Founder and Principal of Scratch Marketing + Media.
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At a recent conference, the chief marketing officer of the company hosting it said, “If we just knew when accounts were ready to buy, sales and marketing would be so much easier.” A statement of the obvious? Or the profound? These days, the answer turns out to be “both.” B2B buyer behavior is changing, and so are the B2B marketing and sales strategies employed to keep pace. It’s unclear which is the chicken here, and which is the egg, but the real question is: If you’re part of a B2B marketing and sales organization today, what do you need to know to make the perfect omelet?
B2B Buying Evolution And The Marketing And Sales Response
There’s an interesting paradox that’s fueling the evolution of B2B buying practices: As B2B vendors have worked hard to improve the online customer experience, B2B buyers and their colleagues who influence them have grown increasingly coy about engaging with these vendors. That’s right—the more enterprises create more engaging and informative digital touchpoints to build relationships with prospects, the less these prospects need to depend on overt interactions with the enterprises to find the information that will help them decide what to buy. It’s a vicious circle.
B2B marketing and sales strategies used to focus on tracking individuals to generate marketing-qualified leads and sales-qualified leads. Then, buying committees comprised of different team members with unique expertise emerged as enterprises took advantage of the growing repository of online resources to research solutions to the business challenges they were facing.
At the same time, marketing technology was improving, and soon marketing and sales professionals had access to new tools that could automate the monitoring of behaviors of individual buying committee members, identify who they were, understand how they were participating in and contributing to the buying process, and personalize the touchpoints through which the company was engaging each member. Focus shifted from the individual lead to the account, and thus, account-based marketing and account-based sales were born.
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All of this change played out over the past 10 years and brought us up to the very recent past—but not quite all the way up to the modern day. The cycle of changing buying behavior and sales and marketing strategies has pushed B2B buyers to become even more aloof. Today’s account-based approach still needs to identify key accounts and customize content for those accounts and for the individual members of the buying committees. But the conventional wisdom of ABM and ABS is out; new realities are changing the game.
Know The State Of B2B Buying Today
Here’s a quick look at the conventional wisdom that doesn’t hold in today’s B2B marketplace, and the new realities:
Buying Committees
• Conventional wisdom: The typical B2B enterprise buying committee is made of around six people.
• The new reality: Buying committees these days are much bigger: 10, 12, 14 people or more (based on data shared at the conference I attended). And if you don’t know who they are and what they do, you’re not going to be successful in engaging them.
Buying Intent
• Conventional wisdom: The best way (and maybe the only way) to identify a company that’s in the market for a solution you sell is to monitor who’s filling out forms on your landing pages and who contacts you for a demonstration of your solution.
• The new reality: There are upwards of 20 different buying signals that can be tracked today. Some research has found that buyers show 32 third-party intent signals before they purchase. If you’re not monitoring the breadth of online behaviors, you’re likely missing a significant segment of potential customers who are arming themselves with information and being effectively courted by your competitors.
Gating Assets
• Conventional wisdom: A form-fill rate of at least 10% of visitors to a landing page is decent for the typical gated asset.
• The new reality: A mere 3% of visitors to gated landing pages are willing to divulge information by filling out forms these days. Imagine continuing to knowingly throw away 97 cents of every dollar spent on driving prospects to your landing pages.
The Significance Of The New Realities
Customers are choosing to remain in stealth mode longer as they educate themselves on the different solutions they can purchase to solve their business problems. They aren’t as willing to give up their contact information to get to the gated assets you’ve posted beyond your landing pages because they know they’ll be able to find comparable information elsewhere (i.e., on your competitors’ websites). The battlefield for hearts and wallets has moved. Make sure you’re at the new front lines, and that you’re better equipped than your competitors.
The new battleground is the “dark funnel,” the vortex where the 97% of landing page visitors who resist forking over their company email addresses to access gated content are actively researching your solutions and those of your competitors. That’s a whole lot of visitors—prospective customers—you’re ignoring if you’re only pursuing form fills.
Even if you’re already doing ABM or ABS, either at a modest proof-of-concept level or at enterprise scale, I recommend thinking about ABX—account-based experiences—a unified approach that aligns sales and marketing during the prospecting stages and extends all the way to customer success once your prospective account has become a customer.
The dark funnel is the way B2B buyers are buying today, and ABX is how many B2B sales and marketing teams are going after these dark funnel buyers. What’s the ROI of ABX? You will be more likely to beat your competition and keep your customers in the fold. Without ABX, you may be blind to the very powerful buying committees who now have access to a bevy of educational content that can show them which vendors are worth it.
Embrace the ABX mindset—build two funnels. One can still be focused on leads, but also start engaging the entire buying committee. Instead of wishing for form fills, get as many of the buying committee members to read and engage with your content. The more the better. Track their anonymous behavior—in Google Analytics or using accessible tools that will shine some light on your dark funnel. Get some of your sales team to follow up on all members. When you do, you will likely see your pipeline grow over time.
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Author: Lora Kratchounova, Forbes Councils Member
