Hey ,

You know there’s an infamous war between the sales and marketing teams in most B2B companies. Marketers blame the sales team that they’re not closing deals while sales retort that the leads generated by the marketing team are weak.

That’s exactly why modern B2B marketers should focus more on ROI and embrace revenue responsibility throughout the entire funnel. Specifically, they can impact the pipeline velocity, ensure the leads fit in the ideal customer profile, and help the sales team close more deals. 

In today’s newsletter, we’ll show you how to do all that.

But before we dive in, here are some job listings that you or someone around you might be interested in.

TRENCHES JOB BOARD

MaxBill is hiring a B2B Demand/Lead Generation Specialist

Responsibilities: 

• Execute data research and contact qualification for outbound/ inbound campaigns ;
• Drive lead generation programs, measure, analyze, and optimize lead generation channels ;
• Create, manage, and develop email campaigns, landing pages, capture forms, and automation workflows to stimulate interest in MaxBill products and solutions.

Learn more and apply here.

Flashtract is hiring a Head Of Marketing (Remote US, >150k)

Requirements:

• 5+ years of B2B marketing leadership experience ;
• 1+ year of experience in a managerial/leadership role, with the ability to recruit, retain, and motivate both existing and future talent;
• Experience working with marketing and sales automation systems (Outreach, Salesforce, and Pardot experience a plus) ;
• Experience with selecting and managing outside agencies ;
• Construction industry knowledge or experience is a plus

Learn more and apply here.

Now, let’s get down to brass tacks.

What is full-funnel marketing and how does it affect most sales and marketing teams? 

There are a lot of marketers that think of themselves primarily as working at the top of the funnel or the buying journey. They think their job is done when the lead is created.

But the truth is, you can't buy a beer with just a lead. If marketers do not measure their impact based on the revenue and sales numbers the business really cares about, then they’re short-sighting themselves on the impact marketing can have. 

That said, the idea of full-funnel marketing is that marketers can and should embrace revenue responsibility throughout the entire funnel. Because even once a lead is generated and the sales teams get involved, there's still a chance to manage the velocity of those opportunities through the pipeline. 

How? You can still create better content and insights that help the sales team have better conversations with the customers. Also, you can ensure that the pipeline you're creating for sales isn't just based on volume but on quality.

Make sure it’s made up of the right people from the right company that have an actual problem you can help solve. 

So, thinking about the entire funnel, embracing revenue responsibility really helps increase the impact and value that marketing can bring to the table. 

What should be the role of the marketing and sales team members? 

In today's modern sales environment and in the modern buying experience as well, there's a role for sales and marketing at almost every stage of the buying journey.

Marketing may take the lead at the top of the funnel and sales may end up taking the lead at the bottom of the funnel. But see, there's an opportunity for sales to:

1. provide value ;
2. become subject matter experts; and
3. build trust and reputation rapport with the prospects very early. 

On the other side, there's also an opportunity for marketing to provide: 

1. better content ;
2. better tools ;
3. better process; and 
4. better leads that support the bottom of the funnel efforts. 

Historically, we used to take the concept of the overall funnel and divide it horizontally, but a lot has changed today. We're now dividing that funnel vertically in terms of where sales and marketing interact. 

What is the right way to map the b2b buyer’s journey? 

Let’s start with the mistake many companies make which is building a buying journey based on the way the company wants to sell. 

Truth is, it doesn't matter the way you want to sell and it doesn't matter how you may have sold in the past. Instead, what matters is how your customers are buying NOW. And the easiest way to find that out is to ask them and do some analysis. 

Find out all those that are involved in the buying committee. 

• Who are the people that are actually going to use your product or service?
• Who are the decision-makers? 
• Who are the other people that are going to influence that decision?
• Who's going to write the check? 

Once you’ve figured that out, ask yourself the following questions: 

• What are the things they care about? 
• What are the stages they're going to go through? 
• Do they consider whether the problem is worth solving and do they consider various solutions to achieve those results? 

The better you understand your customers, the better your sales process is going to be. 

How to identify the stages of the buyer's journey? 

If you're in a unique market, you may want to customize the stages to your market, especially if you're selling to the government, the public sector, or to very large enterprises. 

There are three main stages you should focus most on. 

• First stage: loosening the status quo. Here, you provide unique insights that get your prospects to think differently about a problem that quite frankly, they may or may not have known they had. 

• Second stage: commitment to change. Kindly note that this is not the commitment to buy your product. It is not even the commitment to engage with the products. Rather, it’s an internal commitment to actually do something different in order to achieve a particular outcome. 

• Third stage: justify the decision. It's really important to keep this in mind. Just because you got a qualified lead (the right person at the right company), doesn't mean everyone in the organization is bought off. More often than not, at the justify the decision phase, you'll end up with someone else in that buying committee that is probably getting engaged for the first time. 

Someone that says, Yeah, I committed to change but now tell me why we need to spend this much money to solve it. 

So, you need to provide a proof of concept, a trial, a case study, or a success story if you ever want to get more deals over the finish line. 

How to align the sales and marketing teams around your strategy and around outputs instead of inputs?

You need to have a set of common metrics. In fact, the sales teams have historically been responsible for closed deals output numbers. So, you should put that same number on marketing and then measure and reward sales and marketing for hitting the overall number. 

After aligning the metrics, you can also align rewards and compensation. What are your bonuses based on? In reality, many marketers are still bonused either by general good performance or by volume-based metrics that are not tied to revenue. 

Look , if you've got marketers that are being compensated and bonused based on hitting a sales number, they'll be more likely to abandon some of their archaic volume-based metrics and focus on revenue-based metrics that are going to help them make better decisions. 

This helps marketers shift their priorities and focus more on activities that have a greater direct impact on getting specific deals across the board. Specifically, they will analyze all the micro stages during the sales process and think about how they can help the sales team prepare for negotiations or calls. It’ll also help them figure out what types of content to prepare: 

• case studies, 
• ROI calculators, 
• comparisons, 
• reports, and the likes. 

Furthermore, that alignment will help marketers get more involved in listening to sales calls and understanding fully well the sales process. This is important because in many cases, marketers just live in a separate world or planet and do not understand what the real negotiation process looks like. Result? Fiasco. 

To conclude, another key to making that alignment work is via executive mandate. It has to be an executive-level priority, something that someone in the c-suite, ideally the CEO, says it’s a priority for the organization so that everyone else aligns up behind it. 

Upcoming community events

ABM Days, Boston, MA (August 30th, 3 pm ET) 

Join Fullfunnel.io, Goldcast and Alyce in person for a one-of-a-kind hybrid event experience in Boston's trendy Seaport neighborhood.

Join our expert speakers for a chance to get all of your B2B marketing questions answered, gather insights to accelerate your career and business, and create new connections.

Can't make it to Boston? We got you. We will be streaming the content virtually via the Goldcast platform.

Register Now

B2B Marketing Strategy Live Bootcamp 

Want to start selling the way your best customers buy? Join us for our B2B Marketing Strategy Live Bootcamp.

Oct 10 – Nov 3

08 practical workshops to:

• Develop a full-funnel marketing plan to create awareness, generate & capture demand, and generate sales opportunities with target accounts
• Define marketing activities & content that can attract the attention of target buyers, educate them, and generate demand for your product
• Get marketing & sales alignment on goals, ICP, campaigns, and leads hand-off process
• Build a unified marketing & sales report to connect all marketing activities to revenue even if your sales cycle is long

Learn more about the Bootcamp here. 

Best Shares From Trenches Community

• ABM stack for different ABM maturity stages by Vladimir Blagojevic
• Building demand in a recession - by Nemanja Zivkovic
• Most B2B marketing plans fail because of one reason - by Andrei Zinkevich
• Here is a campaign you can learn from, for B2B. It’s from Buick, the carcompany - Dan Renyi

NOTE: If you found this content interesting and useful, chances are you have 1 or 2 colleagues (well, maybe 03) who'd also enjoy it. Help them by sharing this and earn some exclusive perks.

See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina D. Odjo,

Content Editor @Trenches