By The B2B market is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Buyers are more aware than ever and demand more value, creating more touchpoints to address on the road to generate revenue and grow your business.
But there is little room to breathe as the market keeps evolving at breakneck speed, leaving most businesses chasing their tails in an unforgiving cycle of reacting to market changes and industry disruption.
To survive and grow, businesses have to make a drastic change to their marketing approach. The traditional approach, where marketing plays a supporting role in sales — a sales enablement strategy — must be revised to remain competitive.
B2B marketing needs to evolve from simply creating awareness or generating interest to a more comprehensive system that addresses the needs of a maturing market. It’s time to move marketing beyond a sales enablement strategy and adapt to this new reality.
The Realities of a Mature Market
The information age has created a market where B2B buyers can access more information and options than ever. With the internet, your prospects can conduct extensive research and compare different products and service offerings quickly.
To distinguish your brand, attract, and retain customers in such a sophisticated marketplace requires more than a capable sales system. Businesses must improve their value proposition across the board, from product development to customer support.
Market maturity and sophisticated buyers demand a mature marketing approach that involves:
- Identifying and catering to modern buyer behavior
- Removing redundancies the in the marketing process
- Creating an exceptional and consistent customer experience
An isolated marketing effort focusing solely on brand awareness and lead generation falls short of these demands. This is true even if you have alignment with your sales team.
So, how can businesses move beyond a sales enablement strategy and better leverage marketing to achieve their business goals?
Creating a Marketing System for Revenue Enablement
For a company to meet the needs of a maturing market and reach its revenue target, it needs to employ a collaborative marketing approach that aligns the goal of different departments towards customer satisfaction in a revenue enablement model. This model requires the following:
A Focus on Customer Experience
Hyper-informed buyers mean prospects seek to extract the most value from their transactions with you. Not to mention that satisfied buyers are returning buyers who become advocates for your brand.
Fortunately, improving your value proposition doesn't always mean you need to create new or disruptive products or services. Giving customers a remarkable experience is an easier way to distinguish yourself from the competition and build loyalty and brand authority. A focus on customer experience calls for:
- A personalized experience that addresses your customer's needs and solves specific pain points.
- Convenient and seamless experience across all channels and touchpoints. You want to make it easy for customers to buy from you and remove barriers, such as confusing content or unnecessary third parties.
- Immediate support resources help customers reach their goals easier and solve problems faster. This includes FAQs, knowledge bases, AI, and live support.
- Customer success ensures proactive engagement to guarantee customer satisfaction and present opportunities for improvement.
In addition, the customer experience has to be consistent across all touchpoints, from your website to your customer service representatives.
Addressing Complex Buyer Behavior
B2B buyers today exhibit behavior that needs to be addressed and accounted for while optimizing your marketing systems.
For example, B2B buyers increasingly rely on digital channels and mobile devices to do research before interacting with brands and vendors. While a sales enablement strategy might react to this trend by integrating an ABM strategy with tailored content for micro verticals, a revenue enablement model would expand further by creating a comprehensive experience across all touchpoints of a buyer's journey, including good delivery, excellent support, and seamless payment processes.
Other modern buyer behavior includes a demand for greater transparency and involvement, a preference for self-service, and a focus on sustainability and social responsibility.
Promoting Collaboration and Alignment
In a revenue enablement model, revenue generation stops being the responsibility of one department. All departments involved in the customer journey must act with a single mindset to provide a holistic customer experience.
It is time to lower the walls and foster a collaborative environment where leaders and their departments communicate more effectively. Aligning the functions and goals of each department towards revenue enablement streamlines processes and makes it easier to meet organizational KPIs and OKRs.
Creating a consistent and personalized customer experience requires companies to expand enablement support from the sales department to every other department involved in the entire customer journey with your brand.
Embracing Data-Driven Marketing Approach
A revenue enablement strategy has more moving parts and details to address than sales enablement alone. This means well-thought-out end-to-end metrics that far exceed intuition and assumptions.
A modern business has to adopt a consistent method of objectively evaluating customer behavior and preferences. This data can be used to improve and optimize marketing strategies.
Investing in a data-driven marketing approach helps to optimize marketing processes, deliver personalized customer experiences, identify new opportunities, and ultimately achieve revenue goals in alignment with the entire organization.
Driving Organization Maturity
Moving your marketing beyond a sales enablement strategy helps you avoid the pitfalls that plague many businesses in increasingly sophisticated markets. Helping the organization mature and align around revenue goals will make you an invaluable leader and change agent. By giving all departments ownership over marketing, sales, product, delivery, service, and more, you are prioritizing the customer experience, which will in turn lead to improved revenue success.
Not sure where to start? Take our Marketing Maturity Assessment to determine your current stage of maturity and the next steps needed to prepare you for revenue enablement and revenue operations alignment.
