforms as Profit Centres

Source:  How to build Profit Centric Marketing 

• What businesses need is a framework for profit-centric marketing, with profit creators
• This can only come from existing customers using 5R – 
• combining retention, 
• repetition, 
• referrals, 
• reactivation (as opposed to reacquisition) 
• and replenishment (targeted new acquisition) 
•  This 5R focus needs the 4P framework: 
•  pipes, 
•  partitioning, 
•  properties, 
•  and prospecting

This transformation will need the third generation of martech platforms: the first generation was about point solutions and the second generation was about full-stack platforms. The third generation will be about platforms that are Web3 powered and enable the tokenisation that marketers need to make XR (and therefore profit-centric marketing) a reality.