🕵🏻♂️ B2B Marketing Function 2025
How to build a B2B marketing function in 2025 that influences the whole buyer journey
Two weeks ago on the “Pilot ABM” webinar we asked 700 B2B marketing leaders what’s their biggest ABM bottleneck?
Here are the replies.
You can clearly see the pattern:
No support from sales and leadership → No trust to marketing → No budget → Broad ICP and wishlist targeting to drive pipeline through lead gen program → Playbooks misaligned with the buyer journey.
Result: missed revenue targets and blaming each other.
The truth is that it’s not the ABM bottleneck only. It’s a lack of marketing function that is aligned with the buyer journey. There are miserable chances any marketing program will work until you fix with your leadership and sales the fundamental issue.
Today we want to share:
5-step process we use to align marketing & sales with the buying process of our target accounts
How to recreate the buyer journey - the must have input
How to define channels and programs to influence the buyer journey
Let’s dive in.
The goal is to ensure that marketing, sales, CS and RevOps work together to influence the entire buying process, create pipeline and drive revenue.
GET ACCESS TO A NEW FULL-FUNNEL ABM 2.0 COURSE
What's included with the course access:
12 modules covering step-by-step ABM strategy development: goal decomposition, ICP, account list building, ABM team, warm-up and activation playbooks, reporting, scaling ABM and building a cohesive ABM & demand gen function.
Short explanation videos and "how to" examples. We believe it's better one time to see a practical example then listen to the theory hundreds of times.
5 orchestrated and ready-to-use ABM playbooks and a detailed explanation
Report dashboard for 4 types of ABM programs: new revenue, pipeline acceleration, expansion and churn prevention
Live case studies and examples of the campaigns we implemented with the clients of Fullfunnel.io in the past few years
17 templates to simplify your ABM strategy launch: ICP, revenue analysis, intent data tracking, account warm-up cadence, customer research, account scoring and prioritization, ABM budget planning and forecasting, account planning, reports, personalized offers, and many more.
Planning & Presenting a Pilot ABM Program to Execs and Sales Framework
Minimal viable stack recommendation and guidelines on how to use it to avoid ramping up budget and being pressured to show ROI for the purchased $50k software
How to build B2B marketing function involving leadership and sales
1. GTM STRATEGY.
Schedule a GTM strategy workshop with your leadership and sales to nail down:
Goals and objectives based on revenue metrics and sales pipeline velocity
Focus market segments and clusters
Marketing message
Narrative (with what strategic challenges you want your product to be associated with)
For each of the points, make sure to dig deeper and ask WHY?
Why these goals? Why these segments? How do we know this message is appealing?
Make sure everybody is on the same page.
2. CUSTOMER RESEARCH.
GTM strategy without customer research and historical growth analysis is a FRAUD.
A lot of B2B companies prefer to spend months:- running endless debates about what marketing programs to run or not to run
debating what marketing message resonates and what doesn't
copying competitors or thought leaders assuming that "if that works for them, it will work for us"
...without ever talking to customers and their ICPs.
They end up with "random acts of marketing" based on "gut feeling", "goodwill" or the false assumption that "the grass is greener in the neighborhood".
They fraud themselves and rob themselves of revenue.
Customer research is not a "nice to have element" for a successful GTM. It is a fundamental operation that should be executed by GTM teams REGULARLY.
Here are 7 steps to run research to inject customer insights into your GTM.
*Hope you can understand my handwritten drawings 😁
1. 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐭𝐡 𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐩𝐢𝐩𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐲.
Look at revenue metrics in different segments and decide what you want to improve.
E.g. We see ACV and # of sales-qualified opportunities in the healthcare segment were constantly decreasing in the last 10 months.
Why does it happen, and how can we improve it?
2. 𝐃𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡.
a) We want to interview top-10 recent customers with a lower ACV to understand why they purchased less compared to similar customers?
b) We want to interview top-30 dream accounts to understand what triggers their buyer journey and does our marketing message resonate with them.
3. 𝐃𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭.
Are you going to run 1–1 calls, surveys or a mix?
Prepare in advance.
4. 𝐃𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐲𝐨𝐮'𝐥𝐥 "𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐦 𝐮𝐩" 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬.
How are you going to engage with target respondents to ensure most of them will accept your invite?
5. Define research timeline.
Make sure it’s not too long to avoid losing the momentum. Prioritize interviews with accounts where you have a good relationship and can schedule a call relatively fast.
6. Prepare questions.
Here are 5 groups of questions we recommend asking:
a. Buying triggers.
What leads them to start looking for solutions like yours?
b. Research process.
How do they evaluate vendors? What information are they looking for?
c. Decision-making process.
What influences their decision?
Who is involved in the purchase process?
What questions do they ask?
d. Product value and impact on jobs-to-be-done & KPIs.
Look at before/after and highlight tangible improvements of KPIs your Champions care about.
e. Educational process.
What platforms & communities do they use to learn?
Who do they follow?
*You can see the entire questionnaire we use here: https://fullfunnel.io/ideal-customer-profile/
7. Schedule a meeting with leadership and sales to prioritize collected insights, re-create buyer journey and plan marketing and sales programs.
During the meeting:
Rank the collected insights
Brainstorm what actions you should take
Prioritize all actions and programs by impact on your goal, intensity, budget, time to value, resources, etc.
*Tune in this episode of Full-Funnel Live where we dive deeper into customer research.
Drive pipeline THIS quarter with full-funnel ABM programs.
If any of these challenges sound familiar:
You are aligned in theory with sales but don’t do anything in practice aside from receiving wish lists from sales and sharing with them your marketing plan. In reality, you work in silos and miss the revenue targets and are being pressured by your executives.
You understand that your marketing and sales playbook is broken (mqls, gated content) but despite many attempts you don’t know how to fix it
Your outbound, paid ads and organic pipeline drastically decreased while CAC increased mostly because most of your market is problem unaware and not buying.
You lack brand awareness among target accounts and sales can’t get even a reply.
You clearly see that you're already behind your revenue targets
We can help.
We'll develop a custom full-funnel ABM strategy aligned with your resources, budget and stack and execute it together to drive results THIS quarter.
3. RE-CREATE BUYER JOURNEY SCENARIOS.
You don't sell to companies, you sell to specific people. They have different KPIs, reasons to buy and decision-making processes.
Analyze all visible digital touchpoints with key customers.
Interview Account Owners about deal history.
Combine insights with customer research and visualize the buyer journey for the most important buying committee roles:
Champions
Decision-makers
Influencers
Blockers
Power Users
4. CORE MARKETING PROGRAMS AND MOTIONS.
This step is vital. This is where you map out insights and ideas from customer research to buyer journey.
All ideas without execution make your research a cost and a fancy deck that makes only the marketing team feel proud.
Map out different marketing and sales activities across the buying process that help to:
Create awareness and attract attention
Generate demand for your product
Capture buying triggers and high-intent signals to start engaging with the buying committee
Enable buyers to sell your product internally
Accelerate time to value with your product
Upsell and cross-sell to other units
You don't need 50 different tactics. Make sure that amount of programs (we recommend 1–2 programs per journey stage) is aligned with your team’s capacity.
*Check our guide on planning long-term marketing programs:
5. MATCH YOUR TEAM WITH PROGRAMS.
Assign the roles to run these programs and define the necessary skillset. Ensure cross-functional collaboration.
Here are a few tips:
Define a program owner. When everybody is responsible, then nobody is.
Create detailed playbooks - don't end with "let's post on LinkedIn"
Define target metrics
Set up report frequency and regular team meetings
Add prioritized programs to your marketing plan
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Last notes.
This diagram might be perceived as a linear buyer journey which is obviously not true. I wanted to describe how to align B2B marketing function with different buyer journey stages.
The B2B buyer journey is not linear. Your buyers might skip steps or repeat some steps.
Check this guide where we interviewed our client to describe their complete buyer journey.
Listen to Full-Funnel Live - Building your 2025marketing function
*If you want to attend the next live episode, sign up here to receive an invite. Usually, we host them every Wednesday at 4 pm CET (Central Europe) - 10 am ET (Eastern Time).
In the new episode of Fullfunnel Live we'll review the marketing function and answer community questions:
What is one thing that the market/ clients think they are doing right but in fact they are getting it wrong, and what should they be doing differently?
Top tips for achieving alignment with sales if it is vast and global.
Are there any tools or apps that can help identifying the buyer journey?