Businesses thrive or falter based on their customer relationships. If customers are happy, results are good. If customers are dissatisfied, growth and revenue stalls or dwindles. The best marketers in consumer-facing industries understand this delicate dynamic, so they put the customer at the front and center of everything. They also subscribe to customer obsession as a business strategy.
Consumer-facing companies already know this, with many heavily investing in technology and solutions to deliver on these expectations.
But what about businesses whose audience is another company and their designated purchaser or buying center?
Buyer expectations within accounts are undoubtedly as stringent and demanding as consumer expectations, since buyers are often influenced by their own personal experiences as consumers.
It’s time to change that assumption.
Businesses can deliver more of the exceptional customer experiences that business buyers demand and speed results by combining the reach and scale of marketing with the personal touch of human-led sales engagements.
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On a granular level, the needs of a consumer (e.g., someone looking to purchase a new pair of shoes) might differ than the needs of a business buyer (e.g., a store merchandiser looking to buy shoes to stock their inventory). But broadly speaking, the expectations are the same.
In other words, as consumer expectations have evolved, so too have B2B buyer expectations. In response to these changes in buyer expectations, suppliers must respond with:
These demands impact both sales teams and marketing teams. By working together and moving toward collaborative selling, businesses can more quickly evolve to address challenges.
We absolutely must stop measuring B2B marketing success in terms of campaign clicks, quarterly reports, and lead volumes alone. The B2B brands who will win are the ones we’ll remember.
Sales and marketing teams often face common challenges and goals in today’s world of B2B customer engagement.
In fact, by bringing sales and marketing processes together, businesses are able to:
Marketing and sales have traditionally been rivals, but the success of your org depends on these two teams working together.
One core pain felt by sales teams has to do with the rapidly evolving industry. Leads are no longer built by pounding the pavement or schmoozing at trade shows alone, and deals no longer have to be closed face-to-face in a boardroom with a firm handshake.
Digital channels have totally changed the way prospects discover and research vendors and make purchases.
On top of this, advanced sales processes have introduced technical and operational complexities. Suppliers — which according to McKinsey “generally contend with a more complex environment, longer deal cycles, lengthy RFP processes, the involvement of many vendors, decision makers, and influencers” compared to B2C businesses — see the rising need to digitize sales, commerce, and marketing interactions as a way to improve the efficiency and reach of their engagement efforts.
To accelerate revenue growth, sales teams must respond to and overcome shifting buyer habits and operational complexities. They need a solution for understanding the increasingly digital buyer journey and their interactions with marketing. They also need to streamline time-consuming and repetitive processes that slow down the sales cycle.
Marketing teams everywhere face decreasing budgets, but more responsibilities. They’re asked to align with more teams across the organization, increase the sophistication of their 1:1 marketing, do this at scale, and prove their ability to drive measurable results — all with less resources and people.
The problem is, while consumer-facing marketing practitioners are typically able to make direct correlations between their efforts and the resulting dollars spent, the nuances of selling to businesses make it challenging for marketing teams to prove that what they’re doing improves the bottom line.
According to eMarketer, 41% of B2B marketing pros said the most difficult metric for them to measure was “sales and revenues attributed to marketing” — above any other metric identified in the source survey. Not far behind was “marketing ROI” at 33%. Clearly, revenue attribution is a challenge for marketers.
Without visibility into marketing’s impact on revenue, businesses can’t gauge if their marketing is working. Even if these businesses are evolved enough to incorporate personalization and digitization into the marketing mix, they’ll need data-driven insight and analytics to know if those elements are actually accelerating business outcomes.
Both sales and marketing need a solution to drive revenue and accelerate business outcomes. Ultimately, this comes down to the ability to engage more buyers with exceptional experiences – at scale.
This presents a unique opportunity — instead of working in silos, or even in parallel, sales and marketing teams can be integrated to bring their processes together. Through collaborative account engagement, businesses can improve sales performance, boost b2B customer engagement, and generate revenue.
In order to thrive, a brand must deliver an integrated experience that breaks down marketing barriers between customer, brand, and employee experience.
In the long run, by bringing sales and marketing data and processes in concert with each other, buyers receive more personalized and coherent interactions across the sales cycle, and the business as whole will benefit.
Collaborative account engagement is about sales and marketing working together as one cohesive voice and acting on a unified view of the buyer, regardless of which team is leading on the engagement.
It’s also about accelerating sales cycles without compromising the quality of service or engagement, and improving marketing’s ability to demonstrate ROI in complex selling environments.
Let’s look at a few ways that a collaborative approach to account engagement can accelerate business outcomes.
Sales and marketing teams are looking to engage the same buyers. If these teams are siloed, and if the data they use is fragmented, they won’t view the buyers in the same way. The result is disjointed buyer journeys, which can lead to dissatisfaction or missed opportunities.
Collaborative account engagement allows for a shared view of engagement activities and account, contact, and sales order data — ensuring connected, seamless buyer journeys. With sales and marketing aligned and these critical data sets fully integrated, you can provide relevant, contextual personalized experiences to buyers across all touchpoints.
An account engagement solution should allow marketers to leverage automation and drive omnichannel 1:1 marketing programs to boost operational efficiency and deal velocity. Essentially, you’re saving the sales team from repetitive and manual tasks that slow them down. You’re also enabling them to engage smarter, in a personalized and relevant way, through channels they may not normally have the ability to access.
Add in the prospect data from the marketing team, and now you’re working with higher quality leads, which also increases deal velocity. Plus, with automation doing some of the heavy lifting, you can scale your 1:1 sales interactions.
Whether it’s sales-led engagement or marketing-led engagements, meeting buyer expectations requires relevant and personalized interactions. A unified solution that brings sales and marketing together allows you to increase overall engagement using collaborative marketing campaigns.
For example, you can engage more contacts with personalized communications that appear to come directly from the contact’s account representative, so the contact always feels that they’re receiving a uniquely tailored human experience… even if it’s digital communication.
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Any business that feels they’ve already perfected the art of customer engagement and content to stick with what’s worked in the past will have a rude awakening. Much like customers are constantly changing, so too are the strategies used to engage them.
If businesses want to engage more buyers and drive more revenue, they must transform. Collaborative account engagement between sales and marketing is how the best businesses are making that transformation.
With a unified solution, they’re better equipped to deliver more 1:1 experiences to buyers, scale engagement across all channels, and consolidate in a way that makes them more agile and efficient — all of which leads to faster business outcomes.
