🕵🏻♂️ How to build B2B marketing function [Part 2 we/templates]
Where to start and the necessary transformations you need to make
After publishing the previous post about B2B marketing function, we received several inbound inquiries with a similar question:
"We are now at a stage in which my team/organization is looking into how we can transitioning from a traditional lead generation to a cohesive demand generation and AB. Where should we start?".
This transition is one of the hardest things I experienced as a B2B CMO.
It often fails because of 4 main reasons.
Lack of knowledge of how to enable transformation and what should be actually transformed
Not knowing where to start
Resistance to change "the old way of doing things" despite initial support
Today we’ll share:
10 transformation pillars to build a B2B marketing function
Where and how to start the transition from lead gen to demand gen and ABM
10 enterprise sales opps from a pilot ABM program in a real estate sector
Let's dive in!
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Academy includes:
All our B2B marketing courses including ABM playbook, LinkedIn Allbound marketing playbook and 11 more courses that aren't available publicly + upcoming courses on B2B demand generation and marketing and sales alignment.
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Learn more and join the academy here.
10 transformation pillars
Here are 10 transformation pillars to transition from sales-lead and lead gen motion to demand generation and full-funnel marketing.
1. Marketing role.
Necesssary transformation:
From arts & crafts and sales order-takers to a strategic role that drives revenue.
B2B marketing is NOT sales and is NOT lead generation. Nor should it simply have the role of an order-taker.
B2B marketing has a strategic role, is done across the full funnel, and should:
generate awareness and demand in your target market to source pipeline with inbound opportunities,
help sales with demand capturing and supply sales with engaged accounts for further prospecting, nurturing, and activation.
Btw, this also requires a change in a CMO's role from being boardroom warriors and dashboard heroes that delegate and control only to the Change agents that lead by example and actively execute programs with the GTM team in the trenches.
2. GTM Strategy.
There are 2 necessary transformations:
1. From broad ICP and universal positioning to focus on the most promising markets and segments, clearly defined ICP, and a marketing message tailored to the jobs to be done by your target buyers.
2. From funnel-based, linear approach: demand capturing & performance marketing to buyer journey-based full-funnel marketing.
The buyer journey should drive your GTM and marketing programs.
The B2B Buyer journey is not linear. Most of your buyers are not actively buying. The most important buyer research and conversations happen OUTSIDE your funnel (check this episode about the dark social).
Don't expect that automated, templated email and Inmail cadences amplified by multichannel ads will grow your pipeline.
"Leads" result from brand awareness, demand generation, and demand capturing.
3. Demand generation strategy.
Necessary transformation:
From keyword-focused and volume-based mediocre content and corporate press releases to expert content based on the buyer journey, aligned with real buyer challenges and created by in-house SMEs (subject-matter experts).
Make a pause for a second and ask yourself:
What if marketing stepped out from the keyword research for their content strategy and set down with sales asking about questions, concerns, needs, and challenges across the buying journey?
What if sales invited customers to contribute to the content?
Then content starts resonating with a target addressable market.
Sales proactively distribute it to the target accounts because they have a good reason for a non-sales touch.
Customers happily share the content inside their organization and with their network.
Sales get lots of pieces of content to share on social media.
This simple shift leads to inbound opportunities and opens doors to engage target accounts way better than expensive ip-based ads, gated ebooks, or virtual events your audience doesn’t care about.
Inbound marketing, like any other marketinactivity, should have one central playbook that includes marketing and sales:
From getting the attention of target accounts to activation.
This is the only way to make marketing revenue-driven.
*In this episode of Full-Funnel Live we share how to create a cross-functional content creation machine that generates revenue and leverages SMEs.
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.
4. Marketing and sales alignment.
From siloed teams that do outbound and lead gen marketing to
aligned teams that plan programs to drive revenue, execute and review them together.
Marketing works together with sales on revenue targets, but focuses on different operations.
Marketing:
Creating awareness, generating and capturing demand
Supporting sales with engaged accounts and intent triggers
Helping sales to accelerate the sales cycle and influence the decision-making process
Sales:
Connect and build relationships with target accounts
Start conversations about a potential collaboration with engaged accounts
Expand the business with existing customers by expanding, upselling or cross-selling
Watch our keynote from London where we share a few examples.
5. Lead nurturing.
Necessary transformation:
From a five-email automated sequence + retargeting begging a prospect to book a demo to a multichannel nurturing program that is aligned with the intent and buyer journey stage.
Not everybody that engages with your ads, content, or sign-ups for your events is a lead. Don’t put everybody into a «push cadence» asking to book a demo.
Instead, segment every prospect by:
a tier based on the firmographics
job role and the role in the buying committee
engagement intent
Nex, develop a multichannel nurturing system.
Add the prospect to a relevant retargeting sequence with nurturing content
Replicate the retargeting sequence in your email automation
Put the same content into a personalized content hub that also includes buyer enablement content and product information
Engage with their content or updates on LinkedIn
Tag in relevant threads or share relevant content
Invite to the relevant events
Connect and engage with other buying committee members
6. Demand capturing.
Necessary transformation:
From retargeting and sales cadence begging for a demo to intent and engagement data tracking to identify engaged accounts and source them to ABM or GTM teams for further nurturing and activation.
Check this post where we share 6 allbound demand capturing tactics.
7. Goal setting.
Necessary transformations:
From revenue targets based on investors' expectations and available budget to Sales pipeline velocity and historical growth to make a realistic forecast.
From Budget spread around lead gen activities and ads based on funnel calculations to Revenue goal decomposition by 4 motions (expansion, acceleration, net new, and renewal) and 3 tiers of accounts.
We’ll cover it in more detail below.
8. Marketing planning.
Necessary transformations:
From random acts of marketing and short-term experiments to 80/20 approach: 80% of resources to regular marketing operations and 20% for innovation and experimentation.
From trying to be everywhere and running 50 tactics in parallel to excelling at 5–7 programs in a few channels buyers use for education and research.
Read this guide with a free template where we cover the marketing planning in detail:
9. KPIs & Reporting.
Necessary transformations:
From Leads for sales and MQLs for marketing to Revenue, sales pipeline velocity, and leading indicators.
From Last-click attribution to blended attribution, including self-attribution, digital analytics, and customer research.
There are lots of interactions and touchpoints that can't be measured by attribution software.
Measure marketing performance and impact on revenue by cohesive analysis of:
Leading indicators for every campaign
Self-attribution
Digital traces
Customer interviews
Here is an episode about How to measure B2B marketing for companies with a long sales cycle.
10. Understanding how marketing scales.
All marketing programs have a compounding interest. The day you plan the seed is not the day when you eat the fruit.
Make sure you allocate enough time and a dedicated team to give your marketing programs a chance to drive revenue. Time and commitment are the keys to succcess.
Gradually develop a marketing function.
Every function has 3 stages:
Pilot
Operationalization
Scaling
We covered it here:
Build the process first, then hire people to own it, run, and refine it with the additional stack.
The transformation from lead gen to full-funnel marketing is not a fancy deck presented by the CMO at the board meeting.
It's a complex process that requires a mindset shift from being company-centric (we can sell to anybody) to customer-centric.
But it's the only way to maintain growth in 2024 and beyond.
In the next section I'm going to share where to start.
Where and how to start developing B2B marketing function
1. Get all the revenue metrics to run a sales pipeline velocity analysis to reveal the problems.
Most B2B companies suck at collecting marketing and sales data because they're scared to face reality. They are scared to see the miserable performance of outbound and lead gen functions, but they ought to.
Here are several thoughts on how to get a sober view of your marketing and sales performance and make data-driven decisions.
a. 𝗙𝗶𝘅 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗰𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗽𝗶𝗽𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆.
Start with how many engaged accounts (qualified and hit the engagement threshold you have in your pipeline). If you have never done ABM before, ignore that metric or substitute it with:
• Demo call requests
• Product webinar sign ups, etc
Next, make sure you have clear data on real sales opportunities in your CRM.
How many of these opportunities have you won and lost?
b. 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗹𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘀.
If you don't have self-attribution, here are a few ideas:
• Reach out to all won deals and lost deals, and ask how they heard about you. Even if some of them will reply, it's better than nothing.
• Ask sales about sources.
• Check digital analytics (at least, for paid campaigns you'd have a good attribution).
c. 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲.
Compare dominating motion to other programs to show the reality.
A lot of companies look only at sales attribution and say:
𝘏𝘦𝘺, 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘴𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘮 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦 40 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘴.
What they miss is the real conversion and win rate.
In our example, 40 discovery calls were generated from 2.500 accounts that were bombarded with cold emails and messages and produced only 7 new customers.
Compare it to a pilot ABM on a LinkedIn framework where the ABM team was able to generate 8 clients out of 80 accounts.
d. 𝗡𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽𝘀.
• Break down won and lost deals into tiers and ACV.
Example: Outbound - 7 won deals.
Tier 1: 1 - $450k
Tier 2: 2 - $220k
Tier 3: 4: $45k
• Define lost reasons to come up with marketing programs to solve existing bottlenecks.
Ultimately, the only way to unlock growth is to take a sober look at your marketing and sales performance, identify bottlenecks and create programs to fix them.
2.Do a realistic revenue forecast.
Here are 9 steps and a template.
Analyze current year revenue between 4 motions: new revenue, expansion, and renewals.
Calculate sales pipeline velocity and revenue metrics: win rate, ACV, sales cycle length, and # of sales opportunities.
Look at the existing pipeline and plan acceleration revenue based on the current revenue metrics.
Look at your core customers and check if there is potential for expansion -> calculate the expansion potential volume.
Calculate the renewal revenue with the core customers.
Allocate what is left to the new revenue.
Break down new revenue among tiers based on your revenue metrics.
Calculate how many accounts you need to hit a tier revenue target.
Reallocate accounts between programs to match your budget and team capacity.
3. Don’t stop anything (e.g. ungate all content).
If you stop anything that was somehow driving the pipeline, but don't compensate it, you're in trouble. You'll just increase a pressure to show the results, and your programs will be like to shut down.
4. Start with a small pilot and a small team.
We covered it in the previous episode.
5. Set the right expectations.
If you have a long sales cycle, is it fair to expect revenue coming in immediately?
Define the positive or traction signals that prove that the program works.
E.g. your sales team didn't get connection requests accepted from the target accounts, but now the decision-makers not only accept and respond, but also engage with the content.
For any sales team it's a huge win already.
The opportunity is still far away, but the doors were opened.
6. Track these small wins and share across the organization to keep the momentum and buy-in.
To your successful transformation!
10 enterprise sales opportunities from a pilot ABM program in real estate sector
In the new episode of Fullfunnel Live we share more details about a step-by-step case study of an ABM program for a niche market that you don't normally associate with ABM: real estate, and cover the hottest questions:
How to influence niche buyers from specific locations who are not active on social
How to run ABM and nurture buyers in a market with very long cycles (>2 years)
How to create account-specific content and leverage it in sales
How to create "solution awareness" with buyers who are used to do things in a certain way, and don't see why they should change
How we structured the program, tests we did that worked and the lessons learned