Shifting Trends In B2B Marketing

B2B Marketing is evolving. Not just because the internet has become a powerful marketing channel, but because the buying process has evolved also.

More information is being freely distributed and re-purposed in more intelligent ways, giving buyers more power and insight.

If you were to go back to 1995 (just as I was preparing to leave university and go into sales), sales people still owned much of the engagement and selling was more about how the sales person “read” the customer to determine how the engagement took place.

Now in 2011 buyers will go much deeper into the sales funnel before they even connect with a sales person and are more educated and prepared using research on the web before any engagement, so its become more about the online digital body language.

The shift is away from a traditional sales processes and more towards a buying process, led by effective marketing which may involve more complex and integrated sales engagement later on.

What’s important in B2B marketing is moving beyond conventional concepts.

• Now, being there at the right time is as, if not more important, than just having the right message.
• Segmentation is no longer by profile alone but includes activity to determine how customers engage with you.
• There aren’t just a few sales steps, its about multiple activities that make up each deal.

This require much greater marketing involvement and automation which is ideally suited to the digital marketing space of the internet.

Trends are evolving in business performance and revenue generation enabled by developments in B2B marketing.

As a result of these changes new trends are starting to evolve, pointing the way to more effective B2B marketing and sales.

1. Databases are becoming bigger and more open, connecting marketing and sales together and providing deeper insights into the supplier customer relationship.
2. Content is hugely important to winning hearts and minds and growing your database and customer knowledge tree.
3. Email is actually increasing across the board and is becoming a critical channel and component of influence.
4. Campaign sizes are actually decreasing because targeting and segmentation are improving.
5. Automation is an essential component of marketing and sales in order to manage this complex engagement effectively.
6. As a result qualified leads are increasing and marketing waste is reducing.

What’s needed to make this work is a strategy to manage the interactions with buyers over the entire engagement (including sales) cycle and deliver more predictable, rapid and profitable growth.

The 5 pillars to better revenue management that modern B2B marketing delivers.

• You need to be able to manage an integrated funnel and make decisions at numerous stages throughout the process.
• Technology is important but its not effective without people who have a strategic mind-set to apply them.
• There must be analysis and metrics to help you identify problems such as bottle necks and implement secondary strategies to overcome them.
• Understanding what activities are generating the best results in terms of leads, sales and loyalty against a base line performance will help you make continual improvements.
• Use this new and deeper layer of data to identify new opportunities and increase sales and profitability.

Looking at sales and marketing together like this is relatively new to most people, but I’ve been doing it and talking about it for quite a few years now and finally the technology is catching up allowing businesses to see the truth about what is really going on.

A lot of this has only ever been accessible by larger businesses but marketing automation is now a reality for SME’s.

This seminar from the B2B Lead Generation Roundtable demonstrates some very powerful customer examples and the positive impact that modem B2B marketing can create when implemented correctly.

Terms used to find this article:

• 2011 b2b marketing shifts

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