039. The Role of B2B Marketing on Complex Sales

Hello everyone. Welcome again to Demand Gen Studio. My name is Emilio Garcia. I'm your host and today I'm really happy to have the opportunity to share the stage with Gabriela Garcia. She will be joining on this event going forward and I'm really excited about that because now she will be able to help me with, you know, if there's any questions during the transmission or any comments before then, we will have the opportunity to interact on the stage for sure. And Gabi, welcome. How are you? Hi.

I'm pretty fine, thank you.

Very good. So just like in the last year, everybody, if any of you is watching this right now, you have any questions, we have a section on the, on the chat where you can post some questions there. Let us know if you have any, any comments or things that you want to ask about demand generation in general. And if not, you can always answer them later. I remember all these episodes. We store actually has a podcast, that's the format that we usually end up promoting the most. So people can join on Demand for sure. And so for today, our conversation will be around the role of the B2B marketing or marketer on complex sales. And it's a very interesting topic. The idea here is when you are a marketer on a B2B brand and you have a sales team, how do you support them? How do you provide them with the best support possible? And first of all, I think we need to talk about what do we mean by B2B sales process or the concept of a complex sale. So I will start with that. And the first question obviously is why complexes are challenging and the reason is the way that they progress. Right? So we are mostly familiar with the process of sales for what they call the D2C world, right? Direct to consumer. And that nowadays is pretty transactional actually. Right? You go to places like Amazon or any other e commerce website and the process itself is that the buyer research and look around and eventually when it's ready to buy, they just go to this website or this easier place where they can buy and they make the decision. And actually transaction happens pretty quickly. They just put their credit card, debit card, something and make the purchase pretty straightforward. It just depends on one person. Usually even for sales that require a little bit more of research, it's just to one person, B2B is different. And the reason is because B2B buyers usually are taking responsibility for something in the name of the company and therefore the process itself, it doesn't land in just one person, it doesn't happen in just one stage. And people need to do a little more research. And so in that sense we need to first understand what are those stages and then understand how a B2B marketing can help the sales team to improve the process itself. And there are many ways that you can break down this. But a typical way that you can break down complex sales process is through four stages. You have usually a discovery stage, then a qualification or diagnosis, then actual proposal and the cloning stage, closing stage. And I will not dive a lot into each of them. Typically for example, during the discovery, the first one, because of the, of the fact that these cells are complex, require larger budgets and typically implementations can last for months or years. There's a, there's a discovery process where both the buyer and seller get to know each other, get to understand what are the problems and actually are trying to find fit, right is the buyer is trying to find the right type of company to start having a conversation, but also the seller, right, the salesperson, the sales rep is trying to understand if the person and the company are the right fit for the brand. So that process happened across one or two phone calls or conversations in person or zoom calls or something similar like that. And once it's clear that both companies will benefit from starting a relationship and because of the budget and the timing and the product that the company sells, then usually you will move into the diagnosis, diagnosis or qualification stage. At this point, then the buyer usually starts sharing more information about the company and the problem that he's trying to solve. And the seller is trying to understand the particulars of the potential potential buyer to try to help them to find the right solution. Sometimes if the, if the, you know, the first stage, the discovery was well, was done well, the, the seller will suggest to the buyer to use another product or to use another company that better helps them to solve the problem. But if the process continue, this is where the seller gets enough information to work out a proposal, right? And again, this can take depends on the product itself or the service. This can take a few minutes of, you know, conversation, a couple of phone calls, or you can take weeks or months. Depends really on the product and the service that you are offering. Finally, when the all the potential issues have been discussed and there's some back and forth additional questions, then comes the proposal stage. And this is where based on that diagnosis, the seller presents to the buyer the proposed solution. And obviously usually here there are some scenarios because buyers want to, you know, will have different levels of budget, different goals. So it's typical that you will have different scenarios so the buyer can work out some potential options in their purchase process. And finally you have the closing where if the proposal lists of the liking of the of the buyer and the committee that usually takes the decision, then you have the possibility of discussing terms and discussing pricing and payment terms and when do you will start and all those fun things. So that's in a nutshell, the process that usually B2B buyers will go through. And you can see how those stations will post a complex or a challenge for a company, right? One of the very first reasons is because there are more than one decision maker or there's more than one person involved in the process itself. Usually you have the decision maker, you also have the user. There are some people that will be against the buy itself. And so you will have to work out with that committee, there's someone that will be responsible for understanding the return on investment usually. So that's the first challenge that you have to work out with all these different buyers within the company. They have different reasons to be involved in the process and the brand and marketing will have to talk to them in a slightly different way because their concerns are slightly different. The second big challenge that you have for a complex or for a B2B sales, it's sales cycle itself. We're not talking about hours or minutes here. We're talking usually at least days, usually weeks and months. And so again, you have to have this momentum going on and solve for things like case studies, understand and perceive risks from the buyer perspective and similar things that have to be discussed internally. So those are some of the things that can make, you know, the sales challenging. Now from that perspective, the question is what can marketing do to help sales across the process? And while the this is not a definite list, right, There are going to be more things that you can do. There's definitely some quick things that you can work out with your team to better help them. The first one, right, the one that probably makes the most sense is to start working on a marketing strategy that includes some account based concepts, so typically known as ABM account based marketing. I like it because it really aligns the process between sales and marketing. One of the biggest challenges that marketers have when working with B2B is that the leads that they work out from the for the sales team usually are not of interest for sales. And part of the reason is because there was not a conversation to begin with on what accounts should marketing focus on. And that happens especially if marketing perceives the effort more like D2C do it right or approach it, which is I will create content and distribute it on, you know, social media networks or search engines and wait for anybody to find that content, consume it and pretty select themselves and decide if they want to reach out. And after reach out, they reach out on the website. We will try to see who that person is and what company does he work for. And only after that we'll see if they're a right fit. Right. So that's a pretty inbound method of doing things. It works great for volume, but it has a big problem which is I don't have any say on the person that is going to see that content. Right. It might not be the right fit. So you get a lot of people that, that might be, you know, slightly a bad fit for your company, but you don't have a lot of control. And that's more of the traditional inbound way of doing things, which for D2C works well. But for B2B nowadays totally makes sense to start from the account perspective and saying these are the accounts that I want, these are the companies that I really want to talk about, talk to. And therefore if I start with that list, is there any way to target specifically that group of people? And that's pretty much what ABM is trying to do. It is not something that you can do across the board. Right. There are for example, areas where it's very hard to implement. Like if you want to create content and rank for search engines, definitely there's not an easy way to target specific buyers within specific accounts. The same goes for paid search where you will just target by keywords and, and you can a little bit like targeted through the keywords that you choose because you might say there's only certain qualified buyers that would use the searches. But that's as much as you can do. There's nothing a lot of extra that you can do there. But on social media, especially on places like LinkedIn or if you have information about your buyers coming from tools like Zoom info, then you can be very specific, very targeted and reach specifically to those companies. And that's something that I highly recommend. Right. Starting a basic ABM effort, it can be for the very top accounts, which is formally, you know, your true ABM efforts, or it can be something broader rather more like industry wise. It's also a good start. So starting with ABM is a great way because you will complete the line with the, the focus that maybe sales will have and that will force marketing and sales to have to talk the same language, to talk about the same accounts and to also have similar goals in a very similar way starting sales and marketing alignment efforts. It's also quite helpful. It's not exactly the same as account based marketing because sales and marketing alignment has more to do with the goals that you establish. Right. So this is the other big problem that usually you have between the two areas, which is sales will have some goals usually tied to revenue, usually try to open opportunities and similar things. And marketing will have more criteria that are leading indicators but that not necessarily tied to revenue. Right. So things like website traffic or engagement on social media or even some marketing qualified leads or leads are good measurements for marketing. But if they are not tied to results on the sales side, there might be some mismatch and usually that will not help both themes. So one way that you can solve that is to work out some monthly sessions, for example, even weekly if possible where you discuss the opportunities being created on the sales side, challenges, communications problems that need to be solved. And marketing also can share the metrics that they're using. The momentum that they're seeing and getting that feedback from sales on the quality of the leads they are selling sending to the sales team. Right. So you can combine sales and marketing alignment with abm. That's possible. That's one thing that can be can be done, but they are not certainly the same thing. Right. And beyond that, beyond going ABM using sales and marketing alignment, other things that you can do are creating specific marketing programs to help the sales team, usually around case studies and questions that they might have, you know, the potential buyers that the sales team can cover with the help of marketing. So those are the two biggest ideas. I don't know if you Gabby, have any other feedback or comments on that.

Basically the sales and marketing alignment, I think it's really important to have those in the same channel.

Right.

Because I think that while marketing is working on that content, it's working on that qualified lead, working on how to approach them and how to make them your customer. Sales is trying to, right. This is struggling sometimes because they have different sometimes KPIs. So that's the main reason I think that aligning that strategy or aligning through abm, it is like a really good way to make that KPIs or your key performance indicators the same and you can actually even that struggle that is always happening. And I think that it's some, I wouldn't say it is like the best thing to do but it is really important because if you are a team, right, Doing your having a company, I think that for calling yourself a team it has to be. Everything has to be aligned, even that objectives or other goals that your company has. So I think that is really important.

Yeah, I agree. So yeah, this is going to be a short session. This is us getting back in track on being live. I have the expectation that we will continue to have at least one of these conversations per month. Hopefully as I, you know, bring Gabby on on track for more of these episodes, we can have it every other week, which I it is the frequency that I would like to have. So in the meantime, again, if you have any questions before after the event, let us know. We will continue to communicate this through social media, some email marketing list and if you also have suggestions for topics that you want us to cover related to demand generation in general or in particular and B2B marketing in general, just let us know and we will happy to discuss them. If you want to participate in one of these events, let us know too. We can invite you and it will be a pleasure to have a conversation with you. So without being covered, that's all that I have for today. I wish you have a great day. Thank you. Gabby, any closing comments?

Yeah, I would like to say that nowadays everything about marketing has changed. It's no longer just like the awareness tasks that has been always like that. Now you can add actually. Well, you can use the funnel, right? And not only make that customer aware of your brand, if your sales team is not prepared for that is not working. If you are getting leads and leads and leads and they're not qualified, they're not actually the right prospects or the right customers for your company and your sales teams will not be able to actually use that lead effectively.

Yes. All right, well, thank you everyone. Thank you, Gabby. I look forward to our next conversation. Everyone, a great day.

Have a great day.

Bye.