to make revenue-generation a company effort //

B2B marketing is expected to generate revenue and sales pipeline. Marketing teams work hard to find new ways to engage, educate, and win customers.

If you are using lead-to revenue, Account-Based Marketing, product- or partner-driven growth strategies, or a combination of these, an important step that is often overlooked is to get the talent and resources within your company more involved.

Revenue and customer generation is a team effort today. This requires the expertise and contributions of all departments within the company. Your product, finance and operations teams, as well as your marketing and sales teams, are valuable partners.

This article discusses revenue strategies that are often discussed and how marketing leaders can work with their colleagues to increase customer revenue.

Some revenue strategies and tactics do not work

B2B selling and buying is no longer the same as it was in the past. All these factors limit B2B sellers’ access to buyers. This reality limits sellers’ productivity, and crushes them.

Add to that a volatile and uncertain macroeconomic climate, and panic will set in. This chaotic mixture generates immediate responses that are not solutions, but distractions.

First, this problem is often misdiagnosed as ” alignment between sales and marketing“. The typical alignment recipe is that marketing generates demand and sales follows up on leads. We know that this has not scaled up.

We then turn to the newest and best technology to make revenue flow from marketing. Many come to mind: marketing automaton; intent, ABM, and product led growth.

They can have a huge impact, but they won’t solve the problem. They also don’t always match up with the way solutions are purchased, sold, and adopted today by companies.

Third, the burden of driving customer journeys and lifecycles is too heavy and relies on digital marketing and demand teams. We can get it to work if we generate enough leads for the right accounts.

This pressure leads to the bad habits that we all know and recognize.

• Filling the sales process with as many leads as possible will feed hungry BDRs and sales professionals.
• Buy leads to meet artificial sales and top-of funnel quotas.
• Media to drive traffic and hope they convert instantly.
• Use of “wish list” sales targets without consideration for buyer, account, or propensity or readiness.

Joining forces with colleagues to deliver better customers and revenue

In today’s market, our prospects and customers who work in B2B organisations are struggling to keep their heads above water. The pace of change continues to accelerate. The sheer number of choices is overwhelming. The sheer number of decisions to be taken daily under high pressure is overwhelming.

Understanding the reality of B2B purchases will guide us in changing our approach to revenue generation. It is a team effort to create customers and increase revenue. This requires active participation by multiple departments within the company.

Explore the state of intent data beyond 2023

If we do not work with other functional leaders in order to define and activate these efforts, we will miss a crucial ingredient for revenue generation. CMOs are in a position to lead, beginning with the development of trusted relationships with other functional leaders. Together, leaders can define the roles and responsibilities for each type of account – strategic, commercial, growth, or however your organization segments customers and market segments.

This is how one $1.4 billion software company is integrating functions with sales and marketing in order to engage, advance, win, and expand relationships with customers and revenue.

Executives as advocates and sponsors for your highest growth potential customers and prospects

Executives are able to understand the business, have visibility, and control budgets, employees, and strategy.

They can quickly mobilize resources to maximize the chances of success and expand opportunities for prospects and customers.

To create value, product teams are assigned and aligned to target accounts.

Now, product pros work with specific prospects and clients to develop and customize solutions.

Real-world R&D is an effective strategy to increase deal size and revenue. R&D efforts also create new and better products for the company’s customer base.

The Ops and Data teams share account intelligence with customers and prospects.

The new mandate of the data and operations teams allows the enterprise to finally use the data that is stored in the internal and external systems, to better understand, listen and engage the frontline teams.

The ops team and the data team can also share data on products and markets that can be used by customers to improve their operational efficiency. This valuable data is being packaged and sold by the company, creating a new revenue stream.

Finance groups can structure contracts, prioritize resources and provide ROI metrics to customers.

Finance had a reputation as a team that was “deal-prevention” oriented and averse to risk. Finance is now offered earlier in the sales and customer journey for key accounts.

The finance leaders created a “swarm” team to provide a service that works with customers and prospects to develop ROI models for the software investment.

Rethinking the role of marketing in driving revenue and relationships

We can’t control everything that happens outside of marketing. We can, however, define the collective and individual roles of marketing and how each contributes to revenue creation and customer expansion.

The enterprise software company that was highlighted above realized not to place all of the burden of demand on digital marketers and to rely solely on them to generate large volumes of leads for the revenue generation process.

Product marketing, for example, was measured by metrics such as the number of launches per year and whether or not sales training and support were completed successfully. Product marketing now focuses on revenue generated by product experiences, adoption of new capabilities and solutions and their expansion.

The corporate marketing strategy is aligned to revenue metrics that reward not only brand awareness, but also the increase in social posts and web traffic from social media.

Corporate marketing instead is focused on meeting revenue targets and rewarded accordingly. Corporate marketing professionals are encouraged to be creative by proactively identifying prospects and customers for inclusion in company communications and programs.

Revenue generation is team sport

It takes more than just internal marketing and sales to align with the best prospects and their buying processes, as we can see from this article about a software enterprise.

Companies can achieve significant progress by integrating key roles into the revenue generation process.

This does not reduce the responsibility or role of the digital marketing team in influencing revenue directly. This increases the chances of marketing and the company delivering better results.

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