To maximize the success of any B2B marketing campaign, it’s important to think about the entire B2B buyer’s journey, not just the initial steps of turning a prospect into a qualified lead. Doing so, of course, highlights the reason why collaboration between B2B marketing and sales is so vital: you can only get a complete, 360-degree view of a customer if marketing and sales are exchanging insights and data with each other.
The problem is that, in too many organizations, marketing and sales are within two separate silos – the only time they really collaborate is when it comes time to handing off the leads from marketing to sales.
For marketing, the key tasks are lead generation, brand awareness and driving traffic (either to the website or to social media properties). They are not as concerned about what happens next, in terms of the final sale. Their core metrics are based on how effective their marketing strategies are in bringing in new leads.
And for sales, the priorities are completely the opposite – the focus is on the final sale, and members of the sales team are not as concerned about all the steps that went into finding each lead. Their core metrics are based on how effective their sales strategies are in closing the final sale.
But what happens when marketing and sales begin to collaborate openly? Suddenly, it’s possible to understand the customer experience from every angle. The sales team begins to have greater insight into how and why certain leads are being passed to them, and the marketing team begins to have greater insight into why certain leads turn into sales.
In some cases, it might turn out that what makes a “hot” lead is not what the marketing team originally thought. And that insight would then go into an iterative process for developing the next marketing campaign. Or, it might turn out that a key element of the product’s value proposition needs to be strengthened or clarified. That, too, would flow back into the development of the marketing campaign.
For many organizations, the “glue” holding sales and marketing together is the buyer persona – what amounts to a highly stylized version of a “typical customer.” For some B2B companies, this might be the head of business development, or a C-level executive, or the head of a specific business unit. Each insight from the marketing team or the sales team can then be used to build out a more detailed buyer persona. At each step of the B2B buyer’s journey, more information can be added to the persona.
The good news is that there are an expanding array of software tools for better collaboration. This software, such as Tidy Marketer, can be useful for marketers, CMOs and agencies – all the key stakeholders in a modern marketing department. It’s important for each of these to be able to track and monitor what’s happening – and the way to do that is breaking down silos so that it’s possible to track what’s happening at each step of the B2B buyer’s journey. When that’s possible, it can only mean good things for the future success of your next B2B marketing campaign.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.