Content marketing attracts and engages prospects at each stage of the buying process.
B2B Revenue Marketing Performance: Are You Facing An Extinction-Level Event?
Account-Based Marketing, B2B Marketing and Sales, Buyer Engagement, Closed-loop Marketing, Content Marketing, eMail Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation, Measurement and Analytics, Revenue Architecture, Revenue Growth, Revenue Marketing, Revenue Programs, Sales Enablement
The Escalating Accountability Mandate…
Measurability and accountability—it’s one thing to feel the heat, it’s another to get burned. To understand why so many marketers are relying on a new and evolving array of automation tools, let’s consider one fact: Today, one of the key drivers of B2B demand generation is proving the value of marketing investments. What are you getting for your marketing dollars? And how do you quantify it?
As revenue marketing executives seek to answer these questions, they’re more focused than ever on measurement, accountability and increasing performance across programs, marketing activities and media. In fact, according to recent marketing outlook reports by the CMO Council, marketers are under “increased pressure to improve relevance, accountability and performance of their organizations.”
In other words, marketers are being told to deliver the goods. Those who succeed are rewarded. Those who do not are at risk. (The average employment span for a CMO at any one company—approximately 2 years.).
Hence, the increased reliance on—and investments in—marketing automation an ABM solutions to help measure results and manage programs. The universal goals, it seems, are to improve and quantify the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing initiatives, and significantly improve the allocation and return on marketing spend. Or, put in its simplest and most personal terms—you need to enhance performance to create a sustainable, competitive advantage in today’s marketplace.
The question is: How do you do it? Or, more specifically, how do you plan,execute and measure a highly-calibrated demand generation strategy that takes into account your target audience, solution set, price point, market conditions, competitive environment and current initiatives?
To answer these questions (I’ll put a stake in the ground in a moment), it’s first necessary to make a few assumptions. First, I’m assuming that as you read this, you already understand the need to align Sales and Marketing more closely than ever to better support the sales process and drive demand. I’m assuming that you’ve embraced new social media tools and marketing automation technologies, that you have the dashboards in place to measure results, and that you genuinely desire to increase performance. And if not, your career is likely facing an extinction-level event!
Additionally, I believe that I do not need to delve into areas that are best left to specialists — including Revenue Architects — such as the mechanics of digital marketing, search and social media marketing and sales, the operation of marketing automation, deploying effective ABM programs, formatting landing pages for maximum conversion, and the criteria and process for lead scoring and distribution.
Today’s universal mission and objectives. Marketers, of their initiatives. Marketing’s attribution to revenue is critical. Those who do are today’s true “revenue marketers”. The others…well they may be looking for new jobs soon.
Below you’ll find SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall. You’ll also find a more detailed view of how best-in-class companies are measuring and analyzing key levers that increase Marketing’s contribution to revenue performance, including conversion in the pipeline via a Metrics-Driven Methodology™…
But enough of the qualifiers. To the heart of the matter. To improve marketing performance and create a sustainable, competitive advantage, you need to do more than rely on new technologies and digital media as ends unto themselves. Rather, you need to return to the foundational principles of solid, effective demand generation—and base your programs on learnings and insights that have proven themselves on countless occasions in the marketplace – ultimately in the context of a well-defined buyer engagement strategy. Yes, new technologies and digital media are remarkable—awe-inspiring in fact—but you need to balance your use of them (and your thinking about how to fully maximize their potential) with several core principles that are often overlooked.
One final thought before we proceed: Let’s define Demand Generation and Revenue Marketing. Before launching into the foundational elements, there’s one point of order. Let’s define demand generation as results-based marketing that supports Sales, and ultimately revenue delivery. Demand generation serves the purpose of generating, nurturing and converting leads into qualified sales opportunities. When effective, it makes both selling and buying a more comfortable and efficient process. And when compared to other forms of marketing, it is by far the most measurable and therefore accountable side of the business.
The challenge is that until recent years, demand generation meant “lead generation” and was associated too often with one-off marketing campaigns, often supported by telesales, less sophisticated landing and registration pages, static banner ads and e-mail blasts. And to compound things, marketing automation platforms were basically used as “spam cannons”. Ultimately, it was measured by short-term results and myopic questions such as “How many leads did the program produce?”
However, the fact is in complex B2B sales, demand generation isn’t about instant gratification, but rather buyer engagement which requires a sustained effort, often over a relatively long period of time.
Is your career facing an extinction-level event?
Many so-called “Revenue Marketers” are writing checks that their companies simply can’t cash! According to a recent study by HubSpot, only 23% of marketers are exceeding their revenue goals. Yet, Revenue Marketing has become a ubiquitous concept and is getting tons of hype in today’s market. And rightfully so. No question – it’s the “holy grail” of today’s senior stakeholders.
Here’s the problem—all the verbiage around it was generated by companies and people deeply invested in its success. These include companies that are predominantly staffed by marketing automation technologists and solutions engineers, who are actually software people, not demand marketers. And all the talk isn’t limited to the marketing operations and automation folks who are making claims. There are also many strategic consulting firms and agencies that do the same, but they don’t have enough experience as practitioners to execute on the very recommendations they are prescribing to clients.
Don’t get me wrong, the modern marketing technology stack forms the most powerful marketing enablement toolkit I’ve witnessed in a nearly 25-year career. But it’s just that…an enablement toolkit. It’s a partial solution. You ALSO need effective buyer engagement strategy and execution or the monetization of your marketing investments won’t even come close to its potential.
Quite simply, revenue marketing can work—when (and only when) it’s driven by a worthy buyer engagement strategy. But the primary challenge, which we address in our new eBook entitled Exposed. The False Promises of Revenue Marketing., is all the confusion, misinterpretation and general lack of understanding that exists around revenue marketing and the buyer engagement strategies that are essential to its success.
These points of confusion include:
- The fundamental deficit in buyer understanding that is killing marketing performance at most companies
- What’s wrong with persona development
- How messaging is largely missing the mark
- Why most B2B content is lousy as it’s “domain-centric,” not “engagement-focused”
- How most marketers are focused on all the wrong metrics
- Why so very few marketers are capable of aligning all the requisite elements of a high-performance buyer engagement strategy
In the eBook we highlight these critical elements (and many more) that are too frequently being ignored, simply misunderstood or not fully embraced, but that are vital for true revenue marketing. In it we address 9 foundational principles that when used as a roadmap for marketing automation and social media propagation are the surest way to develop a sound buyer engagement strategy that transforms you into a true rock star of revenue marketing.
Discover 9 ways to exponentially increase leads, conversion, pipeline velocity, and revenue impact:
Improving the quality and completeness of sales messages delivers hard ROI. Here are three reasons you should review the content your sales teams are using and take a diagnostic approach to assess the effectiveness of your sales messaging:
Three Reasons to Audit Your Sales Messaging:
1) Reduce the time required for achieving channel effectiveness:
- Channel effectiveness occurs when the average salesperson can cost effectively close the sale. Eventually the sales channels [and customers] will learn the value of the differential being offered, but while the market is still learning these values, the effectiveness of the sales channels is reduced. It is difficult to close the sale when the customer doesn’t know the value of the differential being offered, and the sales channels has not been provided with the values, calibration, and evidence needed to convince them.
2) Increase sales capacity
- Sales capacity is the number of salespeople [or outlets] that are effectively selling your products and solutions. Retail uses a term “self ware” to refer to products that are sitting on the shelf but aren’t being bought. Having salespeople that are expected to sell the product but can’t/don’t is the channel equivalent of shelfware. Frequently this occurs when the skill required to sell the product exceeds the skill available in the channel. So the top 10% of the salespeople can sell the product, but the average salesperson can’t. Poor quality sales messaging is frequently the cause of product shelfware.
3) Reduces the cost of sales
- Improved messaging increases the close rate and reduces the number of sales calls required to do so because the customer value being offered is clear and with evidence.
Use a diagnostic process for more consistent implementation
- Review the “top 10” sales messaging deficiencies to see if the issues are identified.
- Check the material being sent to sales people – before it is sent!
- Use a checklist to ensure the quality and completeness of the information being provided.
Make certain your content and messaging is sufficient for the average salesperson to cost effectively close the sale. Would you like a copy of the checklist? Check out the 9 Sales Enablement Content Imperatives.
Here is another article by Bud: 10 Message Deficiencies. Contact us to schedule a discussion.
This is a guest post by Bud Hyler – a member of the Revenue Architects’ expert network.
Generating revenue and winning customers requires a balance of good content and confident sales. Design your sales enablement content around what your medium-skilled salespeople need.
Your top salespeople have sufficient confidence and sales skill that they don’t need a lot of content to be successful in their sales efforts. However an average salesperson with less confidence and less sales skill will require much more content. Top sales people usually need less content because they are able to develop a greater level of customer relationship and trust.
One of the responsibilities of sales management is to specify the content requirements that sufficiently augments the sales skills of the average salesperson so that revenue is successfully generated.
A prospective client may assume that a financial advisor, when giving advice, is acting in their best interest.
Indeed this prospective client may have heard the word FIDUCIARY Financial Advisor bandied about by talking heads and journalists in the financial media and that is now a Rule of Law. For an independent fee-only Financial Advisor (RIA), being a fiduciary will matter a great deal to your ideal client and can be a key if not prerequisite selling point. But they may not grasp the full meaning and intent.
Positioned right, being a fiduciary can be a major point of differentiation from broker/dealers claiming to be financial advisors, but who are associated with vertically integrated brokerage firms that sell products with ‘hidden fees’.
One advisor quoted in the article in a recent New York Times article said “The fiduciary rule ultimately comes down to the fact that some people are making a lot of money at the expense of other people who have no idea how much their adviser is getting paid.” A video from a large independent advisor, compares butchers and nutritionists. Butchers push meat. Nutritionists advise you what to eat, because they have the best interests of the client at heart. The latter is the fiduciary. A Revenue Architects client says, “the professional fiduciary is expected to perform and advise you based on your best interests, even if it comes into conflict with the advisor’s own interests.”
The buy-sell process for B2B high consideration products and services is complex and highly collaborative involving team selling to committee buying. Virtual workspaces like Smart Rooms from Journey Sales facilitate this process by helping account teams share, collaborate and communicate with buying teams throughout dynamic sales and onboarding lifecycles.
Journey Sales built Smart Rooms natively on Salesforce® as digital workspaces that allow sales teams and service teams to quickly create personalized, guided digital experiences with their account buyers and track engagement along the way.
To optimize B2B sales, we often design funnels to drive out metrics and codify sales processes. Linear funnels for B2B are particularly relevant when purchasing is transactional or follows a highly predictable process. Yet, for complex B2B and high consideration sales, customers are interacting with a range of 3rd party research, journals and publications, as well as your competitor’s funnel. This is why we need a non-linear more collaborative approach to selling and engaging the client – one that allows us to build our value propositions responsively and engage customer teams over time. For these more complex sales and dynamic environments, a Smart Room is a great fit.
Traditional account sales is an important, but expensive approach to market. Traditional marketing programs are not account-centric and often fail to deliver the needed impact at the account level. Targeting strategic accounts requires that marketing and sales work in partnership to orchestrate effective account-based marketing and selling. Yet, customizing an approach to a specific account can be costly.
A strategy you can employ to keep costs down is “mass customization” – a leveraged approach across multiple accounts that uses standardized, more modular capabilities that can be customized and configured for the account strategy.
I often hear the use of the word Blogs when referring to what I think of as Blog Posts. While there are no absolute right answers, here is how I suggest you use the terminology:
A Blog: A website with multiple time-sequenced posts. Note, a Blog might not be called “Blog”. It could be called “Resources” or “News”. If it is enabled by blog technology, I call that a Blog!
Blogs: People usually mean the posts themselves. I would use “Posts” instead… or “blog posts”.
Post: An individual entry or article on a blog.
A blog is short for weblog. A weblog is a website consisting of entries (posts) that are displayed in reverse chronological order with the most recent post appearing first. “Blogs” refers to the universe of blogs – not to individual posts. Blogs are created using software like WordPress or TypePad. Blogging is a verb that means writing posts (not writing blogs).
So if you are wondering if you have “blogs” on your blog…. IMHO you actually have posts… If you have multiple blogs (multiple websites or multiple subject blogs, each with sequential posts), then you might refer to the collection as ‘blogs’.
Good luck marketing, selling – and blogging!
Learn more about how to integrate your blog strategy for revenue growth… Contact Us.
Closing the Loop – Aligning Marketing and Sales
Traditionally, marketing teams generate leads, while sales teams close deals. With the web and the shift of the customer buying process and business-to-customer interactions, the lines between marketing and sales are blurred. Companies today know that they need to adapt, but how?
Growth-focused companies often wrestle with aligning marketing and sales to maximize revenue growth. A key goal is establishing a “service level agreement” between marketing and sales teams that defines both the required quantity and the characteristics of the ‘MQL” or Marketing Qualified Lead”. But there is more to it then that. Marketing and sales teams today, must work together to orchestrate the customer experience end-to-end and generate leads, nurture opportunities in the pipeline and ultimately convert sales. And, they need to track this end-to-end so they can attribute revenue to marketing programs and campaigns and see what is working and not working.
A useful framework to manage this end-to-end process is the “Closed Loop Marketing Architecture”.
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