Whether you’re applying lead-to-revenue, account-based marketing (ABM), product-, partner-, community-led growth strategies or a combination thereof, a practical yet overlooked step is getting the company talent and resources more involved.

Today, revenue and customer generation must be a team sport. It requires contributions and expertise from across the company. Beyond marketing, sales and customer success, your product, finance, operations and executive teams are invaluable partners. 

This article tackles frequently discussed revenue strategies and what marketing leaders can do to work with colleagues to generate customer revenue more efficiently and effectively. 

Not all revenue strategies and tactics work

The B2B buying and selling process is not how it used to be. Buyer self-serve preference, larger buying committees, longer cycles with more complexity and scrutiny — all this limits B2B sellers’ access to buyers. This reality hamstrings sellers’ productivity and crushes their spirits. 

Throw in a volatile, uncertain macroeconomic environment and company panic sets in. This chaotic mix generates immediate reactions that, despite good intentions, are distractions, not solutions. 

First, we frequently misdiagnose this challenge as a “sales and marketing alignment” problem. Marketing generates demand, and sales follow-up on leads is the typical alignment recipe. We all know how that has worked — it does not scale. 

Second, we turn to the latest and greatest technology as the holy grail to making revenue flow through marketing. A few come to mind — marketing automation, intent, ABM and today, product-led growth and community-led selling. 

These can be incredibly impactful strategies but won’t fully address the challenge. In addition, they don’t always align with how solutions are bought, sold and adopted by companies today. 

Third, too much burden and hope rely singularly on demand and digital marketing teams to drive the customer journey and lifecycle. If we just generate enough of the right leads at the right accounts, we can make it work, right?

Yet, this pressure quickly leads to bad habits we all recognize, such as:

• Stuffing as many leads into the process as possible to feed hungry sales pros and BDRs.
• Buying leads to hit artificial top-of-funnel and sales lead quotas.
• Buying media to drive traffic to the website, hoping they will convert immediately.
• Using sales target account “wish lists” without regard to a buyer or account fit, propensity, or readiness.

Locking arms with your colleagues to better deliver customers and revenue

Our prospects and customers working at B2B organizations are fighting to stay above water in today’s market. The pace of change is relentless. The number of options is staggering. And the sheer volume of daily high-pressure decisions that need to be made is overwhelming. 

Understanding this reality for B2B-considered purchases is our guiding light in changing how, as a company, we approach revenue generation. Creating customers and growing revenue is an always-on team sport. It requires company-wide, active participation from multiple functions in the organization. 

Dig deeper: The state of intent data in 2023 and beyond

As marketing leaders, if we are not working with other functional leaders to define and activate this effort, we are missing a vital ingredient in revenue generation. CMOs can lead the charge, starting with building trusted relationships with functional leaders. Together, leaders can define roles and accountability working each type of account — strategic, commercial, growth or however the organization segments customers and markets. 

Here is how a $1.4 billion software enterprise is identifying and integrating the functions to work with sales and marketing to identify, engage, advance, win and expand customer relationships and revenue.  

Executives as sponsors and advocates for your best prospects and highest growth opportunity customers

Execs have business understanding, visibility and control of budgets, people and strategy.

These allow them to quickly activate resources where needed to increase win rates and expansion opportunities with prospect and customer engagements.

Product teams assigned to and aligned with target accounts to collaborate and co-create value and instill confidence

Product pros are now working with specific prospects and customers to co-develop and customize solutions.

This real-world research and development (R&D) is a good strategy for increasing deal size and revenue. And an additional benefit is the R&D effort is creating new, better products available to its customer base. 

Ops and data teams provide account intelligence and share data proactively with prospects and customers

Thanks to the new mandate for the operations and data teams, the enterprise is finally using the treasure trove of data sitting in internal and external systems to listen, understand and provide more timely engagement and information to the front-line teams. 

In addition, ops and data teams can share product and market data that customers can use to improve operational efficiency. The company is productizing and selling this valuable data, creating an additional revenue source. 

Finance groups prioritize resources, structure contracts and deliver ROI metrics back to customers

Finance was labeled a risk-averse team with a “deal prevention” reputation. But now, finance is offered as a resource earlier in the selling and customer journey at key accounts. 

The finance leaders have developed a “swarm team” providing a service to work with prospects and customers to co-develop ROI models from the investment in the software.   

Re-thinking marketing’s role in driving revenue and relationships

As marketing leaders, we can’t always control everything that happens in other departments. However, we can define collective and individual marketing roles and the role each plays in contributing to revenue and customer creation and expansion. 

What the enterprise software company highlighted above figured out was not to put all the burden on the demand and digital marketers to be the sole source of large volumes of leads to drive demand in the revenue generation process.

For example, product marketing was previously measured on metrics like the annual number of product launches and successfully completing sales training and enablement. Product marketing is now focused on and rewarded for revenue generated from product experiences, adoption and expansion of new capabilities and solutions.

Corporate marketing is now aligned with revenue metrics focused on and rewarded for not just bolstering brand awareness or increasing the number of social posts or web traffic generated from social media. 

Rather, corporate marketing is aimed and bonused on achieving account revenue targets. This approach encourages creativity by corporate marketing pros proactively seeking out prospects and customers to infuse into the company communications and programs. 

Revenue generation is a team sport

As we see at the enterprise software company highlighted in this article, it takes creativity and alignment with your best prospects and customers’ buying process, not just internal sales and marketing.

By integrating and involving key company roles in the revenue generation process, companies can make significant strides.

To be clear, this does not lessen the demand or the digital marketing team’s role or accountability for directly impacting revenue. It just increases the odds of the company and marketing delivering better results.

The post How to make revenue generation a company-wide effort appeared first on MarTech.

That’s a whole bundle of opportunities stuck in your funnel, clogging your pipeline and baffling your stakeholders.  

But there are things B2B marketers can do to help sales teams and their prospects overcome purchase indecision and win more customers faster. For proper context, and crafting the right strategies and tactics, let’s frame the challenge and the opportunity based on why and how business professionals and their organizations buy. 

B2B buyers are dealing with FOMU, not FOMO

Authors Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna analyzed more than 2.5 million sales-customer engagements for their recently released book, “The JOLT Effect,” and discovered that:

• 56% of the customers who expressed the intent to purchase were lost due to customer indecision. 
• Only 44% were lost due to sticking with the status quo — what the prospect has been doing or using. 

Making the case to move off the status quo has been a popular sales and marketing strategy for several years. When a deal got stuck, status quo-busting was done primarily through “fear of missing out” (FOMO) tactics, including:

• Reconvincing the buying committee of the benefits of the solution by demonstrating ROI.
• Using fear, uncertainty and doubt tactics, emphasizing the cost of inaction.
• The xx% discount urgency play: “This deal is only good for this quarter.”

These tried-and-true sales and marketing tactics and all the tools and content created to bust the status quo are no longer working. Why? The authors emphasize that human beings — even successful business and technology leaders — are wired to avoid loss. 

The fear of messing up (FOMU) is a major barrier for B2B buyers to pull the trigger on a purchase, no matter how compelling. Inaction is guiltless and perceived as less harmful than acting and making a mistake. 

“The pandemic and volatile economy are certainly factors, but not the underlying cause of what’s stalling a large percentage of business-to-business purchases and deals companies were confident they had closed-won,” said Dixon. “Upon further discovery, we found what is holding companies and their decision makers back is the ‘fear of failure,’ something often missed by sales teams.”

Customers change in seconds, markets shift in minutes and business threats and opportunities appear daily. Betting on a technology, platform or service provider in a world where the pace of change is relentless has many organizations and their decision-makers stuck. 

Dig deeper: Scarcity marketing: Does it still work?

How marketing can help overcome customer FOMU in the sales + purchase process

The “JOLT” thinking outlined in Dixon and McKenna’s book provides a strong foundation for marketing to lock arms with sales, product, ops and customer success colleagues to overcome prospects’ FOMU. 

To do this, the GTM team must have a strategy and playbook on how to help their customers tackle the status quo (i.e., why change now) and then focus on customer indecision (i.e., how to change now). 

Let’s break down the framework and outline prescriptive strategies and tactics marketing teams can use to work alongside their colleagues. 

J: Judging the situation to create the right game plan for each customer

First, as marketers, we need to know the pipeline and the best opportunities as well as our sales colleagues. As equal owners of revenue generation, marketers should work closely with sales and other major account resources to qualify based not just on their ability to buy but their “ability to decide.”

This is where your 1-to-1 and 1-to-few account-based marketing (ABM) strategies can have a true impact. In your ABM efforts, marketing can create tools and forums to get customers to talk about their fear of failure. Think therapy and organizing and breaking down information in your communications, webinars, small roundtable or meet-up you organize in the field. 

Over time using data, you will find patterns in the types of customer indecision, so you can more rapidly anticipate and put strategies into practice at the point of the prospect. Starting with hands-on work to test and learn the best plays is the right move for now. Efficiency and automation can come later.

O: Offering recommendations to simplify options for overwhelmed customers 

The market is filled with noise. Many buyers and buying committees suffer from being overwhelmed by too many choices. Our natural reaction as marketers to convince somebody is to throw more options their way. 

For example, integrations and configurations can easily overwhelm the decision team. A smart approach is to help them choose a path and a solution. Marketing can work with product, sales and ops colleagues to build and simplify packages based on their use case(s). 

We can also increase our sales enablement effort to help structure and equip salespeople to guide the customer to proven, popular choices that have worked for other customers. Note that more case studies are not enough. 

Dig deeper: Buying group marketing: The next evolution of ABM

L: Limiting exploration addresses customer information overload

The best sellers and marketers know that the more information the prospect consumes, the lower the probability they will find the answers they seek. We found that when teams continue to indulge the customer’s requests for additional information throughout the sale, win rates are only in the 16% range. 

This is our natural tendency: create and send more content, shoot over more emails, etc. Stop! This may work early on in initial engagement but rarely works later as they move toward a decision.

Today, we have the data and tools to identify and take action when a prospect or customer is putting off a decision and why. One strategy is to limit the information by, for example, curating a recommended reading list or compiling a simple tool kit. This limits the overwhelming amount of info and demonstrates you get their needs and that you are a valued partner who will be there through the relationship lifecycle. 

T: Taking risks off the table by instilling buyer confidence and creating a safety net 

De-risking versus simply discounting price is another smart strategy to combat customer indecision. For example, marketing can work with sales,  customer success and finance to:

• Craft a mutual value map, identifying key areas of ownership and accountable milestones and metrics.
• Co-create solutions and implementation roadmaps for the organization to bolster confidence with defined steps. 
• Adapt contracts that include services, incentives, and/or safety-net clauses to take FOMU points off the table. 

Marketing’s opportunity to shine by focusing on all stages of customer generation

Marketing can play a significant role in the full customer lifecycle by infusing customer indecision-busting strategies into their demand-to-revenue approach. The focus on defeating customer indecision also pushes us marketers to stop obsessing about generating mounds of new leads and trying to score and qualify only for sales to ignore them. 

The most successful marketing teams don’t stay in their swim lane. Instead, as part of GTM and account-based strategies, marketers can capitalize on this revenue generation need to impact all stages of creating and expanding customer relationships and revenue. 

Congratulations to Dixon and McKenna for their eye-opening research and instructive book for B2B sales, marketing and revenue professionals. 

The post How B2B marketers can help sales overcome customer indecision appeared first on MarTech.

We can use this moment to improve the value of content while it is top of mind for all stakeholders. It’s also a great time to demonstrate how our audience’s content consumption evolves. Here are three ways marketing leaders can leverage the AI-generated content craze to bolster content marketing’s impact.

1. Double down on content exclusively for your audience and buyers

This may sound obvious, but often our content efforts are focused on the traditional definition of our ideal customer profile. At a time when B2B pros are bombarded with so much noise, our content must be more personalized and creative than ever.  

Devin Reed, founder of The Reeder, advocates knowing and embodying these 10 questions to “insanely know your audience better than anybody else” before scoping and crafting content. 

• What motivates them more than money?
• What do they fear?
• What makes them angry more than getting cut off on the freeway?
• What beliefs do they hold that don’t make sense to anyone else? (The weirder the better)
• What seasonal changes affect their business?
• What’s a successful day look like
• What current trends are affecting their business and/or livelihood?
• How have they been burned in the past?
• Who do they aspire to be?
• What’s the exact language they use to describe all the above?

2. Deliver multi-media content that gives your audience the control and context they crave

Develop, tailor and deliver content in the format and the channels our audiences rely on. This includes creating experiences that surprise and delight them. Think of:

• Video content that allows people to experience the topic or solution.
• Interactive tools that allow pros to explore on their own terms.
• Self-guided learning via audio and visual educational content. 

Go beyond one-dimensional content such as standard blogs, canned webinars and white papers, which tend to clog our sales and nurture process instead of inspiring buyers along their journey.

Giving control and context also means we summarize and deliver upfront what our audience can expect when they invest their time in our content and brand. This respectful touch in your content marketing effort should include such trust-building tactics as: 

• What’s inside the content: Easy on the exaggeration!
• What they’ll learn: Be real.
• How much time they’ll need to invest to get value from the content: This keeps the creators and the audience in sync.
• Offers for deeper reading or additional assets: Curate for them. 

This is what creating “experiences” and “connections” for our audience and buyers means, whether your content is machine-driven or human-generated.

3. Curate other people’s content in your GTM

Much like the AI mindset generating specific content for your GTM, you can use content that is valuable to your audience and already exists in your market. To be clear, I’m not saying to steal or plagiarize content or copy. Instead, you should:

• Ask permission.
• Properly give credit and source.
• Link to it as a resource.
• Put a summary on the front end.
• Record a short video highlighting takeaways or commentary, adding your take and perspective on the topic. 

You get the idea. The first generation of AI-created content shows us that you don’t always have to create fresh, brand-new content. If excellent content exists, ask to use it, source it, and link to it. Even if it’s your competitors, call it out and then layer on your value, what’s missing and what to do with it (using Reed’s thoughtful advice noted above).

This is efficiency and effectiveness. Improving on existing content says everything about your brand and company — that you value their time, you are part of the community and you are confident in your solution.  

Take advantage of this unique moment to up your content marketing game

Welcome to the AI content revolution. For the curious, confident and brave, this is a time to up our game and contributions to the business with content. 

As you experiment with AI tools to produce content, you can identify where, when and how to deliver both AI-driven informational content and the creative, move-the-needle content required to set your company and solutions apart.

Ride the AI wave to level up your content marketing strategy. Show your execs and team how to create real value and meaningful experiences. 

The post 3 ways to rethink content’s role in your B2B GTM strategy appeared first on MarTech.

From corner office strategy sessions to product development sprint huddles, business and tech leaders are exploring how to build, transform and add a PLG strategy to their business. 

So, why PLG now? 

The team at OpenView Partners, a venture capital firm, makes this thoughtful observation about the rise and appeal of PLG as a GTM strategy:

“Software has become a fundamental utility powering our working lives — just like water, electricity, the internet and mobile broadband. We used to ‘own’ and then ‘rent'”‘ software; now we simply use it.”

The Age of Connected Work

B2B market dynamics are also a driving factor:

• B2B buyer expectations have changed. User-driven control and self-service align with the way many professionals want to buy and use software and apps.
• Traditional SaaS buyer-seller relationships are no longer productive. The SaaS sales and marketing landscape has shifted. Buyers are not engaging as their balance sheet and tech closet are full of half-used subscriptions.
• Capital models have evolved. The “growth at all costs” mindset where capital was cheap is in the rear-view mirror. Profitability, efficiency and precision are today’s expectations for both vendors and the organizations they sell to. 

PLG enthusiasm is spreading across software providers, while interest in new ways to buy and use software intrigues business and tech professionals.

As a result, software GTM teams are taking a fresh look at how and what they develop, how they sell and distribute and how they charge and account for their software. 

Dig deeper: 5 strategies to become a more impactful, buyer-driven marketing org

What is PLG?

PLG, which stands for product-led growth, is a business methodology and a go-to-market strategy for developing, marketing, selling and using software.

An organization that gets PLG right will have its user/customer acquisition, expansion, conversion, retention and even development priorities driven primarily by customer usage and the product.

The goal is for a product to deliver value so easily and quickly revenue is generated by more efficiently jumpstarting and expanding customer relationships.

Datadog, Confluent, Zoom, Airtable, Calendly and Slack are examples of PLG companies at various levels of maturity and adoption.

Today, thousands of companies are pivoting or exploring PLG GTM models, with many more PLG entrepreneurs readying new solutions for the market.  

3 important PLG GTM lessons so far 

Let’s explore a few important lessons software companies are learning about applying GTM methods in PLG’s first generation. 

1. Not every company has the right product or right customer target for a PLG strategy

Despite the enthusiasm of investors and executives, not all products are ideal or ready to deliver the value of product-led strategies. The success of PLG enterprises (a few noted above) may make it look like the product sells itself, but that’s not true. 

Thinking a company can just create a product in a vacuum and it will go viral is unrealistic. In addition, software companies that try to take an existing product and slap on a PLG GTM model without the proper features or support to deliver value through the product’s lifetime are set up for failure.

“One of the most important lessons with PLG is that you can be very successful in getting pros and users signed up to test and use a product, only to realize the product was not ready for self-serve, easy to use, or is ready to expand beyond a single use case,” shares Manuel Rietzsch, B2B demand marketing executive. 

Like any good GTM strategy, PLG can be effective when the product is designed and developed for specific use cases and the entire company understands how and by whom the product is purchased, supported, managed and expanded. 

Experienced GTM leaders advise PLG will not be successful if the product:

• Is complicated to use or application requires technical know-how and complex integrations.
• Requires hands-on help and is not self-serve, especially at customer onboarding.
• Has a non-intuitive user interface (UI) and customer experience (CX).
• Is not supported by a well-defined and documented strategy to market, sell and expand usage. 

2. Developing a comprehensive conversion program is a must

Incorporating a PLG approach in the first motion of your GTM strategy has become an established method of filling the pipeline for big-name companies like Zoom, Slack and Stripe.

PLG builds this incredible base of buyers, but converting these prospects into paying customers requires a full customer lifecycle GTM strategy.

As Rietzsch puts it, “You can spend so much, time, money and resource to acquire new customers, then turn over to customer success or sales only to realize you’re not fully prepared to guide customers, expand use cases and develop deeper relationships required to increase ARR and move to company-wide usage.”

Some of the techniques that PLG veterans talk about to convert initial users into paying customers and accounts include:

• Thoughtful usage paywalls inside the product to access more capabilities and features by more people in the organization.
• On-demand interactive demos to experience new or full capabilities that drive interest, demand and expansion. 
• Offering timely smart trials to unlock and expand beyond a single user or use case.
• An ability to share the app with colleagues to either try the product or to collaborate with others using it in new ways. 

Done right, these PLG core methods are more natural in a customer’s journey.

A series of relentless marketing-driven subscription or upgrade offers or automated sales outreaches, which have defined the traditional SaaS GTM era, are simply not as effective.

3. Cross-functional and departmental collaboration is key to PLG’s success

PLG is great for stoking buyers’ interest and showing a product’s capabilities. However, once buyers are in, you need data, processes and defined roles to convert usage into annual recurring revenue (ARR). To make PLG scale, you also need key organizational roles to be in sync. 

The role of sales is among the biggest changes many experienced PLG pros cite.

“There are two common mistakes: involving sales and not involving sales. Recognize that PLG will be seen as disruptive to your sales team, so partner with them from the start. But resist the temptation to put a revenue target on PLG prematurely. Your first priority needs to be delivering value to future buyers – and that value should be great enough to cause a little discomfort in your organization,” guides Joe Chernov, CMO at Pendo.io. 

To provide a flavor, here is a quick snapshot of a few of the changes for marketing, sales, customer success and product teams with a PLG GTM approach. 

Marketing

Marketing responsibilities must be well defined at every stage of the user-customer-account relationships. For example, messaging must be contextual and tailored for every stage of user and customer interaction. 

Case in point, webpages must speak to users in the beginning to appeal to individuals and “jobs to be done” mindset. As a user looks to drive more adoption, messaging and outreach must focus on “customer” value and the value to their organization as a whole. 

This is the right message, right time that marketers always strive for. In the PLG model, personalized, precision communications are table stakes. 

Sales

The traditional SaaS model was to hire a software sales pro for every $1M+ in SaaS ARR you want to generate. In the PLG model, sales get involved primarily once users begin adoption. 

Account-based models complement PLG but at the right time of gaining user adoption and expansion. Also, successful enterprise PLG models can rely on a “sales-assist” motion to turn users into customer accounts. 

The sales-assist motion helps build trust through a consultative approach, not just selling more software during a critical time when your product is establishing value. 

Customer success/support

This area has the most nuance depending on your product type and applications. The most important move here is to have ample self-service support and the right level of customer success and service to match the user, customer and account stages and needs. 

For example, the initial engagement may be all self-serve. With deeper adoption, customer support resources and/or customer success likely will be required.  

Product

An often overlooked reality is that the product team must play a lead role in the GTM strategy, not a back-office support function. 

Product pros rely on usage data, interaction within the UI and listening to the user base to evolve the tools into products and products into solutions with an eye toward customer use cases and changing needs. 

Dig deeper: How to align B2B sales and marketing teams

PLG is a company-wide commitment

What’s clear is the traditional SaaS buyer-seller model is tired and broken. PLG is rapidly rising as a strong GTM strategy. 

However, as many GTM teams are experiencing this is not as simple as choosing to implement a new model with a few product features and some tweaks to sales and marketing. 

Rather, PLG requires a company-wide commitment and a well-thought-out, user- and customer-driven approach to developing, selling and delivering products.

The post Product-led growth: 3 important lessons from the front line appeared first on MarTech.

To help B2B marketing, sales and customer success teams power through the current and foreseeable choppy macroeconomic environment, this article dives into core strategies and tactics to turn GTM efforts into results. This counsel has been gathered from tens of conversations over the past 60 days with GTM leaders on what teams are doing to optimize performance in uncertain times. 

Dig deeper: In this economy CMOs need to spend more on training, not tech

1. Stop chasing leads, double down on customers and top opportunities

First, GTM teams need to stop generating and chasing random leads, accounts and markets with little to no familiarity with your company or solutions. 

Rather, prioritize existing customers to expand relationships. Work to win over prospects and accounts that have been active with your company and in your pipeline. 

Yes, this approach should always be a priority. But right now, there is little choice where buyers, sellers and all players involved in the process are skittish.

2. Surround and co-create with your current customers

The best and most important revenue opportunity already is in your world — your customer base. 

This is not just traditional customer marketing or listening to the voice of the customer (always essential), but a more purposeful, strategic effort to surround your customers and to help them navigate uncertain times. 

Start with tapping into the customer data and account intelligence you have accumulated to understand your customers, their current state and their priorities.

To get in front of customers, leaders can organize an orchestrated tour of customers where executive sponsors, solutions experts and small teams are formed in your company to focus on specific accounts. 

These dedicated tiger teams are deployed to sit down with and listen to customers’ needs, challenges and plans for the road ahead. They are accountable for:

• Identifying client needs.
• Determining if, how and when to act.
• Rallying the right resources.
• Delivering on client requirements. 

An example deliverable of this high-touch collaboration is using product and engineering know-how to tweak solutions required to help the customer be more efficient or effective. 

This customer co-creation approach not only helps keep customers and become a preferred provider, it also sets up the opportunity to increase revenue and deepen customer relationships. 

3. Review your prospect opportunity pipeline over the past 18 months

With the same vigor and use of data you applied across connecting with customers, GTM teams should prioritize accounts where interest, engagement and past conversations are active or have gone dormant. 

This prospect effort starts with revenue operations, data science, sales and marketing teams coming together to identify the accounts and then develop a strategy to win their business. 

Apply creative thinking and innovative tactics. Be ready to be flexible with customer priorities. Agility can be applied to how customers purchase. Use your solution or add specific resources as part of your relationship agreement to help the company achieve immediate ROI and payback in tight times. 

The focus on top account opportunities outlined above is relentless. It requires disciplined, regular sessions (weekly and fortnightly, for example) to review opportunities, roadblocks and ways to creatively break through. 

Marketing and sales can orchestrate specific roles and plays, much like what GTM teams implement in account-based 1-to-1 motions where resources are maniacally concentrated on a few accounts. 

Operations teams are on the ground monitoring and ensuring key account and buying committee data is used and available to all the players on the team. 

With resources shifted to this more precision GTM approach, marketing can also add always-on programs to listen to customers and top prospect account and buyer activities using intent and first- and third-party data. 

Dig deeper: How ABM strategies can accelerate marketing and sales velocity

4. Strengthen your channel and partner ecosystems

To bring additional resources and trusted expertise to both customers and prospects, organizations can turn to partners with specific expertise to provide strategy and execution support. 

Top partners have relationships with prospects and customers and are often in a strong position to:

• Understand how to get more out of your solution.
• Combine your offerings with other providers to develop pin-point solutions.
• Deliver where companies have gaps. 

In addition, partners are under the same type of urgency to prioritize and look for ways to add more value to existing and new customers. 

Just like the customer engagement strategy outlined earlier, now is the time to prioritize and sit down with like-minded partners to build GTM strategies and co-create solutions to meet specific prospects and customer requirements. 

Many teams are shifting sales and marketing resources to concentrate on forming deeper partnerships and solutions. In the spirit of trust and collaboration partnerships, sharing customer data with your partners to mine for opportunities and craft smarter solutions should be part of the effort.

5. Invest in and utilize AI and buyer and account intelligence to identify and prioritize your GTM focus

Today, GTM teams can tap into useful buyer and account data and AI-driven models available in sales, marketing and revenue tools, platforms and data subscriptions.

For those GTM teams that have already made the investment, now is the time to double down on fully utilizing intelligence in your GTM strategy, outreach and account and buyer identification. If you don’t have the experience or expertise of using data, now is the time to make it happen. 

Let’s start with the GTM teams with access to AI models and account intelligence. This can come from optimizing ABM tools, intent engines or solutions that apply AI models to identify account propensity, priority, fit and timing. 

No longer can we skim the surface. Rather, we must dig in to:

• Maximize the use of our first and third-party data.
• Aggregate and mine intent signals across all the sources and tools we are using.
• Activate this intelligence in-market to identify existing customer and best prospect opportunities. 

For those teams just getting started, it’s a steep climb, no doubt. The positive side is this work will be foundational to creating a high-performing customer and revenue generation machine going forward. 

If you need help and hands to accelerate your effort, both individual consultants and strategic firms can be brought in to provide deep expertise to put intent, propensity models and other forms of buyer and account intelligence to work. 

Don’t stand still, act now

Buckle in. Nobody really knows what we are in for in the coming year. However, history has proven if we focus, remain flexible and act swiftly, the likelihood of success increases. 

The good news is GTM leaders have access to much more intelligence and experience than we’ve had in the past. Now is the time to put it to work.

The post 5 strategies B2B marketing and sales teams can bank on as markets tighten appeared first on MarTech.

With our increasing reliance on intent data and its broadening definition, now is a good time to assess the state of intent and plan on what might be ahead.

I tapped into a group of trusted B2B marketers to gain perspective on all things intent. In this article, we will: 

• Sprinkle in knowledge gained from a recent roundtable with B2B marketing leaders on the data, tools and processes used in sales and marketing account-based go-to-market (GTM) motions. 
• Get a broad view from three savvy data and intent executives who have seen a few things in building Michelin-rated worthy GTM strategies. 

Together, we can capture a snapshot of intent’s current state, understand the challenges and opportunities and preview what should be on the menu going forward. 

What is the number one value proposition of intent in today’s GTM efforts? 

Marketing is playing a larger, more proactive role in the buying-selling process. With B2B buyers and buying teams spending more time doing their research online and through peer networks, sales has less access to buyers. 

This big shift has thrust intent into the spotlight to identify and prioritize the right accounts to reach out to based on account and buyer behavior and, in turn, catapulting outbound sales and outreach as today’s number one intent use case. 

Mike Burton, co-founder and head of commercial sales at intent industry pioneer Bombora, puts it this way:

“Because sales sit so close to revenue, intent data can galvanize action and increase sales productivity. This sales use case has a compound effect making other GTM functions more impactful including demand gen, SDRs and field marketers.”

Orchestrated timing between sales and marketing still remains a significant challenge, largely because of the data, tech and process silos that exist across departments.

Intent data is being relied on to integrate GTM motions and define roles across functions helping sales and marketing stay in sync and to identify the best opportunity accounts at the right time. 

Kerry Cunningham, director of research at revenue technology leader 6Sense, shares:

“Most buyers are researching your solution and don’t know your company or solution exists. Here’s the reality — you lose 100% of the deals you don’t compete for. The goal is to never miss an opportunity when your solution can solve a customer problem or fill a need.

Intent plays an essential role in exposing account timing and need to prioritize account and buyer engagement.”

Dig deeper: How to leverage intent and engagement in the buying cycle

What can GTM leaders do now to get more value from intent signals?

Sales and marketing teams are not leveraging intent to its full value or potential yet. 

Beyond account identification and prioritization (timing), more GTM teams are starting to apply intent to identify and align buyer and account needs with contextual content and messaging. 

David Crane, VP of portfolio marketing and marketing chief of staff at intent aggregator Intentsify, says:

“If we boil down all the use cases across all the GTM functions that leverage intent data, the common denominator is efficiency.

“Rather than marketers, BDRs, sales pros and customer success reps having to spend valuable time and effort to understand buyers’ specific needs and pains, they can gain insights directly from intent signals.

“Done right, GTM teams can quickly supply buyers with the information they want (e.g., content, creative assets, talk tracks) when they need it.”

As more GTM teams adopt account-based tools and more effectively use their websites to implement and manage ABM programs, intent’s value is increasing. 

More than a quarter of an ABM platform’s value is the intent data it generates to use in sales and marketing activities, according to Gartner.

When intent powers ABM tools and an organization’s webpages and these components are used together, marketers highlight the increased intelligence they can put to work resulting in higher conversions to sales opportunity and revenue. 

Cunningham emphatically states:

“The most valuable signals we don’t pay attention to are on your website. Only 3% of visitors fill out forms, so relying on this tactic is futile. Rather, deanonymizing traffic and using intent is the key to unlocking immediate opportunity. GTM teams need to harvest this info otherwise, you will waste all that marketing and sales time and effort.”

Dig deeper: Using intent as a unit of B2B campaign measurement

Where can intent play the biggest role in the immediate future?

With the changing B2B buying-selling landscape, experts highlight that to get more value out of intent data investment, we must:

• Focus on where and how to apply intent during the GTM process.
• Collapse data and functional silos that leave big gaps. 

Bombora’s Burton cites two areas in his work across more than 650 customers: 

“The first is using intent for strategic planning. This means understanding what is happening across different cohorts of your total available market (TAM) and where your target accounts are in their buying stages.

The second is augmentation of first-party anonymous data, especially as third-party data becomes scarcer. We see leading organizations creating a first-party data mart and augmenting it with intent data. Having this info appended allows for precision targeting at scale.”

Crane weighs in on what he is seeing across a rapidly growing Intentsify customer base: 

“First, GTM teams and the data science and ops teams that support them, need to get better about baking intent data into their GTM strategies from the start. Today, intent data is treated more like an after-market component that individual roles use but don’t always share across functions.

Secondly, GTM teams need to improve how they convert intent signals into actionable insights as well as their processes for quickly acting on those insights while the data is still relevant. These challenges are likely a consequence of difficulty in effectively leveraging multiple intent data sources, which we see more and more B2B teams focused on solving.”

Intent as marketing’s essential ingredient in GTM strategy

Intent data is seeing an unprecedented rate of adoption as B2B GTM teams focus on:

• Efficiency and productivity internally.
• Customer experience and engagement with buyers and accounts externally.

While outbound sales are the top use case today for intent as noted by our experts, we’re seeing marketing teams be the driver of activation. As Cunningham succinctly summarizes:

“Marketing’s job is to ensure organizations never miss out on an opportunity to compete for a deal; this is how marketing becomes indispensable!”

The post The state of intent data in 2023 and beyond appeared first on MarTech.

To predictably generate revenue and customers in today’s digital-first world, marketing and GTM leaders are rethinking and reformulating demand strategies, tactics and mindsets that drive and contribute to pipeline and revenue. 

A demand generation makeover is required because business relationships and buyer-solutions alignment are not working when a demand transaction, automation or quantity approach is applied. Yet, too many of us are still focused on capturing lead volumes to hit quotas on websites, through forms, at events and on social platforms — even before we have delivered value to audiences, prospects and customers. 

This is not an “MQL is dead!” rally cry. Instead, the imperative is to let go of ingrained unhealthy habits starting with:

• The buyer/lead/audience “capture” vs. “generate” demand mindset.
• The attribution obsession for proving and gaining credit vs. measurement to increase performance and engagement. 
• Chasing sales-marketing alignment by serving sales vs. an integrated effort that delights buyers and accounts.

The “lead capture” mindset creeps back in, even for organizations using models such as frictionless forms, artificial intelligence (AI)- and machine learning-powered propensity models and buyer and account intelligence.

For example, AI identifies accounts and intent shows in-market account activity and buyer signals, yet we still use automated email and three-cadence BDR scripts to engage buyers. These myopic approaches are holding back organizations from generating real demand from best fit, opportunity customers and accounts.

Let’s break down and, in turn, transform the three bad habits outlined above into new disciplines to improve our ability to identify, engage, delight and convert prospects into customers consistently. 

Dump the ‘lead capture’ mentality and turn up the engagement-first approach

Capture: take into one’s possession or control by force.

Similar words and phrases: take prisoner, seize, apprehend, catch.

Oxford Dictionary

To get to the root cause of the “capture” mindset, we would need a cross between an anthropologist and a therapist. But in simple terms, it starts with B2B marketing viewing sales as their customer. Marketing has been so focused on serving sales, “marketing-sales alignment” and generating volumes of leads to make sales pros productive that today’s demand effort has stalled. 

To ditch this mindset, the best-performing marketing teams are partnering with sales with a joint focus on customer preferences, account needs, pains, requirements and how to integrate their efforts. 

Also contributing to the demand challenge is marketing automation. As marketing’s central system of record, it is still being unleashed to generate, store and score leads captured on forms through third-party syndication, webinars and email blasts. The goal? To hit marketing qualified lead (MQL) quotas. 

Capturing is vital in the process but starting with a “capture first, sort later” mindset is not buyer-focused. Nor does it allow for an engaging experience as professionals research solutions and options. Too often, we develop our processes and programs to capture before we add value to the prospective customers to assist in what they need and are looking for. 

Here’s the good news. Based on observations from a handful of conferences this month, we see a shift to deploying more engagement-focused methods. We witnessed examples of:

• Intelligence-informed timely outreach.
• Using customer-preferred channels with buyer-identified content options.
• A focus on increasing engagement with in-market and engaged accounts. 

All a clear move away from lead capture and random phone calls. While not perfect, we are seeing more teams leave capture island and move toward timelier buyer and buying engagement strategies in motion across marketing and sales. 

Dig deeper: How to leverage intent and engagement in the buying cycle

Stop chasing attribution: Obsess over customer experience and engagement metrics 

A lead capture-centric approach is made worse due to an overfocus on attribution. B2B buying and selling processes are complex and dynamic. They involve multiple people tied to the business model and transformational company change initiatives. Thus, it does not make sense to associate every tactic, campaign and touchpoint with every dollar spent. This chase is a never-ending game of trying to get credit for a lead versus measuring investment more holistically for impact.

To be clear, B2B marketing must be accountable for marketing spend return on investment (ROI). High-performing teams start with outcomes — revenue and pipeline generated — and work back to understand all touchpoints and channels they have engaged with over a specific time period. 

This effort requires analytics across the entire buyer’s journey and sales and marketing efforts to understand buyer and account behaviors. Predictable demand results also need to apply buyer and account intelligence to present the right information and options to meet the needs of audiences/buyers/visitors/attendees. 

Dig deeper: How to leverage intent and engagement in the buying cycle

Dump sales-marketing alignment obsession and elevate your go-to-market strategy across the organization

Today, we are constantly trying to align sales and marketing around strategies, campaigns or plays. Awkwardly, we ask marketing pros to take on sales roles (account research, cold calling, follow-up, discovery meetings and qualification) and sales pros to become marketers (run campaigns, craft engaging communications and be social media pros). 

Because both teams are using technology and data, they often build separate tech stacks, workflows, processes and data models. The unintentional result is an onslaught of communications and outreach that turns off buyers and squashes the buying groups’ experience. 

Marketing-sales alignment is thinking too small. Successful B2B teams are developing GTM strategies that connect sales, marketing, customer success, product and operations to meet buyers and accounts wherever they are in their research and buying journey. 

Sales, marketing and customer operations should be unified into a single team with integrated workflows, connected systems and buyer and account intelligence. This unified GTM strategy aligns resources internally to deliver agility and scale, keeping up with the dynamic nature of how companies and buying teams make decisions. This cross-functional thinking is essential for today’s buying-selling financial agreement — software and services subscriptions that live in the cloud and are up for renewal frequently. 

Dig deeper: Create a B2B GTM strategy that buyers, execs and revenue teams love

Moving on from the ‘lead capture’ mindset

No excuses. No pacifiers. It is time to let go of capturing leads. This demand shift requires marketing to move on from outdated lead-centric strategies and tactics. On the contrary, B2B organizations should focus on buyer and account engagement. 

To make this happen, B2B organizations — not just sales and marketing — must develop and embrace a more holistic GTM approach powered by integrated, buyer- and account-centric strategies, roles, data and systems. 

No doubt, this shift takes courage, grit and change management. With the progress we are seeing, I have more confidence in the demand marketing profession than ever.

The post From capturing leads to generating demand: Breaking down B2B marketing’s pivot appeared first on MarTech.

While there is a long list of gaps, we have identified three debilitating B2B “disconnects” to focus on.

Disconnect 1: Fragmented marketing, sales and customer tactics versus unified GTM strategies

GTM strategies miss the mark because of:

• Misalignment with markets and customers.
• Lack of executive ownership.
• A siloed, departmental approach. 

This disconnect challenge is made more complicated when every organization, region, team or business unit is doing their own thing in how they go to market. While it is essential to tailor to each market (and customer), a core framework must be in place, driven by the executive team through and across all business functions.

Dig deeper: How to overcome data silos and fragmentation

Disconnect 2: Internal-focused sales and marketing process versus buyer-driven journeys

Yes, there is only one process we should focus on — the customer process. However, the reality is we are working hard to integrate — not just align — our sales and marketing strategies, approach and organization with the way our customers want to do business. Mastering the elusive buyer + account journey is the key to effective revenue and customer generation. 

Disconnect 3: Siloed people, process, data and technology versus company-wide integration

We’re automating and spending more on tech than ever. The average enterprise has 270 different technology + data subscriptions. That’s complexity. With self-guided business buyer preferences, now is the time to take inventory, streamline our tech and infuse our people, process and technology with our GTM and customer journeys. 

4 tips for addressing B2B disconnects

The three disconnects above are integral to driving revenue, creating deeper customer relationships and operating efficiently and profitably. These three business imperatives are intertwined, which is why we work on all three as a connected initiative. While this article is as much therapy and inspiration as practical advice, the data spells out the business costs when these disconnects are ignored.

• Lost productivity is estimated to cost U.S. businesses $1.8 trillion every single year due to disconnected teams, processes and data.
• Bad customer experiences cost U.S. businesses $75 billion a year. 
• 55% of organizations work in silos, creating misalignment both internally and externally.

To get connected and make buyer connections, let’s dive in on where and how to address the three debilitating B2B disconnects. 

1. Review, refresh and optimize your GTM strategy continuously

The first place to start is to evaluate your full GTM strategy, with a spotlight on how your target markets operate and your customers buy. Owned and led by CXOs, this always-on GTM work is not a marketing thing, a sales thing or a strategy team thing. Instead, develop dedicated, cross-functional teams to continuously collect and then operationalize customer intelligence into:

• The products you provide.
• The market segments you prioritize.
• The best channels to market. 

Regularly address your GTM strategy components to become part of your culture and the way your teams work and think. Important questions to tackle include:

• What are the big market shifts, trends and drivers creating pain and/or opportunities for the customers you serve?
• What does your ideal customers’ business look like in the next 12-18 months and what role(s) can your solutions/company play?
• How we can better partner and co-create with our customers and partner ecosystem to generate more value for all parties?
• How do we simplify and articulate our company position, the value of our solutions and focus on the use cases we solve?

2. Acknowledge and address the disintermediation of B2B sellers in today’s buyer’s journey

We’ve been studying and seeing the decreasing productivity of B2B sales teams for the last decade. Why? B2B buyers want and expect control of their process and how they want to buy and do business. 

Only 17% of the B2B buying process is spent with sales professionals today. Buyers have gone digital, sales have not. It’s clear that sellers (and company leaders) overvalue an in-person, high-touch customer experience and undervalue online experiences important to today’s buyers.

This is not a call to get rid of salespeople but to rethink the strategy, roles and needs. Let’s take an integrated approach incorporating all company functions. 

To contribute to addressing the sales gap, marketing is trying to play a more active role. But marketing-driven customer generation doesn’t work if marketing is more noise and another silo in the buyers’ journey. Generating loads of content to serve as a honey trap to capture leads just to throw over the wall to sales is not the answer. Nor is simply switching to an account-based GTM strategy to sell and market to specific accounts. Too many times this account-based approach ends up being your sales teams’ wish list of customers and sales and marketing executed on your timing, not your customers. 

What we are starting to see is a digital-human team, leveraging technology and data not just for automation, but for more intelligent engagement. To identify the optimal combination of human and self-serve options, roles are being redefined and cross-functional teams are being formed. 

For example, infusing sales, marketing and customer success pros to capture and action what’s happening with customers across channels.

Another powerful ingredient is putting artificial intelligence (AI), tech and buyer and account intelligence to work to learn more about buyers while, at the same time, giving B2B buyers the control they expect. This unified effort empowers all parties to have more proactive and consultative conversations with their customers.

Dig deeper: What is account-based marketing or ABM and why are B2B marketers so bullish on it?

3. Assess every customer touchpoint to optimize buyer and customer experience and action

As part of a refreshed GTM strategy and an optimization of sales and marketing for digital buying, the next area of focus is to map your best opportunity accounts and buyer committee journeys. 

The “journey” concept is thrown around so often that it has become cliché. Don’t let that hold you back from doing the work. Understanding and building for self-directed buyer and account journeys are the best path forward.

Commit to studying and dissecting — from a customer’s point of view — how your ideal customers and target accounts actually kick-start initiatives and make decisions on both solutions and vendors. Dissection starts with a deep dive to identify the full buying committee and capture committee members’ individual and collective needs, pains and opportunities. These needs will become the most significant focus of our GTM effort, not our products. 

Once your journey-focused approach is underway, we can then use buyer and account intelligence, performance data and feedback loops to understand where to deploy human touch and where we can automate outreach and processes. In all cases, we are looking to infuse “humanness” into every communications touchpoint. 

Empathy, understanding and emotional intelligence become the default over cold calls, spam emails and uninspiring product info. This empowers our teams to develop creative, engaging, multi-sensory communications that feed buyer and account journeys. 

4. Obliterate organizational, tech, data and process silos by integrating with customer journeys

With the GTM set and customer journeys scoped, now we need to ensure our internal processes, team and data can inform and deliver what’s needed to create dynamic customer experiences with predictable results.

The most efficient approach is to have a centralized, cross-functional team to overlay the journey with systems, processes and data models to understand both the gaps and overlapping areas. We also need to understand the external buyer channels and resources we need to monitor and integrate with in order to draw insights and activate buyer and account engagement along our customers’ journeys. 

To eliminate internal buyer, account and customer silos, here are the fundamentals to address:

• Cross-functional organization design and workflows to deliver GTM and customer journeys.
• Technology and tools to automate manual tasks, dazzle customers and provide insights.
• Data models and dashboards to get insights and intelligence into the hands of your teams.

Dig deeper: 3 strategies to create better customer journeys across any channel

Getting connected to make deeper customer connections

Business and revenue are not about sales-marketing alignment or about being aligned with our customers. Today, these noble efforts are not enough. 

Rather, to compete in a digital-first world, our GTM, account and buyer journeys and enabling infrastructure strategy must be connected to win the hearts, minds and budgets of our most coveted customers. 

If we do not address and tackle the big three disconnects head on, we are severely limiting our teams and our potential. 

The post 4 ways to address B2B disconnects and drive customer relationships and revenue appeared first on MarTech.

There’s a positioning battle going on across B2B sales, customer, data, and marketing technology providers. Aiming to organize these diverse B2B solutions into a mega-category — we’ll call it “revenue technology” — the race is on to develop more modern, effective systems to generate customers and manage revenue. And while no one system can do it all, it’s clear a big payoff is awaiting the providers who can get it right in this next B2B era. 

Grab your popcorn and beverage of choice. This should be fun to watch. Well, not so much for the marketing, customer, sales, and operations execs who have to pick the right horse(s) to compete in today’s market while also placing bets on the future. 

Today’s B2B marketing and sales tools are showing their age

Before we get into who is competing in this race, let’s talk about the “why” behind the positioning battle underway for the minds, hearts, and wallets of the B2B go-to-market (GTM) teams. 

For the past handful of years, B2B teams have been trying to transition from generating volumes of leads to focusing on the buyer and account engagement that more effectively, efficiently, and predictably generates revenue and relationships.

Developed well over a decade ago, marketing automation platforms (MAPs) have been the system to help marketers generate leads to support sales. CRM has been the default system to manage customers and customer data, primarily with the lens of an internal sales process and management. A range of ABM tools have supported account engagement.

MAPs and CRMs, while workhorses, haven’t been entirely effective in enabling marketing and sales teams to execute the transition. And it’s even more true today as the buying-selling environment is quickly evolving, becoming far more dynamic and complex. 

The B2B buyer-seller relationship makeover needs something different

Today, sales has less direct access to the B2B buyers and accounts they must identify, qualify, and win as customers. In fact, according to Gartner, B2B pros spend only 17% of their buying journey with vendor sales pros. And this is combined time — not just with the chosen vendor! This all translates into Marketing’s, Customer Success,’ and other functions’ requirement to play a larger, more initiative-taking role in the revenue- and customer-generation effort. Generating leads and supporting sales is not enough with today’s reality. 

This means our customer, marketing, and sales systems of record the last decade-plus must do more. Consequently, there’s a huge opportunity for evolved types of systems (and set of providers) to play a bigger role. Many providers see these market shifts as an opportunity to broaden their product visions. Rather than developing systems for singular functions, they’re gearing up to become the B2B revenue system of record. In reality, and as we have learned in other technology markets, it will take five to seven years (or more) to develop technology that can support the evolving buyer- and account-centric approaches that today’s buyers demand. But the flag is up and the race is on. 

Sizing Up the Race for the Next B2B Revenue Platform

The technology and platform options for B2B sales, marketing and customer pros are diverse. And as stated earlier no one solution can deliver what’s required today, nor in the future. But gaining an understanding of the different options and where they fit, both today and leaning forward, is essential for delivering on our customer- and revenue-generation mission. 

Let’s take a look at the platforms vying for top billing in today’s B2B revenue stack. Note, this is a not a deep vendor-to-vendor comparison but a look across the B2B landscape to gain a sense of perspective. And we recognize more categories can be added to this positioning list. The mission here is to simply provide context of what’s happening in the market.

Lastly, this underlines the critical need to create and fund talent in the area of revenue and data operations (marketing, sales and customer success) — talent that can align technology, systems, data and processes with your revenue and business goals. 

• Marketing Automation (MA) platforms. This large group of providers, who once were the center of B2B marketing stacks and demand gen marketing activity, have decreased in popularity. This is largely because their legacy lead-centric architecture doesn’t align well with the full customer lifecycle and prevailing account-centric requirements. In addition, with the acquisition of the major MA platforms by enterprise software players, namely Salesforce, Oracle, and Adobe, innovation has not kept pace with today’s rapidly changing needs discussed earlier in this article. Primary user = marketing. 
• Account-Based Marketing (ABM) platforms. Because of the popularity of ABM, this category of providers is broad and deep. Vendors that play a role in developing and executing account-based strategies and campaigns are categorized into this group; in other words, most ABM solutions support only some individual elements of ABM strategies and, therefore, must be cobbled together with other systems and platforms. The providers include the predictive and intent solutions required for account-based GTM strategies, the original account-based advertising solutions providers, and the hundreds of providers that deliver account-based demand generation tools, campaigns, and data. Primary user = marketing with sales access. 
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms. With deep roots in managing and tracking sales organizations and creating a single view of the customer, CRM is the sales system used by every B2B team today. Today, we have all-in-one CRM platforms (sales, marketing, customer success/service, data clouds, etc.) and industry-specific platforms that focus on the requirements and nuances of vertical markets. But like MAPs, those major players have consolidated the CRM category, hindering the innovation required to keep up with evolving strategies. This has opened the door and requirements for additional systems to play a role in revenue and customer generation. Primary user = sales with marketing and customer success. 
• Sales Engagement platforms. Focused on solving the huge sales productivity challenge, sales engagement platforms work alongside existing CRM and email systems to streamline the ways sales communicates with prospects (email to voice to social, for example). The value and promise of these platforms are increased sales productivity via streamlined process, tracking and analysis to deliver more impact at a time when sales has less and less access to buyers. Primary user = sales. 
• Customer Success (Management) platforms. These applications, with roots in the SaaS/subscription business environment, help customer success teams to manage existing customer relationships. The software relies on pulling data from other systems like email, CRM, live chat, product utilization, and customer satisfaction-scoring systems to understand a customer’s current status, adoption, and likelihood to churn or renew their agreement. The rise of these platforms is directly correlated to the need to increase customer stickiness and lifetime value (LTV). Primary user = customer success.
• Customer Data (CDP) platforms.  According to the CDP Institute (yes, there is such a thing and it’s pretty informative), CDPs are “packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems…It centralizes customer data from all sources and then makes this data available to other systems for marketing campaigns, customer service and all customer experience initiatives.” Primary users = marketing and data teams. 
• Demand platforms. This is also a broad category, primarily made up of media, marketing services and demand gen providers who are developing technology to migrate from a services-based offering to a SaaS-based subscription model. They are offering some mix of SaaS-based tools, analytics, and data with the promise of making third-party demand gen more efficient, more effective, and more predictable. Primary user = marketing. 
• Data and Intelligence platforms. There are hundreds of data providers, from sophisticated multi-billion organizations to niche solutions offering access to B2B data. These providers typically offer access to data sets, contact and account records for enhancement, and predictive and intent data with the promise of making data science teams more valuable, sales and marketing more productive, and customer and prospect campaigns more intelligent. Many of these providers also compile data from multiple sources and turn it into intelligence because most teams don’t have the time, resources, or talents in house. Primary users = marketing, sales, and data teams. 

Dig deeper: The B2B customer journey is set on a digital track

Understand the field before betting on the winner

2023 is just around the corner and the platform positioning and road maps are expanding rapidly. As you lock in your 2023 GTM strategies and business goals, now is the perfect time to take inventory of your systems and processes, identify your needs and gaps and understand the revenue technology landscape.

The good news is there are both incumbent and emerging options. The challenge in this positioning battle is understanding what’s right for your business, what’s real, and what’s next.

The post Get your front row seat for the race to be the B2B revenue platform of record appeared first on MarTech.

This is no small task, especially when B2B buyers, barraged by untimely automated messages, random cold calls and lackluster outreach from both sales and marketing, are opting out of vendor conversations. B2B marketing expert Tony Zambito calls this the “Great Buyer Resignation.” This phenomenon has progressively intensified over the last five years and is both a challenge and an opportunity for B2B marketers.

A reality check

Let’s tackle the B2B challenge first by capturing today’s reality. The B2B buying process has gone primarily digital; most B2B sellers and teams have not. Sales has limited access to prospects and customers. We know the facts. According to Gartner, more than two-thirds of the buying process is complete before buyers engage directly with a brand rep. Only 17% of the B2B buying process time is spent with a salesperson across all suppliers. And this scenario is only accelerating as digital native professionals become influencers and decision-makers.

To contribute to revenue and customer generation, B2B marketers are cranking out “leads” to help sales generate revenue. Marketers are often using legacy marketing automation-centric practices developed during the first wave of marketing technology and lead generation. The teams are pushing out random campaigns in a world where prospects and buyers already know what’s coming when they download a white paper or attend a webinar. Cringe — here come the automated nurture and cadenced phone calls.

Compounding the challenge, prospect and customer outreach happens in silos via one-off campaigns, isolated channels and focused functional teams. And data is being used to justify spending rather than apply buyer and account intelligence to deliver more timely information, better buyer engagement experiences, and more creative outreach.

The change and challenge revenue teams face are real.

Marketing’s impact opportunity in the buyer and customer generation lifecycle

With change comes opportunities for B2B marketers who understand, embrace and develop a smarter approach to identify, engage and delight buyers. And it should be emphasized that B2B teams and marketers have begun their transformation as marketing works across their entire company to play a more proactive role in all revenue and customer generation aspects.

From talking with progressive B2B go-to-market (GTM) leaders, here are strategies to stop mass buyer resignation, advance your career and have a much more significant impact on revenue growth.

1. Drive the shift from push to pull marketing

We often focus our effort on pushing email, cranking out business development representative calls, blasting ads and putting up forms to engage B2B pros. The breakthrough strategies are built around moving from pushing stuff at prospects and customers to pulling buyers through their process. Give them control. Provide options and let them guide their own journey, based on their needs, with value-added assistance. This is an art and science to master. This playbook and skill-set is, and will continue to be, highly coveted.

2. Focus on moments we create, not just those touchpoints we capture

“Capture” is primarily what we do today in the form of paid media engagement to generate leads, drive web traffic and white paper downloads, and sponsor events to scan and swipe badges. The best marketers are flipping this model and asking, “How can we create moments for the buyer?”

Moment creation requires a proactive, experiential mindset putting ourselves in the shoes of our most coveted buyers and accounts. Breakthrough moments and experiences can be done through:

• Product-led growth (PLG).
• Interactive and self-guided applications and videos.
• Personalized workshops for prospective buying teams at your target accounts.
• Curated web pages that feature topical and popular content aligning with themes your buyer has been researching or engaging with over the last quarter.

It doesn’t have to be over complicated.

3. Master the full customer lifecycle

Today’s market realities and company growth mandates underline the need to build GTM models, strategies and resources around the entire customer lifecycle. With today’s prevailing Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud subscription customer financial models, 50 to 70% of the profit comes from existing customers.

For a deeper perspective, a five percent increase in retention results in an estimated 25 to 95% increase in revenue.

4. Embrace data intelligence and science

We will not be effective marketing leaders or pros without the ability to access, use and interpret data. At a minimum, we must be proactive in using data to understand markets, customers, accounts and market trends. The ideal case is to be confident in turning data into insights and actions and applying data science to help guide investments, programs and experiences. Data cannot be used simply to justify or defend marketing spend.

The most in-demand marketing skills in a B2B buyer-driven world

Let’s look at a few past examples of marketing career breakthroughs to plot the future. Ironically, the emergence and mastery of marketing automation tools, data and campaigns created a generation of what turned out to be the marketing operations (MOps) profession. It’s become a well-compensated, highly respected and in-demand role. In another example, the rise of account-based marketing (ABM) created a shift of sales support-focused field marketers to revenue generation-focused members of the GTM team.

Based on the Great Buyer Resignation reality and market shifts, here are a few high-impact career opportunities for talented pros who want to up-level their professional world while positively impacting their company’s growth. It is important to point out these re-imagined roles all focus across the customer lifecycle and obliterate internal silos whenever and wherever possible.

• Growth marketing: This high-impact role is the next level of demand marketing, which today has largely been focused on digital and paid media spend to generate qualified leads or pipelines. Growth encompasses the full customer/buyer lifecycle of revenue generation in today’s Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscription world. It also focuses on identifying and activating the markets, drivers and industries to grow revenue and expand the company’s total available market (TAM).
• Journey architects: To align with best-fit buyers and accounts, this craft is an ability to use buyer and account intelligence to create experiences to more naturally pull a buyer or buying group through their journey. With a full view across buyer channels and company touchpoints, this role expands beyond marketing to ensure more timely information. For perspective, this is the buyer-driven outgrowth of what was integrated marketing.
• Revenue ops: It is very difficult to identify and engage buyers and target accounts if your view is only on sales, marketing, customer success or finance. This progressive function demands a full view of buyer and customer lifecycles. It unifies and analyzes data to empower the rest of the front-line, customer-facing players to act on intelligence and insights.

The bottom line on what buyer resignation means for our marketing careers

Now is an opportunistic time to capitalize on market and marketing shifts and commit to buyer-centric GTM strategies and tactics. If you see a new role or transformation opportunity inside your organization or at a new company, raise your hand and dive in. These are the times when careers are made and energized.

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