Keep your eyes on the prize: Solve your prospects’ urgent problems instead

Marketers often make the mistake of falling in love with shiny new trends. They’re always looking out for what the competition is doing and make decisions based on FOMO.

But the truth is that prospects may not even notice or care. So while there is a place to try out new concepts or add something to your marketing mix, you need to be laser-focused on solving for the thing keeping your prospect up at night.

As Briana Belisle, EVP of Marketing at Field Nation, says, “Problems don’t have to be sexy to be important.” In a recent episode of The Revenue-Driven CMO, she explained her process for honing in on the boring, urgent problems and using them to crystallize her team’s messaging and boost their performance.

Below, we share some of the highlights with you. Let’s jump right in.

Why solve the boring, urgent problems?

As a marketer, your biggest priority should be solving prospects’ problems, even — and especially if — they’re boring.

Urgency should also be top of mind. There’s a difference between solving a prospect or customer’s someday problem and the pain points they’re suffering from right now. So things that cost them time, money, or customers should jump to your highest priority.

Pinpointing your target audience helps you get specific on your messaging and tie it to their biggest problems — even if those don’t seem top of mind in the broader market.

How to narrow your focus

To ground your marketing activity in prospects’ biggest, most urgent problems, go back to what your solution solves better than anybody else. Then ask:

• Who is in urgent need of this solution right now? Are we hitting that audience?
• Are we engaging with them on channels they frequent?
• Are we emphasizing the urgency enough?
• Are we really addressing their pain?
• Is our messaging relevant?

Challenge yourself. Think critically. Speaking to the right audience with the right problem should be your ultimate goal.

Assemble a revenue marketing team

Most marketing teams create ideal customer profiles once and never revisit them.

Revenue marketing teams are constantly trying to identify new customers with the highest propensity to do business with their company at scale. They do the research. They talk to customers and prospects. They observe their behavior. And then they develop enterprise, mid-market, and SMB funnels catered specifically to the boring, urgent problems those audiences have.

They then relay the data they’ve collected to a product marketing team that works on story and offer development.

Briana’s marketing team operates this way: “With our team’s initial research, product marketing can go deeper, getting really crisp on the problem and creating highly relevant content. Our revenue team setup ensures we can support both our buyer and technician community with a solid narrative and corresponding offers they feel are valuable.”

She also supplements her revenue marketing team’s work with a content and design function that can bring field service trends and predictions to life.

Create an all-in ABM campaign

ABM forces you to talk to accounts that have an immediate need for your product.

Once you’ve identified the 25 or so accounts that desperately need your product or services, it’s time to go all-in. Surround them with content, conversations, and opportunity.

It can be awkward to kick this off — especially if some of those accounts are cold. One way to do this is to leverage first-party data to set the macro stage.

For example, Briana’s team knows that field service isn’t necessarily always the most critical component of a company’s overall service delivery program, but it could be the one that’s causing the most pain. So they turn the billions of data points they have into aggregate reports and stats to underscore the need for and value of top-notch field service.

We say, “Here’s what’s happening in field service today. Here are the opportunities that you may be unaware of, and here are the gaps that companies like yours are experiencing. Would you like to have a conversation?“

Our goal from a marketing perspective is to get those conversations with the right folks and then to support our sales partners in having those conversations progress through the sales funnel.

Use the right tools

When it comes to running ABM campaigns, several tools can streamline and optimize the process.

One such tool is your CRM. You collect a wealth of information about your prospects and customers, so why not use it?

Briana says, “Our marketing operations leader is particularly skilled at finding ways to gain more visibility and insight, and I’ve tasked them with sourcing intent-related data we can surface in our ABM efforts.”

Pay close attention to individuals who come to you with smaller, one-off needs as well. Although they may not initially qualify as potential customers, these individuals can still provide a wealth of data that can be used to improve ABM over time.

A Field Nation case study

By capitalizing on boring, urgent problems, Briana has positioned Field Nation as the trusted platform for service providers who want to connect with IT professionals.

She knows that retailers like McDonald’s, Walmart, and Home Depot have an enormous amount of technology powering the customer experience. And these companies need to know that the IT professionals they hire will implement hardware and software quickly and efficiently, helping them maintain the level of service their customers have come to expect.

Right now is also a particularly challenging time for service providers to hire reliable IT talent — there’s a major labor shortage in the space — and Field Nation can fill that gap.

Playing to Field Nation’s strengths as a reliable source of talent, despite macroeconomic factors, has helped Field Nation emerge as the number one player in their industry.

Briana says, “The majority of technicians on Field Nation have over two decades of experience. They’re very, very experienced in field service work, so the focus became making Field Nation the ultimate source for skilled IT work and fusing it with our customers’ need to get skilled talent fast. Our job is to make sure companies trust that we’re able to deliver.”

She continues, “What we’re finding is that companies that traditionally didn’t look to on-demand labor to solve their field service challenges are in need of a different way of doing business. So a lot of the work the marketing team is doing is producing content to highlight that opportunity in the market and giving our BDRs the right materials to bring that idea to market.”

To have a productive sales conversation, all BDRs have to do is connect the dots.

Your prospects’ problems are right in front of you

With the right tools, team, and focus, you can zero in on what your customers really want and need right now and give them the proof that you can deliver. That alone has the power to make your GTM team unstoppable.

To learn more about Field Nation, marketing strategy, and Briana Belisle, listen to her full episode on The Revenue-Driven CMO.

And keep your creative juices flowing with advice from other digital marketing experts at our next monthly Growth Clinic.