Creating Your Own Enterprise Demand through Sales and Marketing Integration
Sales and Marketing Alignment and (Sometimes) Integration
The rising class of digital natives in enterprise buyer roles coupled with easy access to information has led to the “insourcing” of a significant part of the buyer journey. According to CSO Insights, 70% of buyers fully define their needs on their own and 44% even identify specific solutions prior to reaching out to a seller. With this shift, sales and marketing teams are struggling to define their respective roles across the buyer journey.
While the buying process takes 22% longer than five years ago, B2B buyers are typically 57% of the way to a buying decision before actively engaging with sales. The net effect is a substantial compression in the window of time that sellers can influence the outcomes of a deal. Compounding the problem is the exponential increase in the volume of information thrown at buyers. According to the World Economic Forum, by 2025, it’s estimated that 463 exabytes of data will be created each day globally. I’ve never heard the term “exabyte” but one of them is the equivalent of 487,995 DVDs. In a world with a vast wealth of information, scarcity is derived from whatever that information consumes, and it’s consuming the finite attention span of enterprise buyers at an accelerating pace.
The combined effect of decreasing the amount of time available to influence a purchasing decision and the increasing competition for a buyers’ attention has created real challenges when selling to the enterprise market. One thing has become clear – the traditional view that a “hand-off” in ownership takes place at some point in the buyer journey between marketing and sales is from an era long since passed. Today, we often must go beyond just aligning the sales and marketing organization and think about a more integrated approach informed by the customer journey.
Market Takers vs. Market Makers
As selling organizations get uncomfortable with their waning influence over the buying process, their natural reaction is to throw more money into lead generation campaigns. These campaigns are designed to find those buyers which have already commenced the buying process – we define organizations pursuing this approach as “market-takers.” Often feeding off the demand generation initiatives of competitors, market-takers search high and low for buyers currently engaged in researching or evaluating potential partners.
Here is the problem with being a market-taker. In a digital, information-rich world with lower barriers to entry, an increasing number of competitors reduces the size of the pie for all market participants. We’ve all seen this play out in the competitive bid process – an increasing number of suppliers who have not been previously involved in the buying process urge leadership to bid on RFPs where they have not earned the right to win – we all know how that turns out.
On the contrary, market-makers aim to create the narrative for their solutions well before the sales team gets involved. By creating and shaping the requirements of demand, they stretch their influence over the buying process and capture a larger share of their buyers’ limited attention. This provides an opportunity to help frame the problem, favorably position critical requirements and, in many cases, side-step a formal bid process altogether. As a result, market-makers often avoid discounting and yield higher conversion rates than their market-taking counterparts.
However, in the market-maker’s quest to enter earlier in the process, one of the common mistakes is to share content which is misaligned to where the buyer is in their journey. For example, in the early stages of the buyer journey, an executive sponsor may prioritize a problem and assign a project lead to begin researching how other companies have approached a solution. This may include looking at build vs. buy alternatives or anecdotes related to the organizational change process. If a rep is fortunate enough to gain access at this stage of the journey, pitching a product demo is the fastest way to break the trust and confidence of the buyer. In this case, the buyer has not yet decided to look outward to solve the problem. Instead, offering up a thought leadership piece or a 30-minute executive alignment session to share how other leaders have approached the enterprise change process will go a long way towards building trust and advancing the relationship.
Renewing a Spirit of Partnership
This is where the partnership between sales and marketing can enable a market-making machine built to create and service its own demand. Here, a cross-functional team is created to collaborate and collectively agree on the definition of victory at each stage of the buyer journey (e.g. awareness, education, preference, selection and growth). Case in point - the definition of victory at the education stage is different than the preference stage. At the education stage, the sponsor should be able to articulate the key requirements of a 3rd party solution and why these requirements (which happen to be supported by your solution) are critical to creating value. At the preference stage, the sponsor should be able to articulate your solution and how it supports the roadmap for change by maximizing value and mitigating risk.
Once the definition of victory at each stage is laid out, the teams can work together to identify the appropriate marketing and sales assets to enable that victory. These assets should be tailored to account for the various buyer personas throughout the buyer journey to align to their respective needs and definition of value. The output of this exercise is an agreed upon content roadmap which can be developed together and ultimately aligned in the CRM to each stage of the buying journey.
Other than the benefit of elevating your firm to market-maker status as outlined above, this collaborative process provides two powerful benefits. First, it brings the marketing and sales team together to share accountability for a common goal, a powerful antidote in combatting an “us” vs. “them” culture. Second, it ensures an efficient allocation of dollars spent on sales collateral and assets as each dollar is aligned to facilitating the buyer journey.
The last point to make around this topic is time-bound. While market-maker strategies are almost always preferred to market-taker strategies (I can think of only one exception), they are particularly favorable in down-markets. At some point, we will arise from this crisis, bigger, better, and stronger because that’s what defines us. At that point, we’ll have to ask ourselves as leaders whether we sowed the seeds to create our own demand and seize a market leadership position or whether we’re comfortable with the prospect of looking for the scraps.