Unless you just woke up from a coma, you’ll agree that 2020 was a crazy year.
And with that craziness came a need to transform marketing.
But how do you seamlessly transform one department when every other department is busy transforming, too?
In today’s episode from B2BSMX, Todd Davison, CEO at Demand Frontier, speaks with Lisa Cole, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at FARO Technologies, to discuss the lessons she learned transforming a global enterprise marketing organization to face the challenges of 2020.
The unique challenges FARO faced
Every company had to transform to a certain degree last year.
But FARO perhaps more than most…
As a company focusing on 3D measurement, imaging, and realization technology, FARO essentially sells to 4 key industries:
- Automotive
- Aerospace
- Construction
- Public safety
And if you look at this list, you realize pretty quickly that ¾ of the industries ground to a halt at the beginning of the pandemic.
That left FARO scrambling to transform overnight and shined a light on some of the weaknesses in the organization’s marketing approach that had never really been seen before.
The tactical weaknesses the pandemic exposed
One of the biggest concerns was their reliance on demos, trade shows, face-to-face meetings, and conferences in order to court potential buyers.
It’s a situation many — if not most — B2B organizations found themselves in when the pandemic began transforming the economy.
And the only response was to transform themselves.
“If you find yourself in a situation where an individual tactic no longer works — you can’t meet face to face, at a trade show, or conference — it immediately exposes a complete lack of emphasis on this always-on digital engine.”
Like most companies, FARO had to pivot to virtual equivalents of all these engagement channels to meet the challenge of a global pandemic. And fortunately, their product — 3D imaging — helped them do this at record pace.
But in the process, it became clear that, despite the advanced technology the company traded in, they were not using digital to the fullest extent.
By looking at competitors who were also throwing their money at digital marketing, Lisa and her team realized that these competitors were, in reality, just increasing their spend.
With organization-wide transformation happening, they needed not only to transform quickly, but also to do so economically.
Since the business strategy wasn’t just changing for marketing, it was affecting every department — and that shined a light on potential weaknesses in interdepartmental communication.
If every department was to transform, they all needed to be in sync.
Not only for the sake of tackling the challenge together, but for garnering buy-in for the transformation that needed to happen — it’s a lot easier to build a business case and secure funding for new initiatives if you have strategic alliances within the company.
How technology helps illuminate the path forward
With so many new avenues being explored at once, metrics become even more important than ever before.
If you are trying myriad new things, you need to tease out what is working.
As such, it was imperative that FARO cleaned up their data, integrated it into their infrastructure, and used it effectively.
“Technology’s the underpinning that can certainly help us transform the way that we work.”
Likewise, their infrastructure itself needed to change to accommodate the restructuring of the business — that way, they could build a demand waterfall in a new way and build the reports to demonstrate marketing’s impact in a meaningful way.
This is a #FlipMyFunnel podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.
