🕵🏻♂️ Marketing & Sales Bingo
The core reasons for missed revenue targets in 2024, and how to handle them.
After two recent posts about building a B2B marketing function (part 1, part 2) I received a great question from VP of Marketing of Enterprise B2B SaaS:
We are running almost all the activities that you recommended in these posts, maybe, in a less structured way, but our marketing doesn’t perform well. I feel we lack the holistic full-funnel approach, but to let you know we tried a lot of different programs…
Here is the problem.
Lots of B2B companies prefer to play marketing and sales Bingo instead of developing a full-funnel GTM strategy, creating cross-functional revenue teams and establishing marketing function that influences entire buyer journey and drives pipeline.
Instead of focusing and running well a few programs on 2-3 channels, they try to do a lot of things, which the same person described as “random acts of marketing”.
Here is the truth.
To win at Bingo your skills do not matter. What truly matters is luck.
In Bingo, the more cards you have, the more chances to win you have (in reality, you’ll never profit from it)😃.
But B2B marketing is very different.
Volume and quantity don’t increase your chances to hit revenue targets. On contrary, trying to do a lot of things in parallel and broad targeting decrease the quality of marketing and sales performance.
Today I want to share with you:
Symptoms of marketing bingo.
Step-by-step guide to handling “bingo” symptoms and developing full-funnel B2B marketing function
Let's dive in.
*I recently joined Mark Osborne on The B2B Growth Blueprint podcast sharing how to align marketing, sales and leadership on ABM strategy. Tune in here.
BECOME A FULL-FUNNEL B2B MARKETER
Full-Funnel Academy is a comprehensive B2B marketing training and Slack community for B2B marketers who care about revenue and want to move the needle.
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.
Private Slack community to answer all your questions
Personalized learning plan. If you are not sure what skills you’d develop in the first place and how to get maximum from the program, we can create a personalized learning plan accordingly to the time you can dedicate to education.
Behind the scenes sessions. See what’s working and what doesn’t work and why on the “behind the scenes” sessions where we review the campaigns we are running for our clients and us.
30% discount for live events and bootcamps
Learn more and join the academy here.
Symptoms of Marketing & Sales Bingo
Here are the symptoms to recognize if your company is playing marketing Bingo at the moment.
Lack of clearly defined ICP and focus on a broad market
Focusing on 1:many broad advertising targeting sales wish lists and calling it ABM
Trying to capture more demand by investing in expensive intent\signals platforms and sending 5-emails "book a demo with us" "nurturing" sequence
Generating more MQLs through gated to generate pipeline with a miserable conversion into sales opportunities
Increasing quantity of produced content using AI but at the same time drastically decreasing its quality.
Focus on leads or vanity metrics instead of pipeline and revenue
Regularly jumping from oneprogram to another instead of developing a holistic B2B marketing unction.
Impatience. Not giving enough time to marketing programs to generate results.
Lack of prioritization. Too many campaigns and marketing programs are running in parallel without getting results.
Blindly copying competitors.
Lack of customer insights about how they search and buy products like yours and plan marketing based on your assumptions.
Targeting a "wish list" of accounts without any intent to buy
Focusing on demand capture only. Most of your buyers are not ready to buy, and if they are, the chances they will use your competitors are really high.
Lack of leads hand-off process and futher support until closed won.
Buying expensive tech stack without having robust marketing operations and playbooks.
Evaluate marketing programs by scalability, not revenue impact.
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.
B2B companies that WIN in the long-term do the opposite.
Focus on the most lucrative market segments and clearly defined ICP
Marketing: awareness, demand gen, and demand capture.
Sales: demand capture, activation, expansion.Prioritize marketing programs and focus on several campaigns that drive revenue instead of running 50 tactics in parallel.
Regularly interview customers to collect insights about the buying process, the value they are getting, information they are looking for, and share these insights across the organization.
Develop a clear playbook for capturing engaged accounts, warming them up, and helping sales to nurture and connect with them.
Thoroughly analyze pipeline, marketing, and sales processes to reduce friction points and improve conversions across the full funnel.
Document proven campaigns and processes, turn them into daily operations, and make them easy to repeat by other team members.
While that advice sounds logical, the biggest problem B2B marketers face is how to implement it. What steps should they take and in what order?
Here is what I'm going to cover next.
10 steps to develop a full-funnel GTM strategy
1. Analyze historical growth and sales pipeline velocity.
To plan your GTM you need to understand what markets and verticals drive your growth and how your current revenue metrics look like.
"Generating more leads" is not a panacea for leaky sales and marketing processes.
2. Define focus segments.
Not all segments are equally contributing to your revenue growth.
To achieve "focus and doing more with less", define focus segments, considering:
ACV
segment growth
your success stories and experience
complexity of sales and sales cycle length
growth potential, etc.
3. Develop ICP.
For a focus segment, analyze the top 5 best customers, 5 fastest deals and 5 top lost deals.
Your goal is to replicate the best customers and understand what unites accounts that are a bad fit.
Include 4 pillars:
Firmo and technographics
Buying committee and their Jobs-To-Be-Done
Tier segmentation
Account qualification and disqualification
4. Run customer research and analyze digital journeys to understand how your best customers buy.
Tune into this episode of Full-Funnel Live where we share a step-by-step process.
5. Develop typical buyer journey scenarios based on your research.
Read this post where we describe it in detail:
🕵🏻♂️ B2B Marketing Function 2025
Two weeks ago on the “Pilot ABM” webinar we asked 700 B2B marketing leaders what’s their biggest ABM bottleneck?
6. Map out channels, programs and content you can leverage to trigger and influence the buyer journey.
Listen to our recent episode "How to influence buyer journey with account-based demand generation" where we cover:
How to influence 3 stages of the buyer journey
The mix of content, channels and tactics you need to influence the entire buyer journey: Fullfunnel.io examples
Subscribe to Full-Funnel Live:
7. Think about:
How can we attract attention of our buyers and trigger their buyer journey?
How can we identify where they are in their journey?
How can we influence their next steps?
What resources do we need?
8. Create a unified revenue report, but make sure you develop individual reports for different marketing programs.
You can't measure the success of your organic thought leadership the same way you measure demand capturing.
9. Create a structured marketing plan including team, stack and budget.
Allocate 20% of time to experiment or test new programs, while spending 80% on programs that already work.
10. Onboard and align with sales and stakeholders on all the points above.
GTM strategy is not a 40-pages document full of corporate fluff about mission, useless stats or theoretic forecasts.
GTM strategy is answering 7 questions:
How can we grow our revenue?
Who are our best customers, and how can we replicate them?
How can we trigger and influence their buying process?
How can we resonate with them and differentiate our product?
How can we understand we run the right programs?
What skillset and tools do we need to execute it (aligned with our budget)?
How do we ensure everybody understands GTM and is focused
on the same programs and goals?
Make sure you have included these questions on your next GTM strategy meeting agenda.
Carpe diem,
Andrei Zinkevich
We help B2B Tech and Service-based companies generate demand, mid-market and enterprise sales-qualified opportunities with full-funnel account-based marketing operations.
@Jamie Carter thanks a lot for sharing!