For a memorable example, look no further than men’s grooming brand Old Spice. In 2006, the 80-year-old company saw upstart Axe beginning to steal market share. Confident in its product, Old Spice quickly identified its message as the problem. Within months, Old Spice had retooled its message on the back of hilariously memorable ads and YouTube videos. The company’s blunt message and creative delivery resonated with consumers, who increased purchases of a product they’d previously overlooked.

Turning back to B2B, we believe the same lesson applies: taking creative risks for a stronger message can pay off. Let’s take a page from the Old Spice playbook and better connect with our prospects and customers.

Don’t reinvent the wheel… just what you call it

Many of us enter our office doors each day confident in our product or service. But there’s always the risk of losing market share – even to an inferior product. A new message allows you to retool your marketing arsenal while keeping your product intact.

A good message must explain what you do and why you do it better than anyone else; ideally it will also build an emotional connection with your target market. The message communicates who you are and what your values are, which becomes even more important when you consider this: according to Harvard Business Review, 64 percent of people cite shared values as the main reason they have a relationship with a brand.

A new message can help you build that emotional connection without pressing the reset button on product initiatives. But before you pick up the pen, research is called for.

Look at your message from the outside-in

Market research and persona analysis go a long way in ensuring you’re on the right track with your message. Even then, you have to be sure your message works. Take the draft and ask some current customers, and a few key prospects, what they think of it. It’s tempting to skip this step – especially if time and budget are limited – but there are ways to make the testing process quick and efficient.

For a message to truly resonate, it needs to be authentic and it needs to connect. And there’s no way to know this without testing it with prospects. Even if you love it, if your prospects don’t, it’s back to the drawing board.

Take back the monopoly on creativity

As a B2B marketer, it’s easy to latch onto the same buzzwords time and again. Agility… security… flexibility, and so on. All too often the result is a safe, predictable, stale message that falls flat – especially compared to the creativity we see in B2C.

Door-to-door marketing is a canvassing technique that is generally used for sales, marketing, advertising, or campaigning, in which the person or persons walk from the door of one house to the door of another, trying to sell or advertise a product or service to the general public or gather information. People who use this sales approach are often called traveling salesmen, or the archaic name drummer, to “drum up” business. This technique is also sometimes called direct sales. A variant of this involves cold calling first, when another sales representative attempts to gain agreement that a salesperson should visit.

With the realization of telephone “Do Not Call” lists it is becoming increasingly more difficult to connect with consumers and business people. An emerging trend is the deployment of very professional, highly skilled door-to-door canvassers to drive product sales and brand awareness.

Coordinating, training and motivating these teams to produce results are at the very core of Fulcrum’s proven capabilities. Fulcrum has the knowledge and experience required to implement these programs, such as best days and times to canvass, who will sell the most product; male, female, young or mature and what geographics and demographics respond best to door-to-door marketing. Put Fulcrum’s experience to work for you and avoid the costly mistakes of trying to manage these programs in-house.

Hire and Train Door-to-Door Marketing Team

If you’re in charge of hiring people, that typically means that you’ve found success in Door To Door Marketing yourself. You know what it takes to be great, but now you’re stuck with an entirely new problem. How do you find others who will be just as good (if not better) and will stick around and grow into important influencers invested in the long term growth of the company? A great D2D sales company is a great recruiting company. So what does that greatness look like?

First off, you need to realize that you’re not going to hire a superstar every time. If you think you have found one, be careful. It’s not hard for someone to seem golden during one interview and you don’t want to be fooled.

Even if you think the candidate does have a lot of great experience working in the field for other companies, you have to realize that success doesn’t always translate. What worked for them at previous companies probably won’t work as well for you. In fact, their success will probably make them stubborn; after all, what reason do they have to follow your approach when they’ve figured out their own?

It’s also possible that the rep’s previous company might have had much better-developed training and selling systems than you do, and that system was the key reason they killed it. If you’re not developing a competitive system, what does that communicate about your company? The more dialed-in you are about a rep’s success, the more likely you are to attract and keep strong performers.