Erik Hawkins, Field Marketing Director (North America), GTT
“We created opportunities for our partners to participate in specific webinars, and we also worked together to create solution briefs, additional webinars, and even lunch-and-learn events.”
“Going forward, as we move to a more integrated field marketing model, we will develop live events along with virtual and digital tactics that effectively keep prospects moving through the funnel.”
GTT is a challenger brand in the enterprise networking market, and we compete against the former monopolies and major incumbents. Our main goal is to gain market share, and our field marketing program is dedicated to supporting this goal. In our Americas Division, we live by the mantra that
everyone in the organization is either in sales or sales support roles. My field marketing team is closely aligned with our enterprise sales teams, and our goal is to generate appointments and pipeline opportunities with new prospects.
We focused on targeted, smaller, intimate local events as one of our main field marketing tactics. We used an account-based marketing (ABM) approach and have predetermined target prospects in each of our markets. We found smaller, targeted events to be the most productive for generating follow-up
appointments and set measurable objectives for every event.
Our target prospects are IT leaders, decision makers, and influencers. Leaders, C suite executives, and other decision makers and influencers in our space have seen just about every type of tactic and event from our competitors. So, creating unique experiences to break through the clutter, engage our target prospects, and get them out of their offices has been a main focus. To accomplish our aim, we used a combination of our own intimate, high-end hospitality and networking events and partnering with and sponsoring third-party technology and chief information officer events.
In addition to generating new prospect appointments and pipelines, another field marketing goal was pipeline acceleration. Software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) is one of the hottest topics in enterprise networking today, and GTT is a leading SD-WAN provider. SD-WAN and other enterprise networking services can involve long buying and sales cycles driven by sales negotiation as well as
the technical specifications and network design of dozens or even hundreds of customer sites. So, in addition to prospect-focused field marketing, we also typically focused on intimate and unique experiences that targeted midlevel to bottom-of-the-funnel “prospect nurture” pipeline acceleration.
This is an excerpt from 15 Experts on Reimagining Field Marketing. The eBook was generously sponsored by Mighty Guides.
