Couple of months ago, just before Singapore Circuit Breaker was announced, I sat down with Jason Gorud, Group Vice President: IDC & IDG Global Solutions, to discuss what B2B Tech Marketers should do in this time of the global pandemic. 

I asked Jason to comment on some of the burning questions on B2B Tech Marketer’s mind,

1. What should B2B Tech marketers do now?
2. How can marketing help sales?
3. Should companies cut marketing budget?
   
   It’s about sixteen minutes long, but worth every second.

Key Highlights from the interview:

From B2B tech marketeer’s perspective, I think about the only piece of advice that is mildly self-evident, but exceptionally relevant is, use this time to develop competencies around data. The ability to understand your customer, the ability to generate a single view of who your customer is, across your CRM, marketing automation systems, your customer data platform now, is far more critical than ever before.

Far too many of the customers that we see are overly reliant on old metrics, and the tactics used to achieve those old metrics. And the one that springs to mind obviously would be bums on seats.

Face-to-face events for the foreseeable future are no longer viable. The desire to default into anything virtual without the implicit understanding that virtual will never replace face-to-face is a path that you should not take as a marketer. When we talk about the challenges that face marketers in the COVID era, what we’re talking about is a traditional channel to market disappearing – face-to-face events; and the knee-jerk reaction to replace it with something virtual, thinking that it’s an apple to apple replacement. That is not the case.

The best possible approach an organization can take, in terms of enabling its sales force, creating that handshake between marketing and sales is through ABM.

The firms that survive through economic downturns, recessions and prosper are not the firms that cut marketing out altogether. Certain activities can be reduced. There are specific buckets of spend around thought leadership and perhaps even brand awareness that can go away now. Doing nothing or doing even less than nothing is not a formula for success.

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