There’s a saying many of us have heard, most likely from a line in a movie when two notorious people are first introduced, “Your reputation precedes you.” While in those cases it refers to personal reputation, the same sentiment applies in business: Your reputation is your brand. And when you’re in sales, you certainly hope the reputation that precedes your initial contact with a prospect is positive, predisposing that potential customer to be amenable to a conversation.
Brand development and marketing are essential in today’s sales environment, where OEM and B2B buyers research products and companies online before proactively reaching out to a sales contact. The proliferation of online content has shifted buying-cycle dynamics, placing greater power in the hands of customers and prospects. Without a solid brand and reputation, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to be in the zone of consideration when buyers are actively researching and evaluating products and services. A WARC study, The Multiplier Effect 2025, highlighted the importance of existing brand awareness and its impact on the ultimate purchasing decisions of B2B buyers.
Leveraging Emotion and Logic To Get to “Yes”
The sales process is challenging enough on its own. It’s even more difficult if you don’t have a strong brand to open doors and marketing programs that can support preselling efforts and accelerate an already long sales cycle. To support sales by expediting the process and driving conversion, you need to leverage both components of branding: emotional and rational. These two elements also align with how most buyers make a final decision about whom they will work with: Do they like and trust the company and the salesperson, and does the product or service deliver the functional benefits, specifications and outcomes they are looking for? Most of the time, you need a “yes” to both questions to win the day.
Marketing and marketing communications can help buyers say “yes” through a variety of strategies, primarily by using data in storytelling. Being congenial, empathetic, a good listener, competent and ethical are certainly important for forming an emotional connection and initiating a relationship. Eventually, credibility, trust and proof of performance are required to further solidify a long-term customer relationship. In a B2B environment, the emotional connection alone is insufficient to complete a transaction. Proof of performance is key in a more technical buying atmosphere, and this is where strategically using data comes into play.
Data as a Differentiator
At Crafted, we understand that OEMs and B2B enterprises face distinct challenges when developing go-to-market strategies, especially when selling into highly specialized markets. While consumer brands can focus on broad awareness and emotional appeal, B2B companies must adapt to diverse sales and marketing environments that also account for technical credibility, collaborative relationships across the value chain, multiple decision-makers and buying groups, and longer sales cycles. Buyer behavior has evolved and continues to shift, mainly driven by the ubiquity of the internet and the nearly instant availability of vast amounts of information. This shift has created a digital-first, data-driven buyer journey, with the added expectation of proof before commitment.
A Formula for Success
In OEM and B2B landscapes, products must meet exacting standards set by buyers who demand proven reliability and long-term support. Closely aligning marketing with engineering, sales and product teams can create and deliver messaging that resonates with highly informed buyers. Combined, these factors mandate an exceptionally well thought-out and precisely formulated marketing plan that addresses buyer diversity, brand recognition, trust, the need for highly customized and consistent messaging, and technical education and distributor support. This plan consequently requires moving from one-off, opportunistic marketing efforts to more holistic, centralized and prescriptive strategic execution driven by data, measurable by performance and quickly adaptable based on actionable, real-time learning.
Creating Content That Converts
This data becomes the fuel powering a revenue-generating marketing engine and supporting the development of content that converts. Achieving this requires examining every potential data source within an organization, ranging from online customer portals, net promoter score (NPS) surveys, sales enablement platforms, and service scheduling tools to VAR and distributor management platforms, social media contacts, primary market research, and more. That’s the intelligence we need to power data-driven marketing, enabling advanced segmentation, personalization, intent identification, buyer journey mapping and pain-point discovery. The result is a full-funnel marketing strategy that equips sales teams to engage buyers effectively at every stage of the journey — especially the decision stage.