It Is Time to Rethink (and Redo) B2B Marketing and Sales

It Is Time to Rethink (and Redo) B2B Marketing and Sales

Oct 7, 2022 | Insight

Many organizations are suffering from a fundamental misalignment between how they market and sell and how buyers buy or would prefer to buy. The underlying problem is that most B2B marketing and sales teams operate in a siloed, linear manner.

First, marketing engages prospective customers early in their purchase journey and qualifies their readiness for sales engagement through content nurturing. In practice, once those leads have been designated “marketing qualified leads”, individual sales reps and supporting pre-sales consultants take over, pursuing those leads and giving way to in-person or increasingly virtual interactions.

We do not oftentimes challenge this dynamic that, to some extent, ignores the fact that B2B buying has evolved to a far more digital-first, multi-channel buying behavior.

Multi-channel Buying in Practice

Today’s B2B buyers rely significantly on digital channels, information, and insights to enable progress through their entire buying journey. Particularly the supplier’s own website and the relevance and value of the information and insights presented there play a pivotal role. In fact, they play an equally important role as the supplier’s sales reps for the buyer to gather the information needed to complete critical buying tasks, such as problem identification, solution exploration, requirements formulation, and partner selection. This, in turn, has resulted in a shrinking window of direct interaction with prospects, and it is increasingly challenging many sales leaders and sales reps today.

Given these developments, why do we so often end up hiring more field sales reps as a response to pursuing our growth objectives instead of approaching this more holistically and enabling optimizing the whole buying journey through well-thought out multi-channel marketing AND sales. One of the most frequently heard arguments is that “our customers cannot buy complex solutions without sales rep and pre-sales consultant involvement”. To a certain degree, that is a valid point, but it does not mean that those customers would not prefer to do so if it were possible or more feasible. In addition, this kind of persistent thinking can result in a situation where a more digitally savvy competitor or disruptor finds the way to bridge the “interaction gap” between suppliers and customers.

What You Can Do, What You Should Do

Identify and accept the new buying reality.
Your primary job is to help your customers’ buyers and lower the threshold for buying. This is both an information challenge and a sales challenge – or an information opportunity and a sales opportunity. This is about providing your customers and prospects with the information and insights they most urgently need and seek through the channels they most clearly prefer. Given the fact that much of this information is available online, sales reps are no longer the channel to your customers. They are simply one of the many channels. Customers may seek sales rep and pre-sales consultant input early in the process to explore solutions and alternatives, but they may return to digital after this to further build their requirements, rendering the siloed, linear approach to marketing and sales almost irrelevant.

Identify your customers’ buying journeys and their most common buying tasks.
This is a key step to avoid traditional marketing and sales silos where almost everything is mapped to internal processes and based on an inside-out view. Instead, your insight into your customers’ buying journeys, complex solution purchases, and their most critical buying tasks help you build back from a careful mapping of these journeys.

Align your marketing and sales with how your customers buy or would prefer to buy.
We are seeing an increasing number of organizations establishing and reorganizing their legacy marketing, sales, and service organizations to specifically support each and every critical buying task from learning and discovery to purchase, adoption, and support. These moves also aim for consolidating otherwise duplicative efforts across traditional functional silos and realigning their legacy commercial operations and its related processes with the new, brave world of B2B buying.

 

What it really means to leverage insights to navigate the exponential change

What it really means to leverage insights to navigate the exponential change

May 17, 2022 | Business Innovation, Business Strategy, Insight

Much has been written about the use of customer and market insights instead of simply generating them. Leading brands typically excel at understanding their customers and markets for developing strategies for sustainable growth, creating superior customer experiences, driving continuous innovation, and increasing the efficiency and impact of their marketing and sales activities.

They see insights as generating the fact base that will enable them, for example, to optimize their offering portfolio, inform their innovation programs, focus their marketing and sales programs, or setting the right prices. Insights reveal what your customers value, to what extent your company delivers it, how customer and market requirements evolve, and which tactics you can deploy to improve your performance relative to your competition.

Based on our consulting engagements and the impact analysis of our work, we dare to say that organizations leveraging customer and market insights typically outperform their peers in two key areas: sales growth and gross margin. Two of the key questions that we often get in this context relate to the key success factors for excelling at this and understanding the relationship between strategy, insights, and competences. So, here are our selected thoughts on the topics.

 

Insight engines are ingrained in today’s business strategy and stakeholder experiences

The insight engine drives an evidence- and facts-based understanding of your customers’ needs or motivations and – more broadly – of the drivers, trends, and directions of your business environment. It powers business decisions and strategy. It also informs your marketing decisions and activities and sales processes. In summary, the key capability of the insight engine is to produce all the data required for business strategy and for powering more proactive, efficient, and predictive marketing, sales, and customer service.

Treating the insight engine as a pure technical set of capabilities results in an inevitable failure. Above all, it should be seen as a strategic capability including a number of well-known core competencies that can be divided into data, operational, and people competences. Most of these competencies are related to business acumen, organizational culture (building a data-driven culture as part of this), and ways of working that in today’s business can represent a pivotal foundation for competitive differentiation.

In summary, you need to understand what customers really want, what they are likely to want in the future, to what extent they are getting it from your company today, and how you can keep them coming back for more.

 

The insight engine is powered by competencies 

Competencies represent a pivotal set of building blocks when it comes to bridging the gap between data and strategy, i.e., turning raw data into evidence- and facts-based business decisions. More specifically, these are the most critical core competencies required in insight today:

  • Data competencies. This is about the ability to extract value from disparate data sources by generating a single-market, single-customer view that is shared and used across your entire business. Data aggregation, data enrichment, data synthesis, and data activation are the key concepts here.
  • Operational competencies. Increasingly, this is about a relentless focus on imagining the future and the idea of experimentation. The forward-looking orientation focuses on anticipating and testing future opportunities. Experimentation leverages a test-and-learn approach to identify new business opportunities, inform decisions, and optimize your processes.
  • People competencies. This is oftentimes the most diverse and challenging set of competencies. For example, business acumen and business literacy are critical foundational competences in a sense that customer and market understanding are of very limited value to the business, if it does not inform a business decision. The power of story telling should not be underestimated either, as it is related to the ability to communicate insights in a usable, meaningful, and engaging manner.

In summary, leveraging insights is a holistic game. It is about the ability to integrate data, make insights-led decision recommendations, run and scale experiments, and communicate to the business (through the power of story telling). There is oftentimes a big gap between aspiration and reality. Bridging this gap is, of course, completely doable and very critical, as it takes the right strategy and insights to navigate the exponential change we face in our world today.

Dare you try? Based on our experience, we dare say that creating a corporate-level or business unit-specific strategic plan or a marketing and sales playbook that is relevant, insights-driven, and forward-looking and that also considers the concrete competencies and other relevant “enablers” required for its successful roll-out and execution will show up in your top-line and bottom-line growth.