Posts related to B2B marketing and sales
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.
You are a Small Biz. You’ve built a great product and achieved early success with a handful of customers. Congratulations!
You have an existing Revenue Architecture, although it may be early in its maturity. Revenue Architecture encompasses all the activities for generating predictable and growing revenues for B2B growth. Example processes that support are:
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:
Is your sales team the “real” sellers of your product or service? We are habituated to having a group we call our sales team. We hold them accountable for revenue, give them a quota, and provide them with a target account list. However, depending on the requirements of your sale, the sales salesperson may only have modest influence and control of the sale. Members of the consulting team or content experts may be the “real salesperson(s)”. This issue is common in complex, high-consideration, and consultative sales. It is vital to align the sales roles in consultative and complex sales.
In my four decades in sales leadership at both large enterprises and early-stage growth companies, and in my subsequent consulting & sales advisory practice, I have witnessed and resolved many poor sales practices. If sales leaders do not diagnose and correct these Deadly Sins of Selling, then accelerated and predictable sales outcomes will be in jeopardy. I recount these sins with amusement since they also tell us something about human nature and how that factors into successful selling practices. Individual sellers, their sales managers, sales trainers, and sales coaches can all benefit from being on alert to these common sins.
The focus for Revenue Operations is aligning and optimizing revenue-generating functions to achieve business objectives. This strategic function helps align and optimize the activities of sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive revenue growth.
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.
Revenue comes from one place – the customer. Too often, companies don’t fully consider the complete revenue picture when pursuing their revenue growth strategy. This post reinforces the importance of taking an end-to-end customer lifecycle and full-funnel perspective to create and optimize a comprehensive revenue architecture.