Why should chemical and synbio companies bother with a marketing plan?
One major mistake I see when chemical and synbio companies introduce new products or set growth targets for existing ones is a haphazard approach to getting the word out. Someone may attend a conference, others may contact people they know at existing and new customers. Slap together a slide deck and have a few conversations and boom! You’re on your way to sales.
You may feel like you’re gaining momentum as reports of positive conversations trickle in. Maybe there are some samples sent and perhaps you even get into a couple of trials. But despite this seemingly forward movement, you’re wondering why things aren’t moving faster. Why aren’t you closing sales?
Without a dedicated marketing plan, you run into three major challenges:
Spreading your message and moving customers through a pipeline moves slowly
Your efforts don’t reach nearly as much of a target audience as they could
Critical members of your buying committee will miss out on important education about your product
Ultimately you’re missing out on critical education steps that would help you sell more (and sell faster).
So what exactly is a marketing plan? It’s really not complicated. I look at the marketing plan as the master set of activities for talking to a market and customers within a given time frame. It looks at your starting point, the tactics you’re going to deploy (what/where/how/how much), and what kind of goals you’re striving for after X number of months.
Why is having a marketing plan better than a scatter shot approach?
Accountability: You’ll notice when individual team members - be it technical, sales, or even marketing - start going out on their own to random events and customer meetings, they actually miss opportunities to connect with customers. Maybe there’s a conference where discussing your product would’ve been a great opportunity. Maybe there was an industry journal featuring your exact topic one month. Maybe they met with one decision-maker in a customer organization, but the other three know nothing about your product. Maybe your customers want to read case studies and opinion pieces without talking to you, but you have nothing available on your website. Having a marketing plan is a forcing function to understand all of the communication channels available in your industry. You can understand the landscape: where will your customers be? What will they be reading? And then holistically plot how to have your content in front of them. That way, the entire cross-functional team can be held accountable to being front and center in a market when needed, and you’ll no longer be on the sidelines wondering why your competitor always gets top billing and you don’t.
Collaboration: While we’re on the topic of one-off approaches…these usually tend to be very individually driven. A scientist might sign up for a talk without telling marketing, or sales might have a customer meeting without bringing in the technical expert. Everyone does their own thing, says their own words, and you end up with a market that’s very confused about what exactly you’re trying to sell them. Having a marketing plan in place gets the team on the same page about tactics from the beginning. It allows each team member (and leadership!) to understand what is happening, what is expected of whom, and when actions should be executed.
Understanding: Are you sure your entire team actually understands a growth goal? You may have revenue targets and growth percentages in mind, but there’s a high probability team members - particularly in technical capacities, who are arguably some of the most important to supporting a sale - have no clue. A marketing plan helps the team understand their role in promoting a product, what’s in and what’s out of scope, and what they’re expected to achieve as a result. Because a marketing plan relates to all stages of a customer’s buying process, it shows a team where they can contribute to helping a customer learn, test, and ultimately accept a product.
A marketing plan isn’t just a spreadsheet outlining what swag you’ll give away or pictures you’ll use in advertisement. They outline what you’ll say to customers, how you’ll say it, and where you’ll say it. In a world where your buyer only spends 5% of the decision process actually talking to you, having a 360 degree view of your approach is the key to closing sales.
