Full-Funnel B2B marketing function and cross-functional teams
How to go from siloed sales and marketing to full-funnel cross-functional teams that are focused on pipeline and revenue generation: change management required, KPIs, alignment meetings.
A lot of B2B companies are seeing declining inbound and demand generation pipeline. They try to change narrative, lay off marketing and sales people, and change vendors without realizing what causes a decline.
In today’s newsletter we’ll cover:
How siloed marketing and sales functions impact pipeline
How to create cross-functional full-funnel teams FAST without significant changes in the company's structure
How to adjust the KPIs in the full-funnel team to focus everybody on revenue and pipeline generation
Where do we see in the marketing org chart functions like website, social media, paid search?
What’s the right level of reporting out to stakeholders across GTM/revenue teams?
What are the first and key steps in transitioning to a cross-functional team model?
Recording of the episode about developing full-funnel function (watch here)
Before we’ll dive in, a quick announcement.
How siloed marketing and sales functions impact pipeline.
Here is how horizontal GTM (go-to-market) misalignment leads to missed revenue targets.
Different marketing and sales functions receive their own KPIs that are not aligned with the revenue target. They develop their own programs and pursue own KPIs instead of a joint GTM strategy.
They develop their own programs to hit KPIs. In most cases, different units are not aware of the programs executed by others. Here is an example.
Content - traffic
Demand gen - MQLs
Field marketing - Sign ups
Client success - NPS
SDRs - # of lead gen touches & meetings booked
AEs - pipeline won
Instead of synchronization and joint planning, marketing and sales prioritize handoff.
Nobody pays attention to how their programs contribute to revenue aside from Account Executives.
Until a B2B company hits their revenue targets, nobody questions this broken model.
But when the targets are missed, the blaming and fingerpointing battle starts.
Here is a real case we saw at one of our clients.
Marketing team generated 16k MQLs in 2023, and only 0.2% of them became closed won.
Who is guilty?
No surprises sales treat marketing as a non-revenue cost center and are going nuts seeing marketing teams celebrating MQLs quota when revenue targets are missed.
We could have an endless conversation about what’s broken, but the goal is to define the solution. Let’s discuss it.
Become a better B2B marketer
If you are a B2B marketer, your core KPIs are really simple: sales-qualified opportunities and revenue. Period.
To generate sales-qualified opportunities and influence revenue metrics such as ACV, deal close-rate and sales cycle length, you need to run demand generation, account-based marketing, lead nurturing, deal expansion and sales enablement campaigns.
It might be frustrating, especially, if you don’t have a prior background or experience of selling to mid-size/enterprise accounts.
So isn’t it time you stopped guessing at every turn… and started running these campaigns with a proven process, frameworks and techniques?
Select on-demand self-paced B2B online training courses to ramp up your skills and accelerate revenue at your company:
Full-Funnel Academy (includes lifetime access to all our courses, private community and events)
Necessary change management to fix the broken playbook and shift to cross-functional teams.
Here is the necessary change management.
1. Develop a change management team.
Create a change management group including marketing, sales and key stakeholders.
This group accept that horizontal GTM misalignment is a fundamentally broken playbook because it's not aligning teams on revenue generation, and is motivated to change things.
2. Define GTM challenges.
Analyze pipeline, lost deals, failed programs and define GTM challenges.
Sales can't even get a reply because of lack of vendor awareness
Prospects don’t understand product value, etc.
To initiate the change everybody should agree that the defined challenges should be solved.
3. Set up realistic goals.
Impatience and wrong expectations kill a lot of marketing initiatives. A lot of companies shut new programs down in a few months because of lack of pipeline.
You can't get a baby in one month by getting 9 women pregnant.
Look at the sales pipeline velocity and revenue metrics.
Analyze what worked before.
Define low-hanging fruits and realistic targets.
4. Develop a pilot cross-functional team with a shared GTM strategy.
Pilot team should work on a full-funnel GTM strategy that is aligned with the buyer journey, including:
Focus on high-priority market segments
Define a narrow ICP including the buying committee and their jobs-to-be-done
Research the buyer journey and the necessary change management for accounts that are not in the market
Define channels of creating awareness, including thought leaders and communities
Develop an approach to engage and connect with the target accounts in these channels
Create and distribute expert content to nurture target buyers and generate demand
Running progressive profiling and account research to develop personalized offers
Track high-intent and engagement spikes to initiate product conversations
Every unit should influence the buying process, pipeline generation and expansion, not focusing on the vanity metrics. All teams need to work on the same segments, using the same content topics and messaging.
Check out our B2B marketing strategy course to get a step-by-step framework to develop a full-funnel GTM.
Core units insisde the team are.
a. Demand generation.
The main goal of the demand function is to drive demand and inbound inquiries. Responsibilities:
Run an "always-on" calendar of demand generation activities (social, communities, co-creation, guest contribution, events...). Ideally, the team has all the necessary skills to avoid bottlenecks (content, event management, subject-matter expertise)
Remove friction & capture demand (in collaboration with marketing ops and ABM teams)
Nurture flows, progressive profiling (in collaboration with marketing ops and ABM teams)
b. Account-based marketing and sales.
The main goal of the ABM function is to drive net-new, renewal and expansion revenue with strategic accounts. Responsibilities:
• Works with PM on vertical ICP and messaging
• Work with demand and marketing ops to source intent & engagement data
• Account research and value proposition mapping
• Works with sales on account expansion & renewal
• Enabling sales w/ social content, event warm-up and follow-up and co-creation
• Account warm-up plays
• Account activation plays
Check out our Full-funnel ABM course where we show how to run these activities.
c. Marketing Operations.
Marketing operations provide the backbone infrastructure and tech stack, and make sure that:
• The key data, metrics and report are available to anyone in the team
• The digital buyer journey is as frictionless as possible
d. Collaboration with sales.
The main teams are collaborating with sales and product management and ABM. The key alignment happens on the level of GTM, and the shared playbooks to nurture and activate target buyers.
Drive pipeline THIS quarter with a 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.
5. Make a sanity “lead gen check” 😁
It's easy to play with marketing slang and call any program "ABM", "Demand Gen", "Brand Marketing". It's hard to maintain them the right way.
Make sure your programs are aligned with the buyer journey, including:
Creating awareness
Engaging and connecting with the buying committee
In-depth thought leadership content
Nurturing in channels buyers use for education and research
Personalization based on account research
Avoid volume games, lead gen tactics and prioritize engagement with accounts that are likely to become sales opportunities.
6. Define right metrics.
You can't measure brand awareness or demand generation by leads only. Not every program or piece of content should generate a click or convert.
Aside from the revenue report, define leading indicators that demonstrate the program traction and soft brand metrics:
Message-Buyer Fit.
Content impact & relevancy.
Brand awareness among target accounts.
Friction in the buying process.
Let’s break them down.
a. Revenue Metrics.
Revenue
Sales opportunities / pipeline
Sales pipeline velocity
Revenue metrics: ACV (average contract value), sales cycle length, win rates.
Hard revenue metrics demonstrate revenue trajectory and likelihood to hit your targets.
b. Soft Metrics.
Soft metrics show if your GTM foundations are strong.
Message-Buyer Fit.
Do your buyers understand what your product does?
How is it different from the competition?
How well it solves their challenges or helps with jobs-to-be-done?
Look at win rates, won & lost reasons, and sales cycle length.
Content impact & relevancy.
Does your content help to accelerate sales cycle?
Create awareness among target accounts?
Generate inbound opportunities?
Brand awareness among target accounts.
Do ICP-fit accounts visit your website?
Do they sign up for your events?
Do the buying committee members reply to our Sales team?
Friction in the buying process.
Can buyers easily find all the necessary information they need before having a call with sales?
How quickly buyers can get a demo or access a test environment/try a product?
c. Leading Indicators.
Leading metrics demonstrate the short-term efficiency of your current marketing programs.
Target Account Engagement
How many target accounts visited your high-intent key pages: pricing, product tour, integrations, demo?
Account Penetration & # of engaged buyers
How many buying committee members from the target accounts engage with your content?
Have conversations with sales?
Join your events?
Profiled Accounts.
How many accounts have a known challenge that marketing and sales were able to identify through marketing activites?
Repeat buyer engagement.
Here is a leading indicators report we usually track.
Ditch vanity metrics (MQLs, CPL, etc.) and develop for every unit their own leading and lagging indicators that influence revenue.
Switch from marketing/sales-sourced revenue to ALLBOUND revenue.
Replace the first-click / last-click attribution model with a blended attribution:
Self-attribution
Digital analytics
Customer interviews
To make right decisions about what influences the buying process.
7. Set up joint planning and reviewing meetings to maintain the change.
To make cross-functional teams working together , make sure you’ve scheduled these 4 sync meetings.
1. Weekly joint planning.
Agenda:
Leading indicators report for every joint campaign
Wins: what moves us forward?
Challenges: what’s holding us back?
2. Pipeline review meetings.
Agenda:
Leading indicators report
Target account engagement, updates, and insights collected
Next actions per account
What accounts should be removed from the program
What accounts should be added to the program
3. Quarterly sales & marketing planning.
Agenda:
Sales pipeline velocity review
Revenue report
Retrospective of all joint campaigns
Next quarter planning: goals and metrics
4. GTM strategy meeting (our Step 2-4).
Depending on the maturity of your organization, host this meeting at least twice a year. Copy the agenda from steps 2-4.
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Marketing and sales silos always lead to a declining pipeline, it's just a question of time.
Changing people, hiring agencies, buying more expensive stack won't help until you fix the fundamental misalignment.
The Ultimate Guide to Develop a Full Funnel B2B Marketing Function
In the recent episode of Full-Funnel Live we covered the topics above and answered the most popular community questions:
How to get started to align sales and marketing in a sales-driven org that sees marketing as a support function, and how do you best allocate a small budget to get initial ROI and buy-in?
How do you set up a full funnel from scratch
How can I measure the performance of my Marketing team, which KPIs should be the most important?
Best Strategies and tactics for Sales and Marketing alignment
How the new marketing model can be fully attributed, and how can i track the new model more efficiently
Tune in below.
Sign up for Full-Funnel Live
*If you want to attend the next live episode, sign up here to receive an invite. Usually, we host them every Thursday at 4 pm CET (Central Europe) - 10 am ET (Eastern Time).
Great insights in this post. Aligning sales and marketing is like finding the right groove in a jam session; without it, the tune falls flat. Organizations need to stop pointing fingers and start collaborating tighter to revive that pipeline. It’s time to break down those silos and get everyone singing the same melody. Let's make those metrics count, not just for vanity!
This hits home. MQLs don’t pay the bills revenue does.
When marketing and sales run on different scoreboards, pipeline suffers.