How to become an A-grade B2B marketer
Andrew Haussegger is the first to admit B2B marketing is far from a smooth operation. As the CEO of B2B consulting agency Green Hat, he’s been tapped up by some of Australia’s top companies to help them market products and services worth millions.
Ironically, the same companies hiring its expertise are often also ones whose own marketing teams sit tucked away from the rest of the action. “Most B2B organisations tend to be sales-driven, not marketing driven,” he admits. “I have walked into organisations where there have been hundreds of salespeople compared to a small team of marketers doing their thing in the corner.”
“They are challenged by their sales counterparts every second day who are asking traditional questions like, ‘Where’s my brochure? Where’s my breakfast event?’ It takes guts for a modern marketer to stand up and say to an over-powering sales organisation the B2B buyer has changed the way they buy and we need to do things differently. From our experience, many B2B sellers have not changed.”
As shown in the chart below, the B2B buyer is engaging the seller later in their buying process. They can research online and engage digitally in peer group forums to educate themselves without having to speak to ‘persistent’ salespeople. However, many B2B firms are slow to recognise the buying change and to modify their investment ratio between the sales function and the digital function accordingly.
Haussegger’s path into B2B marketing was undoubtedly far from traditional. As an ex-software engineer, he turned his attention to ‘complex and considered’ buying processes during the mid-1990s as the personal computer boom took full force in the Western world.
As a co-founder of Green Hat 17 years ago, he has dedicated the last decade to customer lifecycle marketing, initially for the IT and professional services sectors, and today for a broad range of vertical industries where the considered buying process can take three months to three years.
To get a handle on how Australian B2B marketers are faring today in an era of ever-evolving disruption and technological change, Green Hat teams up with ADMA to annually to produce the B2B Marketing Research (BMR) report. The 2018 study surveyed 412 marketers about their past performance and planned intentions for innovating the discipline.
Speaking at the recent Mumbrella B2B Marketing Summit, Haussegger identified three main areas for marketers to put at the forefront of their minds before embarking on their next campaign.
Optimise your customer experience
According to the BMR, 95% of marketers said they found optimising customer experience a challenging endeavour. In fact, of all the challenges faced by B2B marketers today, customer experience mapping was the most likely to give them a headache.
As Haussegger admits, the sector is lagging behind its B2C peers when it comes to creating customer profiles, mapping their journeys and offering a truly personalised experience.
“Customer experience was rated as the number one challenge in the report,” says Haussegger. “But it’s evolving as a competitive differentiator. We are behind the B2C world with personalisation. B2B is hard. Your engagement with the buyer is about a considered purchase and can be complex with many decision makers and significant investments. And how do you keep the conversation going over an extended period of time?”
Nevertheless, customer experience’s value is becoming increasingly recognised: Green Hat/ADMA’s report showed 48% of all B2B marketers have undertaken customer journey mapping and developed personas over the past year. Half are now targeting specific segments using social media and personalising content by segment or individual buyer.
He adds: “Leading marketers are taking their B2B buyers on the journey with them from the start. Nothing happens without a problem, but sometimes a customer gives you the wrong problem. You need to go with them and find the right problem and market to that – emotionally as well as functionally.”
Bring sales and marketing together
Pivotal to the success of the world’s best-in-class marketers was a deep focus on bringing sales and marketing teams closer together – and each using the other for mutual benefit. Despite this, only 43% of marketers reported they were getting effective alignment with sales. One indicator of the dept of the problem is that more than a third of respondents claimed they had no visibility as to whether leads converted to orders or not.
“Interestingly, our research shows sales and marketing alignment is the least significant objective for 2018,” quips Haussegger. “However, given the significant performance gap between best-in-class marketers and the rest of respondents, B2B marketers might want to reconsider their focus.
“There is a great opportunity for sales and marketing to do things internally to improve growth. Research tells us that sales and marketing-aligned organisations achieve 17% faster growth rates than those that don’t.”
He adds: “Collaboration is a no-brainer. But it needs to be something that is set, and that is regular.”
Measure performance harnessing the power of technology
Marketing automation platforms have become one of B2B organisations’ hottest tools over recent years. Although Unica (now known as IBM Omni-channel Marketing) introduced the first CRM software as far back as 1992, it’s only since the dawn of social media that marketing automation software vendors have begun to broaden out their technology.
According to the Green Hat/ADMA study, more than 50% of the Australia’s marketers ranked automating their marketing as one of their top three areas of investment in 2018, and already 54% of all respondents said they use a marketing automation platform (MAP).
“The digital ecosystem generates a mass of data. It can feel like trying to drink from a fire-hose. Automation and analytics platforms, when set up correctly, allow us to shine a light on what is important, and make sense of this data” says Haussegger. “We need to spend less time consolidating data and more time understanding what it is telling us. That is, defining the ‘actionable insights’. These insights allow us to attribute success to campaign sources and optimise conversion through the funnel.”
According to Haussegger, the best way for marketers to get started with data-driven marketing (vs following your gut instinct) is to pick the top metric that best aligns to success. For example, for a commercial machinery manufacturer, that metric may be the number of downloads of a product catalogue, given that the download increases is an early signal of revenue growth.
He adds: “Today in B2B, integration of the key technology platforms is mandatory. Websites should be wrapped up with marketing automation tracking. The automation platform should be inter-connected with online media advertising and re-targeting services, social media as well as with the CRM for lead management and closed-loop reporting. Once done, a measurement and operational foundation is in place for top-line growth.”