A typical priority in revenue growth transformation and Revenue Architecture design is getting to the next level of Demand Generation and Buyer Engagement effectiveness. Quite often, companies come to us with what they perceive as a “marketing execution” issue. When we dig a little deeper in a Diagnostic, it often becomes clear that while there are always improvement opportunity in the mechanics of marketing execution, core issues often revolve around a broader view of buyer engagement strategy.
For better demand generation performance, it is helpful to validate your buyer engagement strategy by answering these 3 central questions and following these 9 best practices:
https://revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/shutterstock_1739865149.png20854710John Stonehttps://www.revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/RA_logo-300x137.pngJohn Stone2022-03-21 15:15:502024-04-07 08:52:009 Best Practices for Demand Generation and Buyer Engagement
This article is periodically updated. It was originally published in 2013.
Your LinkedIn profile is an outpost for your personal brand. For many, it takes the place of a website. It is a landing page you can manage and share your professional background, positions, experiences and achievements. A LinkedIn profile often takes the place of a resume or CV. We used to think of LinkedIn as the online resume. While it remains important for job seekers and recruiters, it is now a powerful business social network.
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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.
Defining Your Funnels
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.
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.
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We have written a few articles about collaborative qualification and how to select and apply the right sales qualification tools – including SCOTSMAN and BANT. These tools are quite familiar to B2B sales and teams that focused on a considered sale. Yet, we see some challenges:
As clients are self-selling on websites, they will pre-qualify (assuming they find buying content on the website). This changes the role of sales-led qualification.
BANT is a proven model, but the focus is on qualification from the seller perspective, it works better to qualify OUT the opportunity rather than qualify IN the opportunity. It does not help build a collaborative relationship with the client. It is confrontational.
SCOTSMAN is another great model as it offers a nuanced approach, but it is hard to remember each of the elements in the mnemonic on the fly. Sales reps may need to pull out a cheat sheet which can be difficult in the heat of the moment. ( See our other post on BANT and Scotsman to learn more. )
So what is the right approach to sales qualification? We suggest a collaborative approach using FACT.
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As growth focused companies realize the critical synergies required across the marketing, sales and customer success functions, they are increasingly recruiting a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) to lead the way. Yet many CROs fail without a properly defined role and an adequate onboarding process. It is vital to ensure CRO success.
A Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is responsible for a company’s revenue streams. He/she has the ultimate accountability for driving revenue growth. The role is clearly cross functional. The CRO oversees and aligns revenue-generating departments: Marketing, Sales and Customer Success. It is a challenging role. The average tenure of a Chief Revenue officer working at the same company is incredibly brief – only about 18 months, according to an annual survey from CSO Insights.
The first 90 days are critical – Whether a company makes money rests with the CRO. Expectations are that the CRO will have about one quarter or 90 days to prove they can meet management’s expectations. As Michael Watkins points out in his top selling book The First 90 Days.
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Do you have a focused SALES business recovery plan? Does it allow for current year goal achievement post-crisis?
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.
60% of participants stated that they have or plan to layoff/furlough part or all of their sales and marketing teams
50% stated they do not have a formal recovery plan to return to Pre Covid-19 performance.
100% stated that working remotely had a positive impact on their productivity while also representing new management challenges
80% indicated that it was harder to bring some staff given the reverse incentives of government programs.
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?
https://revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Road-to-Recovery-scaled.jpg17072560Ed Funarohttps://www.revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/RA_logo-300x137.pngEd Funaro2020-06-24 09:25:382021-12-24 20:23:17Pivot to the NEW NORMAL – Accelerate Revenue with Tech-savvy Sales Talent and Tools
More insights for the 85% of B2B marketers who don’t have effective personas!
Mapping out your buyers’ pain and organizing via Pain Maps™ to enable the ULTIMATE Goal: Informing Engagement Personas™.
There are many different perspectives and philosophies on persona development. This makes sense, as they’re the most critical element of creating messaging and informing Message Maps™…then identifying and developing content aligned with the buy cycle…and ultimately validating the various components of a true buyer engagement strategy. In the end, persona development should be defined by how it’ll be used – in terms of purposeand context that will drive messaging, and ultimately content strategy. Other marketers will use it more as a “playbook” of all possible or available buyer insights. I’m not saying either is right or wrong, but it’s why we’ve created a new category called Engagement Personas™.
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