Posts related to B2B marketing and sales

Under the Microscope: Market Strategy

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A Market Strategy is a core element of a company’s revenue architecture and differentiated strategy. Revenue leaders need to define how to approach the Market Strategy based on attractiveness, competitive positioning, and fit.

This post dissects Market Strategy and its components and explores why it is essential to any business.

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Let’s Talk About Email – Why and How to Use Email Marketing

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email marketing

 

With the rise of social media, many “traditional” online marketing tools have fallen out of the spotlight in the glamorous new world of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Marketers scramble to discuss the latest marketing campaigns that can be implemented with social media.

However, email marketing is one of the marketing tools that should be discussed in earnest. Email marketing is still useful and has its place in the modern B2B marketer’s repertoire.

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Revenue Systems: Your Platform for Sustainable Revenue Performance

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We define Revenue Systems as the foundation for sustainable revenue execution. Revenue Systems include brand, people, process, and technology that enable marketing and sales. These core capabilities help attract, capture, deepen and expand relationships. Assuming the right strategies are in place, your revenue system provides the platform you need to execute marketing and sales programs and achieve marketing and sales performance metrics.

Some B2B organizations still view marketing and sales as distinct organizations with different skills, and requiring different technologies and processes. While there are distinctions in the role of marketing and sales, today’s buyer lifecycle experience is fluid and must drive the marketing and sales process.  Leading businesses recognize that in order to attract and engage these self-directed buyers, marketing and sales teams need integrated branding, technologies and processes.  With a Revenue Systems approach, leaders can architect an integrated platform and manage continuous and non-linear buyer journeys.

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Good Selling Checklist: Activities and Competencies

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There is a continuum of different B2B business models – from luminary consultants to commodity products – and each model needs to have a distinct structure for marketing and sales.  Before we assess sales team readiness, we begin by ensuring that the right revenue architecture (the product and process of marketing and sales) is in place and aligned with the target business architecture.

For businesses with a complex, solution sale or consulting sale, there are sales effectiveness attributes that we look for. Below, we’ve outlined competencies, activities, and attributes for good selling. Sales executives, client managers and account reps that sell complex products, business solutions or consultative services should possess the following:

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10 Questions for Your B2B Sales Campaign

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Designing and launching a B2B sales campaign is a continuous activity for B2B sales and marketing teams. To illustrate this, we developed a Closed-Loop Marketing Architecture that describes the continuous campaign process. Data insights help determine the new customer messaging and personalized interactions resulting in better sales conversions.  The process tightly aligns marketing and sales teams to orchestrate buyer engagement at each stage and maximize lead conversions and ultimately revenue impact. Data and insights from past campaigns drive new segmentation and new messaging, spawning new campaigns.

A campaign involves the design, launch and optimization of experiences across multiple channels. It will engage customers and prospects at each stage of the buying lifecycle. So what are the elements in an effective B2B campaign design? These 10 questions can help cover the bases for your next B2B sales campaign. 

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How to Set up a Lead Nurture Program

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You have implemented marketing automation and you are generating some inbound leads. Great!  You have uploaded a database of contacts and these represent even more potential ‘leads’ (in the system). Now you need to manage all these leads. How do you convert them into subscribers and real sales leads?

lead-nurture

Of course, only a handful of leads are likely to become MQLs – Marketing Qualified Leads ready for sales engagement. Also, sales will likely want to send some MQLs back to marketing for more nurture. You need an approach to manage all the leads and contacts in your marketing database and start to nurture them into sales ready MQLs.

How do you set up a lead nurture program to generate more MQLs?

The answer is simple segmentation. Tackle this in three simple steps:

 

1. Define your buyer personas. Start with a few (3-4 perhaps) and build from there if needed. Personas could represent your typical economic buyer, technical buyer, business decision maker and influencer.  Focus on personas that would likely value different types of content and messaging from you at a different cadence. Some marketing automation solutions will automatically generate lists based on the persona and corresponding drop down self-selection fields that new prospects can complete to self select one of these persona segments.

 

2. Define your custom fields. This is an important step to ensure the database has the parameters you need based on your specific business. Of course, the more data fields you track, the greater the segmentation options, but the harder it is to maintain and complete profiles for each contact.  Data fields (custom and standard) may include things like business function, industry segment, personal contact status, interest areas, client status, partner, analyst, consultant, etc. You can also use existing analytics, like behaviors (interests) and lifecycle stage to help further create target segments and lists. All these existing and custom fields will allow you to build highly targeted lists for nurture campaigns and sales focus.

 

3. Build a matrix of segments to nurture campaigns. Now you can create a set of segments using the personas and appropriate custom fields. These segments can each receive different engagement campaigns. Campaigns can be set up along the customer journey;  for example awareness stage, consideration stage and decision stage campaigns. Another campaign archetype could be general company news and updates. Build your matrix to define which segments gets which campaigns and agree this with the sales team.

 

Now that you have the database set with personas and custom fields, you can run queries and build targeted lists for specific sales / marketing campaigns and follow-up. Of course, the process between marketing and sales must be highly collaborative. You can answer a range of queries that may trigger a targeted campaign or sales prospecting follow-up, e.g.:

  • Who has visited the site and registered in the last 2 weeks ?
  • What people that we know, have we not reached out to in the last 8 weeks ?
  • Who made an initial visit to our site and returned n times to download what?
  • Who do we know at XXX Company?
  • How many [sector] contacts visited/registered/ and downloaded the Infographic or eBook?
  • Who has responded to our initial message?
  • How many contacts do we have in Segment A?
  • Who visited our site and registered – but we have not followed up with?

Contact us know if you want to discuss nurture strategies in greater detail.

 

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