Are You Falling Behind on Your B2B Strategy?

According to the Business Marketing Association (BMA), B2B social is critical to reach the New buyer. Does your marketing strategy include a B2B social strategy? If not, what else is missing from your marketing strategy?

SBI’s annual research report, “How to Increase Marketing’s 2015 Contribution to Revenue,” identifies marketing strategy gaps. SBI then turned to understanding why marketing leaders struggle with marketing strategy.

The number one reason reported for the wrong marketing strategy was: Marketing Tactics Masquerading as a Marketing Strategy. When the marketing strategy is just a compilation of tactics, the organization is not proactive. They may contribute revenue one quarter, but not the next. However they are unable to contribute revenue every quarter.

There are 6 steps to defining the right marketing strategy. The 6 are listed below and defined.

1. Segmentation – understand the market, accounts and buyers. This ensures the strategy is differentiated from the competition. Alignment is required with the buyer, the corporate strategy and the product strategy.
2. Planning – leverage the segmentation findings to develop revenue, budget, product/solution, campaign, content and data plans. Once executed these will allow the organization to make the number.
3. Engagement – define the processes for how the marketing team is going to interact with prospects and customers.
4. Organization – make sure the organizational structure is set up correctly so the right people are in the right roles to execute the processes.
5. Execution – begin executing the strategy. Focus areas include content production, campaign execution, lead management execution, sales enablement, reporting, etc.
6. Support – help the marketing team be effective in perpetuity by supporting them and making the internal organization easy to do business with.

Let’s review a few of the steps to start to determine if you have any gaps in your marketing strategy.

Segmentation:

Distribution Strategy – You have the appropriate distribution strategy for each of your products/services.  Your distribution strategy is aligned with what buyers are willing to pay for and need to make a purchase decision.

Product Lifecycle Awareness – For each of your products/solutions you understand the stage of adoption of the market (innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards) and have incorporated this awareness into your marketing plan.

Account Potential – You know the spend potential of each of your prospects/customers.  You have ranked accounts according to the spend potential you have not yet captured.

Propensity to Buy – You know how likely a given customer is to buy each of your products/solutions.  You use this information when prioritizing prospects/customers to target with a given offering.

Planning:

Product Launch Plans – You have product launch plans that help you bring new products to market.  As a result new product launches attain their revenue projections.

Field Marketing Plan – You have a field marketing plan that coordinates how you market in the field while directly interacting with customers and your sales team.  As a result each of your field sales team attains it goals.

Content Plan – You have a plan for creating and distributing compelling content that attracts buyers while also meeting the internal needs of your sales and marketing teams.

Engagement:

Response Workflows – You have workflows that enable you to execute your lead management process and are aligned with the BPM.  As a result your response workflows help facilitate buyers though their non-linear buying journey.

LDR Playbook – You have defined a lead management process that helps your LDRs execute nurturing.  You have equipped the LDR team with a step by step playbook that helps them execute this process.

Organization:

Content Marketing – Your marketing team is world class at content marketing and staffed with sufficient resources to meet your content needs.

Clear Roles and Responsibilities – You have defined clear roles for each of your marketing team members and they know exactly what is expected of them.

RACI – You have defined the responsibilities for each of your marketing roles.  For each of your core processes, it is clear who should do what when.

Execution:

Content Production Process – You have a process for creating compelling content.  You have secured the resources needed to execute the content process.

Social Selling Playbook – You have embraced social selling as a modern way to generate leads.  You have equipped your sales team with a step by step playbook that helps them execute social selling.

Getting Started

Start with reading the entire report.  Download How to Increase Marketing’s Contribution to 2015 Revenue report here. Complete the associated marketing assessment checklist. It should take 10 minutes. Completing the checklist provides additional areas of alignment, gaps, or gulfs. After completing the analysis you’re ready to develop or update your marketing strategy. If you’re interested in reviewing the report in more detail schedule a 90 minute 1-1 review here.

If you have any other questions, connect with me via a LinkedIn Inmail.