A company needs an effective go-to-market strategy that makes it easy to buy from and sell to. Go-to-market strategies and plans are a blueprint for how the company will reach customers, streamlining and establishing a strong focus on the steps that a company must take to co-create value with customers.
The commercialization process prepares you to introduce products and services into the market. There are several different frameworks that describe the product development process in detail and commercialization is typically included in this overall process. For our purposes, in assessing and constructing a revenue architecture, we focus on elements of commercialization that impact marketing and sales execution.
Consider the traditional “7 Ps”: product, place, price, promotion, people, process, physical environment. For the purposes of the Revenue Architecture framework, the commercialization activities are central to marketing and sales execution. Sales and marketing teams do sell for a hypothetical company – their job is to sell the products and services the company offers. Commercialization helps influence product design and quality, and paves the way for more effective productive marketing and sales execution.
Activities prior to Commercialization include Market Strategy: Customer Value Research and Analysis, Firm Competencies, Competitive Industry / Market Analysis, Customer Win/Loss Analysis, Firm Performance Analysis, Requirement Definition, Product Line Economies , Budget Planning and Cost Management, Market Acceptance and Availability,Product Strategy, Product Roadmapping.
The Commercialization process includes: Value Positioning including Target Market Definition and Sizing, Customer Engagement Model, Commercial Use Cases, Pricing, Terms and Conditions.
Activities we review after commercialization include Go-To-Market: Positioning and Value Communication, Routes to market, Channels and Partnerships, Marketing Planning, Launch Planning, Customer Acquisition Models, Sales Enablement, Collateral, Lead Generation, Sales and Channel Training, Customer Relationship Management, Funnel Analysis, Market Assets at Different Sales Stages, Technical Tools and Marketing Assets.
Although many marketers focus on increasing the number of leads, quite often marketers should be in fact aiming to have fewer leads. The key is that this smaller number of leads are Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), who are genuine sales prospects, instead of people who are curious but have no intent to buy.
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.
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?
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.:
Contact us know if you want to discuss nurture strategies in greater detail.
A Revenue Architecture defines the building blocks for Revenue growth. You can think of the Revenue Architecture as a Sales and Marketing Operating Model. It is critical that the revenue architecture is designed and deployed to directly align with the business strategy and business model.
In pursuit of greater margins (by moving to higher value products and services) or greater scale (by moving toward a more standardized products and bigger markets) a businesses will adjust strategy and business models. The diagram below depicts a simple set of axis that firms generally move along in their go-to-market approach.
Business Model Continuum
Your revenue funnel dictates which metrics are best to use and a range of factors including size and scale, complexity, volumes, revenue per client, account-based vs. lead based focus will suggest different ways to measure your revenue impact.
Your Revenue Architecture – and revenue funnel – should dictate the metrics you use.
Marketers often seek to understand ‘campaign attribution’ to prioritize investments – yet, in complex multi-stage, multi-touch customer journeys, the impact of any one campaign or touch is difficult to define precisely. Should you attribute to the first campaign touch….to the last touch? The truth is that multiple influences and touches combine to contribute to the sale. As an example, if you are using an account-based marketing approach, you will focus more on account-level metrics like account awareness and penetration instead of just lead volume.
If your company were a living creature, Sales and Marketing would be two specialized vital organs that need to work together to sustain and grow your business. Lack of communication or coordination in these essential areas can hinder your company’s growth or even cause it to wither. To work effectively they need an integrated and streamlined process to keep your company healthy.
At Revenue Architects, we’ve developed a Closed Loop Marketing Architecture™ to provide a blueprint for revenue marketing and aligning marketing and sales. It’s a continuous process that delivers tailored omni-channel experiences that engage customers and drive conversions. By ‘closing the loop’, sales and marketing align around the end-to-end customer lifecycle and campaigns are measured for total revenue impact.
This blueprint enables businesses to refine their marketing strategies based on data that is managed and analyzed to provide much needed insights into your prospects and the customer lifecycle. Many businesses perform these same tasks internally with various teams, or pay for multiple services — like e-blast platforms, CRMs, lead tracking, etc. — but often these methods, which don’t ‘close the loop’, waste valuable resources and lead to incomplete or ineffective results.
The focus on Account Based Marketing and it’s requirements has ignited a range of discussions and specialized B2B and ABM technologies and processes. For companies that are selling to accounts, the strategies associated with ABM are well understood, yet the technologies are still evolving. At first blush, you might think that a closed-loop marketing architecture doesn’t apply to B2B and account-based marketing. Closed Loop Marketing is data and insight-driven. It clearly works for B2C and high-volume campaigns. Yet, how does CLM apply to a highly relationship-centric account-based marketing focus?
Actually, closed-loop marketing is a core foundation for effective Account Based Marketing / ABM.
Account based marketing (ABM) is a B2B marketing and sales process that begins with a focus on accounts rather than only ‘leads’ or people. Rather than primarily using the conventional method of casting a wide net to reach potential leads, ABM “flips the funnel” and focuses on specific target companies or accounts, the “business”, instead of only the “lead” or person.