As the B2B buying process changes from a sales-driven process to a buyer-driven process, there’s a need to evolve past the traditional sales cycle and pipeline. Companies need to look at creating a new revenue engine in order to sustain consistent and sustainable revenue growth.
By looking at the entire revenue cycle, including the first interaction with a prospect, companies can identify areas of opportunity within their sales cycle and enjoy the benefits of:
- Lower customer acquisition costs
- Reduction in wasteful spending
- More predictability in forecasts
To understand how the new revenue engine increases revenues and efficiency, let’s dive deeper and see what components make up the new revenue engine:
Efficiency Through Lead Scoring
For the revenue cycle to run efficiently companies will need to filter prospects and prioritize leads – this includes filtering on demographic profiles and actions taken by the prospect.
With lead scoring in place, each lead is given a score for prioritization. This makes it easier for the sales team to quickly identify and focus on the most promising prospects first.
By deploying a lead scoring process, you increase lead quality, enable efficient use of marketing and sales resources for hot leads and better align with customer’s needs in the buying process.
Effective Lead Nurturing For Future Leads
For leads that are not sales-ready, it’s important to employ a lead nurturing process. This process nurtures those leads with consistent and high-value communication to enhance and sustain the relationship until the lead is closer to a buying decision. This is true for leads which might require more time when budgets get put on hold or require more information to make a purchase decision.
Successful ways to engage the prospect during the lead nurturing process include B2B social media, email marketing, content marketing and forums.
Marketing Automation Solutions
Creating powerful processes help streamline the overall cycle, but there is a need for a solution to house and manage the entire strategy. This is where marketing automation solutions come into play, efficiently propelling each lead through the process from one level to the next.
The better marketing automation solutions include features such as: marketing analytics, real-time tracking and alerts, data warehousing, marketing dashboards and integration with existing technologies including your CRM.
