B2B Conversations Now

At last Fall’s MarketingSherpa Demand Creation Summit there was a specific track laying out a basic B2B sales cycle from start to finish. Although every organization will have a variation of the model, it is a good starting point to understand how organizations can improve their sales by understanding what customers are looking for at the different stages of the decision process and then providing it.

Here’s the model in a nutshell:

Earlier is better

Ask any B2B VP of Sales the question “does your sales team have a better chance of winning business if they engage the prospect early or late in the sales process”; you will get 100% saying they need to engage early.

Of course they do. If the sales team can engage early then it can influence the decision (function) criteria. So why does Marketing fail to filter and capture these “future customers” during the Research phase?

The problem has become that marketing has fewer and fewer unique reasons (Calls to Action) for a prospect to reveal themselves so they continue to pile on more of the same stuff (whitepapers, webinars and case studies) without any noticable effect on lead generation.

This reminds me of the definition of insanity, “doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result”. Do marketers who have created saturated sales websites really expect serious prospects to fill out a form for “more information”?

So, what is left in the Research Phase to incent the serious B2B prospect to engage?

Budget Fit and Decision (function) Criteria, that’s what.

How are you handling these 2 “needs”?

Tags: B2B Marketing, B2B Sales, Lead Generation //