By Business owners invest thousands of dollars annually on B2B sales and marketing campaigns designed to generate leads. Many, however, end up feeling disappointed by meager outcomes.
A successful marketing and sales plan must achieve well-defined objectives, such as opportunities generated or deals closed. Planning and implementing a strategy that produces high-quality leads is no easy task. However, with the appropriate insights, you can avoid making expensive mistakes and ensure your B2B company is headed in the right direction.
Why Your B2B Sales & Marketing Isn’t Working
For a business to scale and generate revenue, effective B2B lead generation is essential. Here are some of the reasons why your current B2B sales and marketing strategy likely isn't generating as many leads as planned.
Targeting the wrong audience
Identifying your ideal customers is the first step in a typical B2B lead generation campaign. Business leaders can experience confusion and frustration, however, when they don’t conduct thorough enough research or develop too many potential buyer personas and end up missing the mark entirely.
Solution
Although assuming your target market is easy to do, assumptions don’t prevail in the marketplace.
Do a comprehensive study on your targeted customer before validating your findings through testing. By digging into their psyche and learning about their pain points and preferences, marketers and business owners can more effectively engage prospects and nurture leads.
Ineffective marketing-sales alignment
B2B sales and marketing don’t happen in a vacuum. You need alignment between both campaigns to effectively drive leads through the funnel.
To translate potential customers' expectations into a successful marketing plan to attract more leads, your sales and marketing teams must have feedback loops and other structured processes in place. If there is no clear communication channel, you risk continuing the pattern of exerting effort while receiving little response.
Solution
When B2B technology companies have sales and marketing tightly aligned, they are more likely to generate sales qualified leads and achieve higher rates of conversion. Research also shows that highly-aligned companies can achieve up to a 34% increase in revenue year over year.
Read our blog to learn how to streamline communications between the marketing and sales departments.
Ad hoc or “reactive” strategy
A clear strategy is needed before implementing any digital marketing tactic. Exclusively leveraging ad hoc strategies is a poor marketing approach that produces few leads.
At Relequint, we refer to companies using ad hoc strategies as “reactive.” You can refer to the chart below for an overview of the Relequint Marketing Maturity Model.
The Relequint Marketing Maturity Model
| Reactive | Proactive | Integrated | Catalyzed | |
| Organizational Structure | Roles and responsibilities are undefined. Functions are siloed by department or channel; individuals operate with little to no cross-functional collaboration. Communication is managed per function, leading to one-off and reactive marketing efforts. | Roles, responsibilities, and functions are defined. There is some cross-functional collaboration between departments and channels. The tactic, communication, and measurement being used by teams is often still siloed. | Roles, responsibilities, and team handoffs are operationalized. Members of the marketing team are in sync and maintain cross-functional relationships tied to strategic organizational business goals. The team has the ability to shift to accommodate growth into new channels and/or manage an increase in marketing activity. | The marketing team operates in a unified, adaptable environment and is aligned across channels and functions. There is a significant focus on offering integrated marketing that meets organizational objectives and engages target buyers. The team is held accountable for revenue generation. |
| Marketing Technology (MarTech) | Technology is limited to a marketing automation platform with standard utilization, including manual integrations to other core systems, such as managing and uploading data from spreadsheets. Data quality is poor and typically below 50% marketable. | Investment is made to procure marketing technology systems, including marketing automation, analytics, or a CRM. However, manual processes are still used to ensure data and reporting are connected. As a result, there is a high likelihood of invalid data entering the marketing automation platform. | Many technology platforms are in use, but they aren’t fully integrated. Marketing and sales operate from the same data sets, leading to operational efficiency and trust between departments. Data is better connected, leading to an increase in available marketing data. | All systems in use are fully integrated to empower repeatable and scalable campaigns, provide valid and marketable data, deliver relevant insights, and attribute impact to revenue goals. This also allows the team to test new tactics in response to shifts in marketing trends. |
| Marketing Strategy | The primary focus is to generate leads. The marketing organization is driven by siloed tactics or campaigns that are reactionary and focused on top-of-funnel metrics (e.g., number of inbound leads generated, impressions, or page views) with a lack of cross-functional alignment on KPIs or how to use insights to form campaigns. | The marketing team uses an account-based marketing strategy and is focused on generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). The team is reactive to sales to deliver different tactics or campaigns, leaving little time for strategic collaboration. | The marketing team is focused on more integrated marketing tactics driven by business revenue goals. The core metric is the number of opportunities generated. The team is aligned on outbound tactics and has an integrated marketing approach. | The marketing team is focused on the buyer’s journey and is proactive in developing programs to reach buyers across all channels. The team is focused on driving growth and generating measurable results that impact bottom line. |
Solution
To transition from ad hoc or “reactive” to a more mature B2B sales and marketing strategy, center your efforts are these key objectives:
- Identify all team functions and outline the relationships between them
- Optimize and rationalize your tech stack
- Define (or re-define) mission-critical processes and workflows
- Understand your current customers better
- Build a diverse team of analysts, strategists, content managers, SEO specialists, sales reps, and other marketing professionals
Achieve More Mature Sales & Marketing
Marketers and business owners need to be intentional about their B2B sales and marketing to get the most from their efforts. We hope these proposed solutions help you achieve marketing maturity for your organization.
If you need help reaching the next level of growth and are reevaluating your inbound marketing strategies so that you can drive measurable ROI, contact Relequint.
