In Business to Business or "B2B" marketing, products or services are promoted to companies, large organizations or even governments, rather than directly to individual consumers.
B2B (Business to Business) Marketers have many of the same concerns as B2C (Business to Consumer) Marketers: product development, distribution, branding and promotion. As well, the line between B2C and B2B often blurs--Dell Computers, for instance, successfully markets to both audiences. Yet there are real differences, especially when the product or service on offer has a high price tag that entails a considered, and often extended sales process. So instead of a $1 bar of soap sold to a consumer in a supermarket, the B2B marketer is selling industrial machinery for over $100,000. Or million dollar ad campaigns. Before a buyer is going to make that kind of investment, they're going to need to be sure that the product (or service) will improve the organization's productivity, agility/time to market, or reduce costs. These are exactly the benefits that Prospectvision provides via its unique Behavioral Inference Engine (BIE), enabling the identification and separation of 'serious' potential customers from casual website visitors.
How is marketing to companies or organizations different from marketing to consumers?
- Products and services can represent a significant investment
- Products and services are often complex, requiring a steep learning curve
- The evaluation process can be extensive, perhaps including an "RFP" ("Request for Proposals") or "RFQ" ("Request for Quotations")
- Often multiple individuals from different departments and/or levels in the organization will be involved in the purchasing decision
- Every industry segment has its own jargon, thought leaders, and cultural conventions that need to be respected
Evolution of B2B Marketing
Before the rise of the Internet and social media, the B2B marketer's job was a lot simpler. In fact, often marketing was charged with doing nothing more than "air cover": branding and collateral, PR, advertising and trade events. For the most part the sales team found and developed their own prospects--through connections, on the golf course, or by cold calling into target accounts. For high ticket items a well-compensated local salesperson would spend months educating the buyer and developing the case for the purchase. They understood that they had to develop a relationship of trust with the prospect and provide the right information at the right time in the buying process. That's a lot of golf!
Now fast forward to the Internet age. We've got Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, and most especially we have Google: the font of all knowledge and the disrupter of the traditional B2B purchasing process. With the advent of the Internet, the behaviour of buyers-the way they identify, understand, evaluate, and buy products-has fundamentally changed. The change has led to a revolution in B2B marketing tactics, actually making the marketing function much more important to the B2B sales process. In fact, digital marketers have taken responsibility for broad swaths of the relationship-building that sales people used to do face to face. They're tracking "digital body language" and using data-driven methods to identify prospects, provide them with the information they need, and then determining the exact moment to pass the lead over to sales. Only then will a sales person have the chance to meet the prospect and close the sale.
Today B2B marketers participate in all stages of the sales process:
- Engaging the market on all digital channels: email, web, social media
- Identifying prospects via their digital body language
- Nurturing "hand raisers" with relevant, targeted messaging that moves them along the evaluation process
- Understanding the signals that indicate when a buyer is ready to speak with a sales person and facilitating that hand-off
- Providing sales with the tools they need to demonstrate the value of the product / service
- Tracking each marketing activity at every point in the sales process to understand which marketing activities are actually driving revenue
Where does B2B marketing go from here?
So what's next? Now that marketing is seen to be a valuable part of the organization that is directly contributing to the revenue stream, you will see more and more alignment between Sales and Marketing. Sales people will see the value in developing new skills like analyzing the "digital body language" of their contacts and crafting mini campaigns into their territories. Sales people will become the newest marketers! At many organizations the two, historically distant, camps of Sales and Marketing will merge into a single organization.
Demand Generation
Demand Generation is the art and science of creating, nurturing, and managing buying interest in your products and services. It involves four key elements; campaign management, lead management, marketing analysis, and data management.
In order to create, nurture, and manage buying interest in today's environment, we must first start with a realization of the changes in today's buyer. Today's buyer acquires their information online, through various sources, on a timeframe that makes sense to them. Because of this, marketers must focus on understanding the needs of the buyer and facilitating their buying process, rather than pushing marketing messages at them.
In order to accomplish this, today's marketer must focus on Demand Generation. Firstly, this means understanding the buyer's interest area, interest level, and stage of ... the buying process. This can be done by understanding their online behaviour, or Digital Body Language. With an understanding of the buyer's behaviour, marketers can then use lead scoring to determine which of those buyers are at a stage in their buying process where they are ready to engage with sales. Those that are ready can be passed to sales, while those that are not ready can be engaged in a lead nurturing program that keeps their interest level high over time.
With an understanding of buyer's interest areas and stage in their buying process, marketing campaigns can be personalized based on these factors. This, however, means a deeper level of personalization of targeting, timing, and content of marketing communications than had been typical historically, and necessitates the use of lead generation to facilitate delivering the right message at the right time to the right person.
In order to succeed with demand generation, a strong focus on data quality and data management is necessary. As marketers are interacting with buyers over a longer period of time, they need to ensure that they keep their data on those prospective buyers clean and up to date. Also, as marketing campaigns are now more often driven by demand generation in order to get the right targeting, timing, and content for each communication, it is necessary to have the data fully standardized so it can used by automated rules for personalization, segmentation, and scoring.
As marketers begin to succeed with demand generation, a new approach to marketing analysis becomes possible. By looking at the marketing funnel by buyer stage, marketers recognize that in any buying process there may be multiple campaigns, multiple buyers, and many months involved. Marketing can then begin to understand how each of those campaigns influenced buyer behaviour, and how the revenue achieved can be attributed across the many campaigns involved. This new approach to marketing analysis provides a much clearer view into marketing effectiveness than could ever have been achieved previously.
Demand generation is a discipline that is necessary in today's environment, in which buyers are in control of their own buying process and have access to all the information they require to make a buying decision. Marketers must understand their digital body language to determine their interest level and area, use web channel lead acquisition to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, score leads to determine who is ready for sales, and nurture those who are not. As they do this, marketers focused on demand generation must keep their date clean and well managed, and as they do so are able to apply new forms of marketing analysis to truly understand the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
Lead Generation
Lead Generation is the discipline of proactively creating, nurturing, and discovering interest among prospective buyers in solutions that are offered, so that a sales team can engage with those prospective buyers in a sales conversation.
The discipline of generating leads for sales is in the process of undergoing fundamental change. Historically, marketing departments would focus much of their resources on awareness and branding activities, while a telephone-based group would work from calling lists to attempt to connect with buyers and discover those ready for a conversation with sales. As buyers now have access to all the information they require in a buying process, this process has changed significantly.
Today's marketing departments realize that their role has shifted to one of facilitating a buying process with the use ... of web channel lead acquisition solutions rather than attempting to push a sales process. With that, the way in which leads are cultivated, nurtured, and flagged as being ready for sales has shifted fundamentally.
The lead generation process begins much earlier in the buying process than it did historically. Through social media, educational webinars, and search, marketers seek to be found wherever their prospective buyers may find relevant information that relates to business challenges that the marketer's solutions can solve. As the prospective buyer engages with the marketer's organization, the education process progresses into one of lead nurturing. Over time, by providing valuable content, the marketer will be able to remain top of mind with the prospective buyer, and slowly educate him or her on the key considerations in a purchase decisions.
At a certain point, the buyer's online behaviour - their Digital Body Language - indicates that they are ready to engage with sales in a later stage discussion around purchasing. This is identified through lead scoring which matches the individual's behaviour to known activities that indicate buying intent. The conversation that this leads to, with sales, involves contracts, pricing, and service levels, and it is one that rests on a foundation of buyer education that has been built in the earlier stages of the lead generation process.
Whereas the concept of lead generation has shifted from its historical centring around the use of the phone to identify and qualify leads, the phone is not an obsolete concept in lead generation. As part of both the engagement and qualification of prospective buyers, inside, or outsourced teams may be used to call prospects showing some level of interest, and communicate with them. This can be used both to highlight a value proposition or an event, as part of the lead nurturing and engagement process, or it can be used to ask questions and determine interest as part of the qualification process.
Lead generation has changed dramatically from its historical roots. Today, lead generation software focuses on managing the entire lead lifecycle, from initial engagement, through lead nurturing, to lead scoring and sales hand-off. Phone-based teams may remain part of the process in many instances, but they are far from the only aspect of the process in today's environment.
Lead Scoring
The practice of using an algorithm to assign a ranking to sales prospects based on an understanding the prospect's interests and buying intentions.
Today's new buyer is in control of their own buying process. With access to all the information they require, they are able to self-educate, discover vendors who might potentially solve their business challenges, and form opinions on which vendors are best for their needs. As marketers facilitate this buying process, they must pay careful attention to the prospects' digital body language in order to detect signs that they are ready to engage in a purchase conversation with a sales person.
It is lead scoring that provides this link, from the behavioural information detected by watching prospects' ... digital body language to the action that should be taken based on the insights gained.
In order to score leads well, marketing and sales must first agree on the definition of a qualified lead. This agreement allows a "common currency" between marketing and sales whereby marketing works to generate qualified leads and sales works to close them. This definition, however, has two distinct parts, "fit" and "engagement". Fit, or the explicit information known about a person, their role, company, industry, and revenues, defines whether they are the ideal person and company to sell to. Engagement, or the implicit information known about their activities, topics of interest, and level of interest defines whether they are sufficiently engaged to begin a conversation with sales.
Lead scoring allows marketing and sales to agree on not just the definition of a qualified lead, but the correct next steps for any leads that meet those definitions. As such, good lead scoring forms the foundation of any demand generation operation.
Follow @prospectvision