PowerBlanket Sales Enablement

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Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. Pam Didner here. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.

Frequent listeners know that I just finished my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement. This book was written from a marketers’ perspective on what we, marketers, can do to enable sales. I believe that marketing elements if used right, can support sales and show impact directly. That’s why I am always looking for examples of how marketing better support sales.

Marketing supporting sales

Here is a great example from James Rogers, Digital Marketing Manager for PowerBlanket.  I met James at MozCon, a search marketing conference in Seattle. PowerBlanket is a small manufacturing company that builds industrial heating blankets, wraps, and custom heating solutions for dozens of industries with hundreds of applications. Powerblanket is a 55-person company based in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Its marketing department is a 2- person team with a few contracted content creators. Obviously, they don’t have a big marketing budget. If they spend $$ on something, the results and ROI must follow. I have supported manufacturing companies before, and I totally get it.

I asked James if PowerBlanket does a lot of events. He said that although they used to, they have seen that the ROI of events and tradeshows have diminished in the past several years. They still recognize that event marketing is a good way to reach out their potential customers but, since the ROI is limited, he and his team modified their event strategy. They still attend events, but it’s usually with his distributors, and with a different goal in mind.

He works from the angle of enabling his distributors to succeed. If the distributors succeed, then Powerblanket will succeed.

The events strategy

For events, he doesn’t necessarily attend fewer of them, he simply attends events where his distributors are sponsors. James works at their booths to help them present his company’s products. Also, he is on-site and talking to potential customers.

Since he knows search and digital marketing well, he helps his distributors optimize their websites with the right keywords. He also creates marketing materials that distributors can use to share or upload to their websites.

Supporting distributors at events, doing content creation and optimizing their websites are ways for him to provide value to his distributors so that they can sell more of his company’s products. He tackles it from both online and offline perspectives. Online – website help, content creation, and search optimization. Off-site – event support.

I asked him if his distributors sell his company’s products exclusively. No, he said, most distributors also sell competitors’ products. His salespeople are joining the conversation and helping the distributors to address questions that they may not know. Because of this joint effort, they are able to close several deals together.

When he told me the story, I was so excited. This is a perfect example of marketing enabling sales. Exactly the point I try to share in my book.

Here is a quick summary

PowerBlanket is scaling back on their event budget, but they instead found a way to maximize the impact of their time and energy by attending events with distributors to help them sell Powerblanket products. The effort they put in spending time at distributor booths ‘rubs off’ on their distributor and enhances their education in Powerblanket solutions. With that effort, James also provides additional assistance to distributor websites, search marketing support and customized content for them, Powerblanket is stretching its marketing budget to increase sales.

A great example of effective sales enablement. Thank you for sharing, James! Great job!!

Do you have any sales enablement examples to share?  Please reach out.
Again, send me your marketing questions or thoughts via Twitter @pamdidner

Be well. Until next time.