3.1 Video Lecture: Aligning B2B Digital Marketing for Value

Watch this video that introduces the three organizational teams involved in go-to-market strategy, how marketers are a part of interactions with existing customers, the key focus of marketing in new demand generation, and why alignment between the marketing and sales teams is critical.  A copy of the lecture transcript is included below the video.

Transcript

Now that we have some insight into B2B buying decisions, and some tools to build working hypotheses about those decisions, we turn to what we can do as B2B digital marketers to align with B2B buyers through their decision process.

[0:17] The three teams in go-to-market strategy

Recall that to execute a B2B organization’s go to market strategy, a B2B marketing team works together with the sales team and the service team. Each team is focused on a primary part of the process.

• Marketing focuses on attracting current and prospective customers to interact with the organization.
• Sales focuses on engaging with prospective customers during their active buying journeys, with the goal of converting good fit customer opportunities into sales revenues.
• Service focuses on delighting customers so that satisfied customers return and refer others.

Customers will shift between the three teams as they proceed on their buying journeys. So strong alignment is key to helping customers make progress on their journeys, and to generating sales revenues and satisfied customers as a result.

Key to this alignment is for each team to have a clear, shared understanding of the handoff points, and well-defined measures at each point. Our focus in this class is on the right hand side of the process, converting prospective customers to actual ones. So the key handoff we’ll focus on is between marketing and sales.

[1:20] Interactions with current customers

Let’s take a moment to talk about the left hand side. If the service team does their job well in delighting customers as they use our products and services, three good things happen.

First, our satisfied customers might return to us and interact with us in their rebuy journeys. Because customers know what they want in these situations, and know we can successfully meet their needs, interactions are often handed off directly between service teams and sales teams, bypassing marketing. However, we still want to track and tag this handoff in order to be able to measure customer retention.

Satisfied customers may also refer us to other potential opportunities. Willingness to refer is a key go-to-market metric that all organizations should be able to track, but more importantly, this is something all organizations should be able to act on. Referrals may be internal to the customer organization our customers may have other problems we can help them with, and now that they know us, they may be more willing to talk with us.

We sometimes track these referrals as customer expansion or cross-selling opportunities depending on the customer in the organization. The service team may hand these opportunities directly off to the sales team or point customers to digital content and hand them off to be nurtured by marketing.

Or the referrals may be to our customers contacts at other organizations. These external word of mouth referrals are a valuable source of prospective customers. So strong marketing teams provide service teams with resources to support and track these referral opportunities and hand them off to marketing and sales teams when they occur.

Finally, satisfied customers may be willing to be references for us, providing public reviews of their experiences. Particularly delighted customers may be willing to become the subject of more detailed case studies. The marketing team can use these references to build trust and credibility with new customers. Good processes for service teams to collect and hand off positive reviews and case study opportunities to Marketing teams are important for organizations to develop, as our service recovery processes for negative ratings and reviews. However, both are beyond the scope of this course.

[3:25] Marketing and sales interactions with prospective customers

Now let’s turn to the sales strategy side of the go-to-market process. Since customers in rebuy journeys will be handed off directly to sales teams, marketers will be focused on attracting prospective customers who are early in modified rebuy or new task journeys.

This audience may be existing customers, referrals, or new prospective customers who are attracted to our marketing content. The primary task of B2B marketers is to create content and experiences that are valuable to these prospective customers, educating them and building their trust and interest to the point that they’re willing to engage with the sales team.

When this happens, the prospective customer becomes what we will call a sales qualified lead. Marketing hands over sales, qualified leads to sales, who then has primary responsibility to engage with this prospective customer, with the goal of converting well-fitting opportunities to contracts or deals that generate sales revenue for the organization.

But marketing’s job doesn’t end with sales lead generation. Remember, relative to other tactics in the marketing mix, salespeople’s time is expensive. So B2B marketing teams also create content and experiences that support salespeople as they engage with prospective customers, enabling those interactions to be as productive and value creating as possible.

So the marketing team needs to be aligned with the sales team throughout the four steps in the organization’s sales strategy, attracting customers, nurturing them into sales leads, and then coordinating with the sales team on all of the live and digital interactions that occur between the customer and the organization on the way to a contract.

[5:02] Why alignment between marketing and sales is critical

The first reason that marketing and sales teams need to be closely aligned comes from the Challenger research. As you recall, the Challenger researchers found that our biggest challenge, the place where potential buying processes tend to fall apart, is in the solution identification phase. If the buying center can’t come to consensus on what problem they’re solving and the best general approach to solving it, the buying process will stop and the sales opportunity is lost.

The Challenger researchers also found that members of the buying center don’t tend to engage with supplier salespeople until they’re pretty far along in their buying processes. So the best bet in reaching then is through content and experiences created by the marketing team.

The second reason that sales enablement is a big part of the marketing team’s activities is that the buying center needs to come to consensus twice in their buying journey, and not all of the members will be traveling together at the same rate or with the same perspective. Our sales team’s interaction with the buying center starts with one member who gives our sales team permission to engage, and so becomes a sales lead. If we’re lucky, the great marketing generated content and experiences that this buying center member has had up until this point have resulted in them having a clear sense of the problem, a good understanding of the best solution approach, and strong arguments for why we’re the best choice given that approach– they are ready to buy.

But our sales team still needs to convince the other 4.4 members of the buying center team to join them on this buying journey. Perhaps number two is easily convinced by number one, but they approach number three, who doesn’t quite see the problem the same way. Number four does see the problem the same way, but thinks the best solution is a different technical approach. And number five, who has control of the budget, becomes aware of the conversation, but holds back waiting for the rest of the group to agree before committing.

So there are lots of conversations going on, but our salesperson only has permission to speak with one member. However, if marketing has content ready to address the needs of all of the members of the buying center, then the sales team can use that content to work through member one to influence the others. So our marketing team really needs to be expert at helping B2B customers build consensus on that first decision, on the business value of moving forward to solve an important problem or achieve a key goal using solutions like our.

To do this requires us to use all of our potential sources of B2B value to tailor messaging that resonates with customers early in their buying processes. More on that in the next videos.