Episode 3: How to Win in the B2B World by Building Powerful Relationships with Your Prospects

Steve sits down with Riaz Kanani, Founder and CEO of Radiate B2B, to dive deep into his best strategies for winning in the world of B2B.

Riaz has over 20 years of experience in advertising and marketing technology, has previously sat on the DMA Email Marketing Council, and taught at the Institute of Digital and Direct Marketing.

Listen in as Riaz kicks off the conversation sharing his firm’s “unplanned” foray into the U.S. construction industry. After warming up a shortlisted group of potential accounts in advance via company-target advertising, a two-month campaign resulted in half a dozen conversations across the third biggest construction firm in North America. Effectively, Riaz and his team had built a platform that can target an entire headquarters and, later, retailers, with advertising.

He then shares how B2B firms, big or small, can take advantage of ABM to target mature companies. Riaz also explains how larger organizations can distinguish themselves through building landing pages that drastically cut down the time and effort needed to get that first conversation with a potential customer.

Finally, Riaz offers his best practices for conducting nurture campaigns and discusses the importance of forging a strong relationship with prospects as early as possible, beyond simply building an overall brand.

Key Topics:

• There are two factors that justify the use of ABM for targeting mature companies: 1) If you’re a smaller company, you’ll have an easier time getting close to the customer and understand their buying journey; 2) If you’re a larger company ($25,000 contract values), you do need sales and marketing teams talking with each other; otherwise, your AMB program will never get out of the gate.
• Advertising is a great way to identify companies that are open to having a conversation by virtue of being brand-led. Over a quarter, typically 20-30% of companies you target will reach out.
• What is important is not so much the personalization of a landing page as it is about building relevant content on that page which appeals to your target customer. This automates the process of getting information to the right person, so that they are motivated to have a conversation with you.
• The sales and marketing world has changed so much in the past few years. If you solely rely on prospects filling out a form on your website, you will lose to those organizations who have taken the extra step to build a relationship with their leads.

Connect with Riaz Kanani on LinkedIn.