Account based marketing focuses top down on accounts rather than only lead generation.
Instead of using a traditional opportunity funnel (sales pipeline) to drive toward a revenue goal, extend your funnel view past revenue to company profitability. Why? To create a revenue acceleration engine that uses the interconnected metrics of both pipeline and profitability to sustainably fund growth initiatives. Keep reading to learn how.
Content Marketing: A Cornerstone for Complex Product and Service Sales
Content marketing is a crucial strategy for businesses selling complex products and services. By providing valuable information and insights at various stages of the buyer’s journey, content can significantly enhance your marketing and sales efforts, driving revenue growth and building customer loyalty. But how do you compete with content today?
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach that aligns marketing and sales teams to target specific high-value accounts and drive revenue growth. By orchestrating coordinated campaigns across multiple channels, ABM enables businesses to build stronger relationships, increase customer engagement, and improve sales efficiency. Stop using “Marketing-generated” with ABM. ABM is a team effort between marketing and sales.
How do you know if your strategic account management is healthy? Too often, we fail to measure the critical success factors.
Expanding existing satisfied accounts is much easier than selling to new customers who don’t know us. It is vital that we optimize strategic account management. Successful account managers contribute to revenue in three primary ways:
We believe that businesses need an enduring and well-constructed approach to capturing customer value. They need a Revenue Architecture that delivers world-class buyer engagement. Buyer Engagement is the universal approach to delivering the right experiences and messages at the right time to the right buyers. Buyer Engagement is about prospect care and building meaningful relationships with buyers – with an equitable exchange of value – that translates into predictable and sustainable revenue growth. Buyer Engagement happens across the organization and across marketing, sales and service.
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We left transactional sales behind in the 90s. With recurring business models like ‘as-a-service’, we need to rethink the “sales process” from the traditional vertical funnel to a bow tie funnel that recognizes the role of the post-sale customer execution in revenue realization. We need a full-funnel approach. Predictable, sustainable, and accelerated revenue performance relies increasingly on the customer realizing benefits and impacts from a product or service.
The universe of markets and buyers is incredibly diverse, and your decisions about where and whom to target can make or break your revenue performance. A company can’t be all things to all buyers in all markets. As the competitive landscape is always changing, with more players vying for prospects’ time and attention, it is vital to select markets where you can effectively compete and win. Then, continuously segment the market to isolate specific audiences to engage at the right time and place with the right message.
Enterprise funnel math exercises help align marketing and sales teams by zeroing in on critical funnel metrics like Sales and Marketing Qualified Inquiries (e.g. MQI) and Marketing and Sales Qualified Leads (MQL and SQL).
An enterprise funnel math model can help you identify the mix of tactics for for different funnel characteristics. For example, a sales-driven funnel might be designed with sales-led prospection activities and ABM tactics. A high volume lead gen funnel might be driven by Inbound Marketing or Paid SEM. Each funnel will have its own “DNA” and can be modeled top to bottom across deal stages to inform go-to-market strategies and budgeting.
A simple spreadsheet can help you produce a flexible working model that can be tailored to each company. To make it work, it is important to identify the right funnels or segments. The more granular your funnels are, the more accurate the funnel model will be – but too many funnels will add complexity. So, we typically identify 4-8 segments that represent distinct marketing and sales motions. Select segment that have a distinctive “funnel DNA” – not necessarily a P&L, or a geography segment. Often a funnel is centered around a product or service offering. Funnels can always be rolled up into geos, or P&Ls.
We develop Funnel Math Models with several tabs:
Buyers want an efficient, effective, quality buying experience. They don’t consider whether their experience is “marketing-generated” or “sales-generated”. They choose if they want to engage with your web content, 3rd party digital outposts or marketplaces or with your sales people. They most likely will interact with all of these in different sequences and in unstructured and unpredictable ways.
Buyer engagement efforts take place all along the buyer journey and to deliver the experiences buyers expect and maximize your revenue impact, you need an integrated marketing and sales process.
Most businesses have a business continuity and resiliency plan that allows for continued operation in the event of an unforeseen circumstance, but most businesses do not have a revenue recovery plan! The pandemic crisis has forced new ways of working and impaired business performance, but companies must anticipate coming out of the crisis and being prepared for the new environment. This is the time to take advantage of the crisis by examining and addressing ineffective and unproductive elements of your revenue architecture including systems and talent.
An informal survey of CXO’s conducted by Revenue Architects over the last 6 weeks indicates that sales and marketing organizations are functioning differently through the uncharted waters of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results confirmed that 90% have been materially impacted.
Conducting business under current constraints with social distancing, remote working and the reduction of capital expenditures is a new challenge. It can be harder to sell if you are not in front of the client. Yet even before the pandemic the skills and profile of sales superstars were changing. And the B2B buyer, already digital savvy, was becoming more educated and self-sufficient using online resources to self-sell.
“If you give me a techno-savvy, Internet-friendly, google ranked, instant responding, collaborating, differentiated, social media savvy, value-driven, a value-based messaging, salesperson who uses the voice of the customer testimonials and is interested in how the customer profits…then, I will give you sales results”.
But how do we infuse these talents and skills along with sales best practices into our selling team and drive sales, take market share, and position for the upcoming market expansion?