Finding Marketing Success by Building Strong Relationships with Sales

Creating a successful marketing strategy can be challenging, especially in the B2B space. Unlike B2C, your company isn’t selling everyday items to the average consumer. Instead, you're selling who your company is and how your products and services can help your target audience.  

At Unistrut Midwest, we've found that the best way to achieve that is by sharing our internal knowledge with the public and establishing ourselves as a source of information for our clients.  

Creating a Marketing Strategy  

When I joined the Unistrut Midwest team, marketing was more of a side project than a department. The team was busy on customer projects and simply hadn't had the time to prioritize anything more than a simple informational website and some paid ads. As a result, the true value of Unistrut Midwest was not being communicated to potential clients.  

At the time, our organization was known for having the most inventory in stock of anyone on the market. While that was and is true, Unistrut Midwest is more than just a distributor. The company was growing quickly with large projects in the pipeline. These projects involved our team from start to finish, helping to design and engineer the solution before supplying the parts, prefabricating structures, and installing the solution. We are an end-to-end partner for our clients, however, many potential clients still thought of us as only a distributor.  

My goal as the new marketing expert at Unistrut Midwest was to more clearly communicate to our clients the full range of our services and our ability to be a turnkey solution provider. The challenge there was that, as a new member of the team, I didn't know the ins and outs of the company. So, I turned to the experts: the sales team.  

Building Relationships 

A key marketing tenet that I follow is that it's more important to know where to find an answer than to have all of them yourself. Something that I learned quickly about the sales team at Unistrut Midwest is that everyone is an expert in something and that together they had the answer to any question I could possibly think of.  

But salespeople have their own jobs to do, customers to take care of, and deals to close. Finding time to answer the new guy's questions isn't always a priority. I knew I would have to get them on board with helping me bring our marketing message to our audience.  

Luckily, Unistrut Midwest has a company culture that really encourages teamwork. Overall, we are encouraged to see a bigger future for the company as a whole as opposed to just personal goals and monthly deadlines. This mindset was crucial because it allowed the sales team to understand that by sharing their expertise with marketing, they were helping the company move forward.  

While our team is located across different cities, I do my best to establish good working relationships with everyone via calls and emails. We also have sales conferences to bring the whole team together, see everyone face to face, and create those in-person bonds throughout the team. These are great opportunities for me to tell people what I do for Unistrut Midwest, how I do it, and why I need their help. By filling them in on the big picture, the sales team has a better idea of what information I need, and they're happy to share it.  

With the help of the sales team, we have created a marketing strategy that communicates to our clients that we are a full-service solution provider who can assist at every step of the project. Our website and blog (with the help of Walder Studio) have become valuable sources of information for our clients and potential clients, helping them to better understand both the products we work with and the services we provide. We have even turned some of that expertise into digital animations (with the help of PinkSquare) that help clients visualize our solutions.  

Highlighting our team's expertise has been crucial to developing our marketing strategy and voice. By helping our audience find the information they’re looking for, we have established ourselves as a leader in the industry and have effectively solved even more client challenges. 

Do you have a construction project that could use the help of an expert team? Contact us to find out what we can do for you.