Yeah, yeah - I'm three months late jumping on the "Linkedin advertising is great for B2B marketers" bandwagon. But as one who's been receiving the back-end benefits of explicitly in terms of time-saved.
The two biggest challenges facing B2B sale steams today:
1) The time required to assemble an accurate list
2) The time and effort that is wasted on a "bad-fit" lead & funnel prospect.
Granted, these challenges are not limited to the B2B arena, but their impact is heightened across long-term, relationship driven sales.
Challenge #1
There are a multitude of data-aggregators and list providers (InsideView, NetProspex, Jigsaw, Business Journal "Books of Lists"). Hell, most of us have been cold-called by one of them within the past 3 months (in my case, all of them).
But they provide a partial, and often inaccurate, prospect pool. InsideView - which in my opinion is the crème de la crème - provides significant time-savings in building lists, but I still have to sanity check the contents (email, phone, title) to ensure I'm not spinning my wheels. It's the nature of the beast for outbound sales. And the toughest realization for a salesman is to see that meeting you just fought and won with "Jim Jones the CEO" is actually a meeting with "Jim Jones, Marketing Assistant." See where this can go?
Challenge #2
A different animal entirely. And its issues are rooted in client targeting challenges that extend across just the sales team and into operations and marketing. A bad sales cycle more often than not begins with a bad, untargeted lead. However, the onus falls on sales to "make it work" and the wheels spin. In our case, in the past, we've had issues when we solution-sell a digital marketing engagement to someone who: 1) is outside of our target industry verticals; 2) isn't quite the right senior-most title; 3) doesn't have an appetite for, or white-hot pain on, digital marketing.
As a verbose salesman, I digress. The moral of this story is this two-fold: Linkedin's increasingly targeted advertising capability can quell issues that arise across these two challenges, and save your sales team herculean amounts of time. It's more than just "reaching a targeted audience" and "engaging a professionally-minded audience" - it's about sanity checking data (a necessary a continuous project) and weeding out long-term inefficiencies in your sales cycle.
This translates to:
1) happy sales team
2) more effective sales team
3) increased revenue
4) happy everbody
Of course, the challenge lies in management of the spend. One of the biggest mistakes a company, or marketing team, can make is to push $10K+ in ads without utilizing the right content, landing pages, A/B testing, and daily iteration on success rates. Otherwise, they're just like the salesperson without enough data - spinning their wheels.
