Editorial
The Gist
- Maximize revenue technology. Taking ownership of the revenue technology stack allows marketers to drive accountability and link marketing efforts directly to revenue outcomes.
- Align marketing efforts. Integrating marketing and sales processes based on the buyer's journey enhances deal velocity and win rates, ultimately improving revenue attainment.
- Leverage intent data. Utilizing intent and engagement data within their CRM enables marketers to prioritize high-quality opportunities and optimize their sales strategies.
It’s a challenging commercial landscape for B2B marketers today. The end of cheap money from insatiable investors and the cooling of post-pandemic hyper-growth means the focus has shifted. Growth at all costs is out. Accounting for every pound, dollar or euro to ensure there’s a profitable return is in.
What does this mean for B2B marketing? It means squeezed budgets and more intense scrutiny of spend, as well as the return to a fundamental, age-old question: Is our marketing even working?
Most modern B2B marketers have let go of the notion that a marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a good arbiter of marketing value. When generating demand for complex products or services, thankfully more sophisticated KPIs have found their way into the marketer’s tool kit.
This reflects the overall shift from the old-school funnel mentality (create a lead, qualify it, convert it) — which incidentally never reflected the complexities of B2B decision-making units — to account-based approaches. Tracking the intent, engagement and action of multiple personas involved in the buying process gives valuable insights into their likelihood to buy and the efficacy of marketing efforts.
This is all good progress, but it can still be tempting to consider the marketing job complete when the account is engaged and the opportunity is in the pipeline. The one metric that really matters is whether companies are actually buying your products and services, and marketing often still relinquishes that metric to sales colleagues who book the business and finance colleagues who collect the cash.
One way to change this mindset is to expand marketing’s ownership to include the revenue technology stack, beyond the traditional remit of marketing automation, content management and advertising platforms. By moving ownership of key systems — such as the core customer relationship management (CRM) system, sales engagement platform and business intelligence (BI) tools — new opportunities arise for marketing to drive deeper organizational value.
Optimize the Tech Stack for Sales Enablement
Often the biggest bang for your buck in B2B marketing is to effectively enable the sales team, yet according to Insight Partners, typically only 13% of resources are focused here. By focusing on accounts and opportunities as they flow through the pipeline and the associated sales motions, marketers can observe many ways to improve deal velocity and win rates, ultimately leading to more revenue.
For example, linking existing sales enablement, collaboration and content management systems to the CRM system enables marketers to understand the practical value of their content. Tracking what is being shared or consumed, for what type of deals, at what stages of the buyer journey and to what effect helps direct investment in high-value content.
Going further, integrating intent and engagement streams directly into the CRM enables marketers to triangulate the data, which can help sales colleagues qualify out long-shot opportunities with a low chance of winning. This frees up their time and energy to focus on better quality opportunities more likely to close.
Arguably, marketers should be spending just as much time mining CRM data as feeding marketing automation platforms. By codifying the content from winning proposals into other sales templates and marketing materials, organizations can improve the effectiveness of assets and help close an important feedback loop for product, pricing and strategy.
Related Article: Tidy Up Your Marketing Tech Stack
Streamline Processes Within a Revenue Technology Stack
It is highly likely that B2B marketing functions have well-oiled lead scoring, nurture programs and automated hand-off processes to sales teams. But why does it stop there? What if sales could trigger automations deep into the sales journey, saving time and directing personas through personalized engagements at scale?
Giving CRM ownership to marketing rather than sales or operations opens the way for the adoption of sales processes that are defined by the buyer-journey rather than solely focused on internal sales efforts. According to Korn Ferry, organizations that align their sales process to the buyer journey typically improve revenue attainment by 13.6%, and those that also aligned their sales enablement efforts saw win rates improve by 11.5 percentage points.
Insights Linking Marketing to Outcomes That Matter
When marketing’s responsibility stops at the martech stack, it encourages (albeit important) vanity metrics (i.e., website and social engagement, click-through rates (CTR), lead creation and pipeline growth) to take center stage rather than client acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime value (LTV), revenue and profit, which typically reside in the CRM system.
A comprehensive revenue technology stack helps track critical metrics that truly matter. Either through integrated platforms or third-party tools such as Zapier, marketers are able to connect multiple dots in the revenue generation process — from organic intent and social media interaction to digital ad conversion. These “dots” also include sales engagements, response to proposals and commercial offers. The key is to not stop joining dots until the deal is won or lost.
Related Article: Guide for Perfect Sales and Marketing Alignment
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The Role of the Revenue Technology Stack in Effective Marketing
If your marketing is generating huge amounts of demand, but sales are not selling and clients are not buying, then your marketing isn’t working. Not because the demand created isn’t good quality, but because marketing hasn’t gone the extra mile to identify where, when and how to assist sales to convert that demand into revenue.
By taking ownership of the revenue technology stack and associated metrics, marketers can avoid the trap of relying on attractive leading indicators which fail to translate into actual revenue and which invite the question: Is our marketing even working?
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