The Challenge | Opportunity
As part of my evolving strategic leadership role at Wacom, I took over global marketing alliances and the new business development team in mid-2017. The Consumer Business Development team was a small, agile team of four (4) sales managers that spanned the globe: US, Western Europe, Japan and China. Under my direction, the team supported existing Consumer Electronic channels, plus an increased level of focus on penetrating strategic, new channels: Carrier/Telco, Enterprise, and Premium Incentive.
Shortly into my management of the team, I realized that with such limited resources, large geographies to cover, and a burning desire to rapidly accelerate B2B sales (i.e., volume orders), we needed a new approach to penetrate these new channels.
Leveraging insights, market trends and a cross-functional digital marketing team, I initiated the development of an integrated, scalable B2B lead generation program for Bamboo Smartpads: Bamboo@Work. This was a first-of-its-kind program for our Consumer Business Unit that previously had been 100% focused on B2C marketing and selling.
Program Objectives | Goals
- Build awareness for Bamboo Smartpads as a new tool for business productivity
- Drive qualified leads to Business Development team: 20 leads per month
- Accelerate volume sales via margin efficient channels (e.g., eommerce, distribution)
Honing the Target Audience
We had to focus our programming and outreach, as we had a limited budget and time to get this digital marketing program launched in key regions. While assessing various B2B target audiences – sales managers, event planners, HR professionals, office managers – we quickly narrowed in on sales / business development professionals associate with SMBs.
Why Sales / Business Development Professionals? Our market insights pointed to the fact that:
- This was a large target audience that spanned geographies and consistently looked for productivity gains.
- SMBs proved to be more informal in their buying patterns and had fewer layers of decision-makers (i.e., they could move quick from interest to purchase – less than 3 months).
- Sales managers were consistently being coached to put laptops away during client meetings, unless running presentations, and focus on the conversation and the client’s needs.
- Sales managers were taking copious handwritten notes and follow-up actions, yet their workflow and productivity was being compromised with the need to retype notes and archive their content.
Bamboo Smartpads proved to be a winning solution to help sales professionals stay present with clients, manage simple note taking routines, and gain productivity with powerful bridging technology from pen/paper to digital.
For more insight into the sales / business development target audience persona see below.
Thoughtful Customer Journey
In setting the digital customer journey, we wanted to build an interactive landing zone that provided added value content, new ideas for productivity gains, and established the potential for a consultative sell. Our approach was to drive awareness and engagement via paid media, sponsored content and PR outreach targeted at leading SMB sales professionals. With the help of our digital agency, RoboBoogie (great name, right!) the journey was thoughtfully constructed to take potential customers from an high-impact ad unit on Facebook or LinkedIn to a highly targeted landing page that brought Smartpads to life with a clear value proposition and relevant case studies from KinderCare, Google, and Concordia University.
Mapping the customer journey and conversion path:
During our program run, we found that LinkedIn advertising, although more expensive than Facebook, was the most effective in attracting highly engaged and qualified leads in the US. Additionally, a run of sponsored content with Entrepreneur.com netted the greatest level of ‘fast-track’ engagement in the US with over 1K visitors during a 2-day stretch.
Cultivating Leads
Once on the landing page, the use of a powerful value proposition for Smartpads, value-add gated content, and special offers helped to drive lead generation. We had several micro-conversion points that drove high and medium priority leads to the business development team and positioned them as consultative experts in helping optimize smartpad deployment in leading organizations.
The team was focused on moving quickly to follow-on with leads to initiate discussion and share learnings about how smartpads empower teams and boost productivity.
A quick look into the (preliminary) landing page layout and functionality.
Results | Learnings
- Established >$2M sales pipeline in <5 months
- Drove >20 leads per month in key geographies: US, France, Japan, China
- US program drove >40 high-quality leads per month (2x goal achievement)
- Distribution partners in Europe, Japan and China were able to successfully leverage program assets and extend the program to their B2B clients
- Leads auto-populated Microsoft Dynamics CRM system for easy retrieval and tracking of pipeline opportunities
Bamboo@Work
Program Landing Page
<Click Here>
Example of Analytics from Bamboo@Work Campaign
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