B2B Sales and Marketing leaders should evaluate adopting these 5 new B2B strategies to achieve their goals:
DELIVER COMMERCIAL INSIGHT
The Challenger™ marketing model challenges the traditional model to align marketing and sales, creating a collaborative marketing and sales strategy that creates a cohesive and smooth customer journey without a marketing and sales disconnect.
The Challenger™ model incorporates both marketing and sales teams to enhance the efforts of both teams and provide insights at all touch points, both human and digital. Building a cohesive strategy between the two teams not only helps generate qualified leads, but moves customers through the buyer stages resulting in brand loyalty and increased revenue.
COLLABORATION BETWEEN B2B SALES AND MARKETING
We all know communication is key for bettering any relationship in your life; that stands true while communicating with your marketing and sales team. Consistent communication between these two teams is necessary to not only generate quality leads, but to deliver valuable insights along a buyer’s journey.
“No matter how the CRM industry evolves, getting the sales and marketing teams to synergize is goal number one. Every success grows from their collaboration and free exchange of ideas, because you can’t serve the customer right when your best people are working blind.”
Marshall Lager
Encouraging lead alignment sessions around the customer journey with marketing and sales leaders will help generate high-quality leads and maximize revenue growth.
B2B SALES AND MARKETING PLATFORMS JOIN FORCES
The most effective way to integrate marketing and sales teams is to leverage platforms that connects marketing leads with sales opportunities. More specifically, a platform that captures marketing leads by campaign source and then seamlessly scores, qualifies and alerts the appropriate business development representative. By integrating and configuring your marketing automation and CRM platforms, marketing and sales teams can deliver on the customer experience at every touch point along the way.
NURTURING LEADS IN SYNC WITH BUYER JOURNEY
When B2B sales and marketing strategies are in alignment with the customer’s expectations as they go through the buyer journey, there’s a greater volume of quality leads that will make their way from awareness to purchase.
However, when there’s a gap between these teams, there’s a disconnect and usually results in lost revenue. For example, “Leads that come from online marketing materials close about 25% of the time, and leads that come in from sales – without the help of marketing – close at a rate of 1.5%”. When the traditional sales funnel is swapped with a sales and marketing buyer journey, there’s room to improve sales ready leads.
CONSISTENT GOALS & METRICS
Without clearly defined and shared goals, alignment is challenging at best. It takes a commitment to collaboration, defining common goals and it takes hard work.
Begin with how you will define and measure:
- Scoring inbound leads
- Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
- Sequencing of human and digital touch points
- Service levels for responding to leads
- Marketing contribution to closed won opportunities
Understanding the shifts in the buyer journey and how to adapt B2B sales and marketing strategies are critical to evolving in our world of constant disruption.