When it all settles down and the reality of life hits you, if you end up in a role related to B2B marketing or sales, then there’s a chance you’ll probably still be talking about geography all those years later.
You see, which geographies to focus precious time and money on as a business comes up time and time again for our clients. There are some weird, wonderful and downright crazy ways that sales leads and marketing heads go about prioritising their resources. And it’s a common area that our clients want some help with, so we wanted to share our thoughts on one method we’ve seen work well.
The power of proximity
How close a prospect or a customer is to something sounds quite broad. It is – and purposefully so. When you start viewing your campaign targeting through a proximity lens, a whole world of opportunity opens up right before your eyes.
A few ways to think about proximity:
- Proximity to existing customers
- Proximity to engineering depots/resource
- Proximity to HQ
- Proximity to external sales resource
If any of those take your fancy, you’re probably imagining some kind of spreadsheet hell when it comes to trying to figure it out. If like me, the idea of spending an entire day working through spreadsheets isn’t your idea of a good time, then you’ll be pleased to hear there is another way!
There’s a nifty little tool that’s been around for ages that’s been in the top pocket of any B2B sales lead or marketer worth their salt. It’s the best kept secret in geographical targeting and we’re here to lift the lid on it.
Hello BatchGeo
BatchGeo is a cool product that takes your addresses in a horrible spreadsheet format and stick it in a beautiful map format using the same technology that powers Google Maps.
Working that through, if you wanted to be able to figure out where your top prospects were physically located in relation to your existing customers, you can put the information into BatchGeo and it will show you all your prospects with a red pin, and all your customers with a blue pin.
Likewise, if you wanted to figure out where your prospects were in relation to your external sales team, you would have all your prospects in red and your external sales team in blue.
It’s a beautifully simple way of working with large volumes of mapping data in a way that’s easy, intuitive and mobile-friendly.
It can work for internal sales teams, external sales teams, marketing teams – anyone who has a requirement to figure out geographical targeting.
For us, the main use case is to use this information to help build a list for an account-based marketing campaign. Figuring out which small number of companies to target for whom we have the biggest chance of converting.
ABM and building a target list
It’s one of the main sticking points of any ABM campaign: ‘who do we target’? Getting sales and marketing on the same page here is critical, considering ABM is all about them sharing a common goal to onboard specific named accounts. That’s why it can take quite a lot of time upfront to build your ABM list: getting consensus on who to target is the building block of a successful ABM campaign.
Being able to go into a meeting to decide on priorities for an ABM campaign armed with a custom developed map that succinctly illustrates your thinking is a simple and straightforward way that everyone can understand to get everyone on the same page.
It’s that visual cue – that familiar Google Maps interface. It speaks a thousand words and it’s something that’s easily shared with the group afterwards and used as a continual resource as you get into the campaign fulfilment stage.
