Growth hacking PLM sales

Enterprise sales is one of the most conservative things in sales eco-system. Despite many changes that happened in our life for the last 10-15 years, this particular experience doesn’t change much. You probably heard best recommendation about how to stop “PLM sales” calling you – buy something from these guys. To sell multimillion dollar PLM deal to large manufacturing OEM is an art performance by a group of people mostly combined from a diversely skilled sales people with heavy support of management, development and… marketing. Let speak about last one – marketing. Do we really need one

Engineering.com article – The role of marketing in complex solution sales brings a perspective on how modern digital marketing can help to sell complex PLM solutions. In a nutshell, I can summarize it as a creation of a credible story that can help sales people to make a sale. Few passages below can give you a feeling about what is that.

Some prospects that the sales team has not reached may identify themselves by reading thought leadership stories and realizing a PLM system may be what they needMarketing creates awareness among the decision makers who may not have heard of your solution. Marketing creates the content that helps prospects understand the value of a new solution. Thought leadership is a big part of the marketing mix for many engineering solution vendors.  They routinely send speakers to conferences, for example, to demonstrate their command of technical challenges.  These presentations translate very well to digital marketing, either as sponsored posts in trusted publications or as webinar presentations.

Nothing bad with creating of credible story. For a long time marketing was about how to amplify messages from vendor to customer. So, you may think about new digital technologies as a set of new tools that came to help traditional marketing to amplify their voices.

Here is thing – this wrong and old approach. To use modern content marketing with a traditional sales approach is like to put a lipstick on a pig. Guess what… it is still a pig. Few years ago, Andrew Chen wrote in his blog back 2012 – Growth Hacker is a new VP Marketing. If you never heard about growth hacking, navigate here to read more. The following passage can give you some perspective:

This isn’t just a single role – the entire marketing team is being disrupted. Rather than a VP of Marketing with a bunch of non-technical marketers reporting to them, instead growth hackers are engineers leading teams of engineers. The process of integrating and optimizing your product to a big platform requires a blurring of lines between marketing, product, and engineering, so that they work together to make the product market itself. Projects like email deliverability, page-load times, and Facebook sign-in are no longer technical or design decisions – instead they are offensive weapons to win in the market.

It made me think that new marketing approach can disrupt existing PLM paradigm of selling and implementing PLM products. Most of PLM products today are first sold and then implemented by customers. This process requires a lot of effort from customers to grasp around the PLM idea and thinking how to apply it in an organization. Growth hacking can change it. Few years ago, I posted – How to ditch old PLM marketing and friend engineers. It could be part of growth hacking for PLM sales.

What is my conclusion? Growth hacking can be an important moment for PLM software. By disrupting a traditional marketing and sales roles, growth hacking can change the core paradigm of PLM products – to change the way companies are doing business. Instead of that, the culture of growth hacking will introduce a practice of learning from customers and discovering opportunities to sell products solving customer problems. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of sattva at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing a digital network-based platform that manages product data and connects manufacturers, construction companies, and their supply chain networks. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.