Revenue Growth Resources

Why Are B2B Marketers Still Focused on Individual Prospects, NOT Targeted Accounts?

B2B Sales is Focused on Targeted Accounts while B2B Marketers are focused on individuals.  It’s one of the key reasons that the quality of Marketing leads is poor. 

Why are Marketers not leveraging Account Based Marketing technologies and techniques? 

The main culprits appear to be a lack of Sales and Marketing alignment, and, a lack of success measures proving ROI/attribution.  Take action today to improve Marketing and Sales alignment to the buyer journey.

Better Alignment, Better Leads, Better Outcomes

Sales-generated Leads are always better than Marketing-generated leads EXCEPT in one important scenario. Salespeople in companies with tight marketing and sales alignment saw Marketing as their top source of leads overall.

Tight alignment does not mean Sales and Marketing are better able to pass more leads! Tight alignment means that both Sales and Marketing activities are tightly aligned to the Buyer’s multi-stage purchase processing, empowering Marketing & Sales to collaboratively convert more suspects into more repeatable customers. Take action today to improve Marketing and Sales alignment.

 

How Are CEO’s helping or hindering Marketing’s Effectiveness? 

CMOs clearly believe that their effectiveness depends more on organizational alignment than on resources, and I absolutely agree. Since CEO’s set the priorities and success metrics of each function (Marketing, Sales, IT, Finance, etc.), the CEO is in the best position to lead any meaningful improvement in cross-functional alignment.

CMOs also believe they may need a different CEO: someone who understands Marketing, the complexity of brand building, the importance of a customer-centric approach, and the connection between marketing and revenue. It’s up to CMOs to gain their CEO’s trust and support on these particular issues.

CMOs who demonstrate knowledge, experience and impact throughout the complete customer revenue cycle, from Suspect to Repeat Customer Advocate, rather than primarily branding and lead generation, will have a much easier time partnering with any CEO.  Take action today to accelerate your revenue and profit growth rate.

52% B2B Marketers Still Rely on Intuition, NOT Data?

That’s surprising, given all the talk about digital transformation, predictive analytics, and AI.   When we dig into the data, we find that the core barrier is not technical, it’s organizational.

80% Leaders are using data to Accelerate Revenue Growth: find new business opportunities, determine what solutions to invest in, personalize customer experiences, accurately identify and attribute marketing campaign success, and, drive improvements in sales cycle speed, average deal size, brand awareness and lead generation.

50% to 70% Laggards are NOT leveraging data effectively to accelerate revenue. Why? Laggards are unable to establish “alignment across teams and departments on specific, shared business outcomes.”

If Executive Leaders help to remove the organizational obstacles, Marketers will be become much more data-driven. For two Business Units/Functions/Departments to align around specific, shared business outcomes, the two executive leaders must lead the charge. Take action today to accelerate revenue contribution and marketing ROI.

Closing the Gap between Buyers and Tech Vendors

Buyers prefer to buy from brands that focus on building strategic relationships, however, that’s going to be very difficult to achieve when Buyers currently do not trust much of the content they receive from vendors.

Vendor websites, vendor-produced case studies, vendor blogs and vendor marketing collateral were the least trustworthy, least influential and least used by Buyers out of 15 information sources. On a brighter note, product demo’s were used by 64% of Buyers. 88% of Buyers said they were more influential, and 81% said they were more trustworthy. The most influential Vendor representative was the Subject Matter Expert, not the Sales rep.

Both Marketing & Sales need to focus on providing material that Buyers find very useful, trustworthy and influential. Otherwise, they will continued to be viewed as just another product-centric, transactional vendor. Take action today to improve Marketing and Sales alignment to the buyer journey.

What do Buyers Think of B2B Sales Reps?

Buyers think that B2B Sales Reps are Credible, and Buyers are willing to be engaged throughout the Buying Process, but we need to improve in some critical areas. More than 60% of B2B Buyers interact with numerous members of the Sales Team, but the Sales team needs to do a better job selling to numerous members of the Buying Team. 88% B2B Buyers think that Sales reps are generally credible, but a staggering 58% Buyers also think that Sales Reps occasionally give false information, exaggerate product claims, and alter facts in order to get the sale.

Buyers prefer to buy from brands that focus on building a relationships versus securing a transactional deal. We need to focus on the entire buyer team (not just the “decision maker”) throughout the entire buying process (not just during the close), and always always always be adding honest, transparent value.  Take action today to accelerate sales and productivity.

Key challenges for Sales Marketing Alignment?

Metrics, Processes, and Communications:  

When Marketing is focused on different things than Sales, cross-functional communications and processes become unproductive. 

“None of the top metrics by which Salespeople are measured appear on the list of top metrics for Marketers”. Salespeople are focused on new accounts, number of deals closed, renewals/retentions, and of course, quota attainment. In contrast, Marketers are focused on lead quantity and lead quality.

The solution? “Uniting both teams around actual pipeline” – converting suspects into opportunities into closed/won deals into repeat deals.  Take action today to dramatically improve Marketing & Sales Alignment.

 

What are high-growth Professional Services Firms doing differently?

High growth firms have a superior Marketing strategy. They are generally doing a much better job adapting to the evolving needs of their digitally-empowered clients.  High growth service firms tend to do more research on the needs of their target clients, productize their services, offer specialized services, and invest more heavily in digital and content marketing.

In contrast, low-growth service firms put more focus on hiring better talent, entering new geographic markets, offering industry specialization, cold calling and attending conferences/events. These techniques worked 20 years ago, and they still work today, but not well enough to drive high-growth in today’s marketplace.

Are you satisfied with your growth rate? Take action today to dramatically improve Market Alignment.

 

The Importance of Sales Content

77% Marketing/Sales respondents believe that Sales Content is important to closing sales, but only 15% understand if their content is effective or not.

Ideally, each piece of content should be designed to help the salesforce move a buyer to the next stage of their purchasing stage (and closer to a closed deal!). That doesn’t seem to be the case.  In most cases the Sales reps need to go searching for content within the company: Only 20% automatically distribute sales content through a CRM (and/or Sales Asset Management platform) where it can be directly linked to the sales opportunity and sales stage in real time.  While the majority of Marketing/Sales believes that they are getting good ROI from sales content creation, only 15% actually measure ROI (and therefore, have the insights to create more effective sales content that actually increase sales!).

Marketing works so hard to identify prospects, maybe it’s time to apply their communications and technology skills toward helping Sales convert those prospects into customers? Take action today to dramatically improve Marketing Impact to Revenue Growth.

 

The Life of a Product Manager?

You’ll be surprised to know that most Product Managers started their careers in a customer-facing function or as a business analyst, NOT engineering. 

Are they the CEO of their product? Not quite.  Most focus on developing a deep understanding of the target customer/market and creating the business case, but unfortunately, few have responsibility for achieving lifecycle product revenue and P&L. “The bad news is that a lot of product managers are still doing things they’re not necessarily trained or qualified to do, like managing development teams and designing interactive prototyping. They spend more time than they’d like interacting with internal folks and less time than they’d like interacting with customers. “

So if the Product Manager isn’t responsible for lifecycle revenue and profit for a product, particularly in a multi-product company, then who is? Take action today to dramatically improve Product Management Impact to Revenue Growth.

 

Only 28% Marketing Organizations Have Specific Revenue Goals

The primary metric for 47% Marketing Organizations continues to be lead generation.  For accelerated growth, both Marketing and Sales must collaborate throughout the entire customer/prospect life cycle, jointly converting suspects into prospects into opportunities into customers into advocates. The top channels currently used to accelerate leads at the middle and late stages of the funnel are email, website and telemarketing. Top tactics were case studies, lead nurturing campaigns and in-person events. Take action today to dramatically improve Marketing Impact to Revenue Growth.

 

When B2B Buyers Want To Hear From Sellers

B2B Buyers Say They Want to Hear From Vendors Early in the Buying Process.  71% said they want to hear from vendors when they’re looking for new ideas and possibilities to drive stronger results to improve their business.  Here’s the catch: “Buyers’ primary frustration is with vendors who are more interested in selling than in listening to their needs.”   Does our Sales Enablement and Content Marketing efforts fully leverage this insight?   Take action today to dramatically improve Sales Impact to Revenue Growth

 

Streamlining Sales Process Doubles Growth Rate

B2B Companies that streamline their sales process enjoy a dramatic competitive advantage: 2X revenue growth rate, 3X profitability growth rate, 10X average deal size growth, and 8% shorter sales cycle. 

How? They 1/ tightly align their sales process to the entire buyer’s journey, 2/ utilize social media and website interactions for 31% of their sales communications with buyers, and 3/make savvy SalesTech choices that enshrine the CRM as their system of record.  Take action today to dramatically accelerate sales and productivity.         

 

Why Should Sales Pursue A Strong Alignment with Marketing?

Strongly aligned organizations demonstrate 97% greater annual growth in team sales quota attainment, 64% greater YoY growth in company revenue growth, and 3.4x faster-moving sales cycle.

If Sales wants to achieve its ever-increasing quota goals, they need to figure out how to better align and collaborate with Marketing to accelerate sales & productivity. How to accelerate your Marketing & Sales revenue alignment, collaboration and execution.

 

Chief Revenue Officer or Chief Marketing Officer?

The CEO needs one person accountable for the company’s revenue generation, and maybe the CMO or CRO will emerge as that one person who can help bridge the gap between Marketing, Sales and others.  The emerging role of the CRO focuses more on cross-functional collaboration to drive sustained growth while the “VP Sales” is laser-focused on execution to achieve this year’s number. 

Similarly, the modern CMO is being asked to focus more on cross-functional collaboration to drive sustained growth while the “VP Marketing” remains focused on achieving KPI’s for customer engagement and lead generation. An effective CMO or CRO would definitely help accelerate revenue growth from Sales Enablement, Account-based Marketing and Marketing/Sales automation.  How to accelerate cross-functional collaboration and revenue growth. 

 

What Traits Makes a CMO Most Effective?

The modern CMO needs to be a strategic business leader who can drive cross-functional initiatives via collaboration.

The top 3 traits identified by US Marketers reflect the C-suite’s increasing pressure to have the CMO role assume greater ownership of the customer experience, provide more enterprise-wide strategic leadership, and prove Marketing’s worth in terms of revenue contribution and ROI. It certainly helps to have a growth mindset, direct sales experience and an understanding of technology! How to accelerate cross-functional collaboration and revenue growth. 

 

The State Of Sales Acceleration

How Can Marketing Help Accelerate Sales?  76% B2B Sales professionals optimistically think that the leads they get from Marketing are of high quality, yet, only 17% of those leads actually turn into revenue.

Those 83% leads are dragging down Sales productivity.  How can we accurately predict that a top-of-funnel prospect, who downloads some interesting content today, will actually buy something in 6, 9, 12 months? We can’t!  However, we can use our content and automation to continue educating a prospect until they do identify themselves as a potential middle-of-funnel buyer. How do B2B Buyers determine the right products or services that they need to buy? 22% B2B Buyers rely on recommendations from colleagues and industry influencers, 21% attend in-person events and online webinars, 16% research brands and solutions that they have been contacted about via sales calls, 14% browse the internet for new products/services and customer reviews 13% respond to sales or marketing content they have been sent via email, 13% click on relevant ads they see on websites that they visit.  How to accelerate your Marketing & Sales revenue alignment, collaboration and execution.

 

Why Do B2B Buyers Buy?

What are winning Marketing and Sales teams doing to convert more buyers into customers? B2B Buyers continue to self-educate throughout the entire buying journey and only engage vendors AFTER they have determined their vendor short list. Within the final 3 months of their buying journey, 63% buyers accept vendor outreach, 72% buyers engage sales reps, and 64% of the competitive bids are issued. What are the winning vendors doing to win these deals? 1/ The winning vendor’s website speaks directly to the needs of buyer’s industry and expertise, and, its content speaks directly to the buyer’s company. 2/ The winning vendor’s marketing/sales content makes it easy to show buyer ROI and/or build a buyer business case for the purchase. 3/ The winning vendor’s sales team showed stronger knowledge of the business landscape and the solution area, and, the sales team has more insights about the company and their needs. Unless Marketing and Sales aligned with a deep understanding of the buyer’s business needs, their purchase process, and their buyer team members, it will be challenging to accelerate revenue.  How to accelerate your Marketing & Sales revenue alignment, collaboration and execution.

 

Accelerating Sales With Marketing Automation

Why is Marketing Automation not accelerating B2B sales? It’s because we are not deploying automation technology effectively across the entire buyer lifecycle. 

LEADS: The sales force has their definition of a qualified lead, which is based upon criteria such as company, industry, location, size, etc.  In contrast, Marketing uses a qualified lead definition that is primarily based upon prospect engagement: Less than 16% Marketers are using progressive profiling or account-based lead identification to deliver better quality leads to Sales. 

WINS: The sales force has a sales process they follow to move a qualified lead to an opportunity, then to a forecasted deal, then to a win/loss. In contrast, Marketing’s direct involvement in pipeline conversion activities is minimal. In fact, only 45% Marketers MAP systems are integrated into the Sales CRM, only 24% Marketers have the capability to target individual buyer team members with dynamic content, and only 15% recycle leads until the sales force is ready to re-engage the prospect.  

CUSTOMERS: Buyer advocacy? Up-sells? Cross-sells? We have the technology, but for Marketing Automation to accelerate sales, both Marketing and Sales must effectively collaborate throughout the entire buyer’s purchasing process/lifecycle to turn prospects into repeat customers. How to accelerate your Marketing & Sales revenue collaboration.

 

Accelerating Sales With Sales Technology

Why is Sales Technology not accelerating sales?  71% Companies reported that their Sales Technology investments were ineffective or somewhat effective at impacting Sales results.

Lack of management leadership, Marketing Sales alignment, systems integration and data quality were top obstacles to success. (SalesTech includes CRM, Webinar/Demo, contact management, sales email automation, configure/price/quote, and account intelligence.) How to accelerate sales and productivity.

 

Korn Ferry/ Miller Heiman Group

How many Sales reps are achieving quota at your company?Performance at most companies continues to go in the wrong direction. Fewer companies are achieving their revenue plan (89.2% in 2012 but only 85.5% in 2016).  Fewer Salespeople are achieving their quota (63% in 2012 but only 53% in 2016). However, 6.9% companies are bucking this trend and delivering world class sales performance!

What are they doing different?  They adhere to a dynamic, formal sales process.  They strive to achieve trusted partner or strategic contributor relationships with their customers. They maintain superior alignment with their customer: they communicate value messages that are aligned to the customer’s needs; they articulate a solution that is aligned to the customer’s needs; they deliver CX that is aligned to their brand promise; they deliver consistent CX across all channels.  To deliver the right messages and consistent multi-channel CX, there had to be effective alignment and empowered collaboration between Sales, Marketing, Service and Product Management.  When Marketing and Sales are tightly aligned with their customer, great things happen.   How to accelerate your Marketing & Sales revenue collaboration.

 

Maximizing Paid Media ROI With Account-Based Marketing

Does your B2B Marketing have real-time technology to  focus more on targeted accounts and their buyer team members, and less on individual leads?

Learn how B2B Marketing can re-deploy a portion of their Paid Media Budget into Account-Based Marketing display ads to increase media impact, ROI and revenue. How to accelerate your Marketing & Sales revenue collaboration.

 

Korn Ferry/ Miller Heiman Group

What is your sales win rate?  Sales organizations could win 15% more deals by tightly aligning their Sales process to the Buyer’s purchasing process.  

Even “average” Sales organizations could win 15% more deals by improving alignment. How to accelerate sales and productivity.

 

Increasing Marketing’s Revenue Contribution

Is your B2B Marketing organization focusing more on generating revenue and less on generating sales leads of uncertain quality? 

By improving Marketing & Sales Alignment, and by focusing on converting leads to customers, they will be able to more clearly demonstrate real revenue contribution. How to accelerate your revenue contribution and ROI.

    

Accelerating Revenue With Account-Based Marketing

Why is Account Based Marketing (ABM) NOT delivering accelerated revenue? 81% B2B Marketing have adopted ABM. 57% B2B Marketers claim that Sales and Marketing are fully aligned (Flipmyfunnel Study). 85%-97% B2B Marketers achieve higher ROI than other marketing activities (Altera, ITSMA studies).

So where is the revenue growth? Our modern marketing strategy seems to be grounded in 1997! Most of the measures of ROI are focused on the number of account leads generated per additional Marketing dollar spent, not the amount of revenue dollars generated per additional Marketing dollar spent. In fact, 62% B2BMarketing do not measure marketing activities taking place in the middle of the funnel and 80% B2BMarketing do not have dedicated tools to track multi-touch attribution. Passing leads between internal functions is not the kind of Marketing and Sales “alignment” that will accelerate revenue from buyers. To accelerate revenue, Sales and Marketing leadership must align their functional sales/marketing strategies to accelerate buyer action throughout the buyer’s entire purchasing journey/life-cycle. 

 

Korn Ferry/ Miller Heiman Group

Why is Sales Enablement NOT accelerating sales? Numerous studies show that better aligned Sales organizations deliver increased revenue, and more companies are adopting sales force enablement as a discipline, yet quota attainment continues to decline (55.8% in 2016).

Sales Enablement is supposed to be a strategic, cross-functional discipline designed to increase sales results and productivity, but is that what we’re really implementing today? It appears we are currently focused more on improving Sales processes WITHIN the Sales organization, rather than improving revenue growth processes BETWEEN Sales and others. The top priority for Sales Enablement groups in 2016 was to increase revenue, however, enabling collaboration was a priority for only 16.5% of Sales Enablement groups and only 21% of Sales Enablement had a formal process for collaboration. To achieve consistent sales acceleration, Sales and Marketing leadership must align their functional sales/marketing strategies into an integrated revenue strategy, enabling Sales and Marketing specialists to collaborate on joint execution of these common strategies throughout the entire buyer journey.   

 

Why Didn’t They Buy?

How can we accelerate  B2B Sales? Win Rates We need to sell and market to every member of the buyer team, but in the end, the project will or will not get approved depending upon who is pushing it, and that person is NOT necessarily the highest ranking member on the team.

In 90% of the deals there is just one dominant buyer team member involved in the decision, and, in 89% of the decisions the recommendation of that dominant member prevails.  We have a 90%+ chance of winning the deal if, as an integral part of our updated sales process, we identify this person, win them over, and collaborate with them to ensure the buyer team reaches a consensus to proceed.  

 

Product/Market Fit and Go-to-Market

How can we accelerate Product Revenue and Profit? Product Market Fit Unfortunately, 40%-75% of new products fail to achieve their financial projections. It requires a team effort, and if we …. Sales, Marketing, Product Management … do not get the product/market fit right, then we can not get the Go-to-Market Plan right either.

Ask the hard questions WELL BEFORE any product launch: Do we understand the Ideal Customer Profile, their compelling business problem, and how they make decisions. Do we understand the Ideal Partner Profile that will help us reach those customers. Do we have a Compelling Value Proposition for our ideal customer. If we can’t figure out how to win an ideal customer, then we will struggle to accelerate product revenue and profit.

 

Social Media Marketing ROI

How can we demonstrate Marketing ROI to the C-suite for  Social Media Marketing?  How much additional revenue and margin dollars could the company generate for every additional dollar of Marketing budget?

When it comes to social media marketing, most marketing departments struggle to answer that question. Only 21% Marketers measure social media success based on conversion to revenue. 79% Marketers continue to measure social success in terms of likes, shares, re-tweets, impression, and reach. We need to partner with Sales throughout the buyer journey to drive incremental revenue and margin dollars, and a great place to start is to align social media marketing actions with social selling actions.

 

The High-Impact Sales Manager

How can we accelerate B2B Sales? Sales Management. One option is to turn the sales manager into a sales multiplier.

The top 20% of Sales organizations have more than 75% of their Sales reps achieving quota, 65% of their Sales managers spending more than 20% of their time coaching, and spend much more in sales manager training than everyone else. 

 

The Customer in Context

How can Marketing accelerate B2B Sales? Customers-Preferred Communication Channels. Customers don’t expect a fancy omni-channel experience, BUT, they do expect us to respond on the channels that are important to them at different stages of their buying journey.

For B2B Marketing & Sales, it’s no longer good enough to simply send 100 potential customers a whitepaper or webinar invite. “If they say they need a phone number, they’re saying they also need someone who answers that phone, who knows a bit about me, knows about my experiences and my engagement and doesn’t treat me like a stranger.”

 

Understanding Selling Challenges

How can we accelerate B2B Sales? Team Selling. Team selling is a critical ingredient in winning over B2B Buyer Teams, yet, a top challenge cited by sellers is knowledge about how to team-sell effectively and helping buyer teams combat their status quo. “The challenges involve alignment of message, breaking down silos, and forming an effective partnership.”

 

 

Four Marketing Strategies That Can Accelerate Sales

How can Marketing accelerate B2B Sales? Performance Marketing. 

85% Marketers could increase the conversion rate of Marketing Qualified Leads Into B2B Sales By Up To 25% they implemented best practices for all four of these techniques: rigorous journey mapping; sophisticated lead scoring; standardized lead hand-off; and coordinated up-sell efforts.

The Need For Better Collaboration

How can we accelerate B2B Sales? Sales  Collaboration.  Sales Teams are ready for better alignment and collaboration between Marketing, Service and Sales. “Collaboration is crucial to streamlining the sales process and ensuring customer success.”

However, effective alignment/collaboration will not happen until the Marketing leader AND the Sales leader agree it’s crucial enough to their success that they start collaborating.

 

The Emerging Importance of Personas

How can we accelerate B2B Sales? Target Buyer Personas. Target markets are for Strategic Planning. Target market buyers are for Revenue Generation Strategy.   This infographic clarifies personas.

If your Sales, Marketing and Product launch revenue activities are still focused on just target markets, and not target market buyer personas, then you are not maximizing your revenues.

 

Digital Transformation: How B2B Leaders Are Aligning Marketing To The New Buyer

The Digital Transformation process for B2B leaders starts with getting the Go-To-Market strategy right, then enhancing or building out core marketing capabilities.  How to accelerate Marketing reenue contribution and ROI.