Nblak Studios

When you first look up on software marketing, sometimes it’s easy to confuse it with making sales. That’s okay, especially when you’re so used to popular notions of advertising trying to get people to buy a video game or an operating system (and to an automatic extent, get those things sold).

However, please know that while it’s easy and excusable to confuse the two, it can be very disadvantageous if you keep falling for it. For example, when you outsource a firm for marketing (e.g. lead generation services), the more experienced ones might be confused as to why you’re expecting them to get something sold. Some people go as far as to complain about it in blogs and in worst cases, you read about friction between the sales teams and marketing teams within a particular company. This confusion between sales and marketing can also be even more problematic when paired with the confusion between leads forB2C and B2B.

When you’re in the process of marketing B2B software, that friction is even more evident because the phases of qualifying interested prospects and convincing them to make a deal can be both equal in terms of time and resources required. It’s not like in advertising where the marketing phase is just a prospect seeing an ad speedily leading up to the sales phase where that prospect picks up the product and buys it. No, it’s much slower in B2B.
This is because there can be a fine (albeit easily overlooked) difference between getting someone to buy and sell and simply just calling people’s attention. The former can be more critical in actually gaining profit and putting money into a company’s pocket. However, the latter can serve as a safety filter to draw out only those who are genuinely interested whilst leaving out those who clearly lack interest.  Read more...