Prospect Nurturing Must Be Holistic and Integrated
One implication is that marketing and sales assets can no longer operate in a disjointed fashion when it comes to nurturing prospects.
Today, nurturing activities must be approached differently than in the past. Now, we’re less likely to invite prospects to spend time with our sales representatives at our box seats at a baseball game, but more likely to offer a series of relevant, content-based tools — such as a best practices workbook, an analyst report or an ROI calculator. Similarly, our email campaigns cannot simply serve as the electronic check-in, continuously haranguing buyers with “Are you ready to buy yet?”
Things are changing, but what is driving this change? Two major forces include:
• Changing information consumption patterns of buyers: On one hand, the methods through which B2B buyers prefer to interact with our companies have changed. Buyers are less interested in qualitative relationships and more focused on substantive and quantitative ones — i.e., they want to know how we can help them, not just whether we are “fun to hang out with.” Content — substantive content — matters, as does when and where buyers seek this content. This content is more critical than ever to buyers’ decision-making. With an overabundance of third- party and peer-to-peer content, what B2B marketers produce must clear a higher bar. While in the past buyers might have called our sales representatives to get this information — or may have waited for these representatives to reach out to them directly — today they seek out this information proactively via online, search and social media channels, and at their own pace. Today, they call sales teams last.
• Changing B2B marketing technology and tools: The tools at our disposal for communicating with and managing relationships with buyers have also significantly changed. More than ever, our ability to reach Web 2.0-empowered buyers — via Web, social, email, mobile and other channels— has been augmented by CRM and marketing automation technology. These technologies enable us to better engage buyers on a one-to-one basis where and when they want interaction.
The need to nurture in B2B marketing and sales has not changed, but the way we nurture — especially on the marketing side — has changed substantially.
Nurturing Activities Must Be Rationalized Around the Buying Cycle
Nurturing is now likely to be digital-content-centric for a substantial portion of the upstream engagement with a prospect. It must be aligned with B2B buyers’ decision- making processes and integrate both sales and marketing activities.
How do we get there?
We need to know the stages our targeted buyers go through in their buying processes, and then we need to make sure our marketing and sales activities serve up the right information at the right time and in the right format and/or domain. This ensures buyers have the information they need to make their own assessments at different stages of the buying process and move their process forward.
Demand generation is not merely about getting a prospect’s attention; rather, it is about incubating a prospect with the information he or she needs to move forward until ready to speak with a sales representative. Also, it is about helping to convince a prospect — before he or she talks to a sales representative — that your product or solution should be on the short list, if not the top choice. And finally, demand generation is about managing continuity of the buyer dialogue from upstream nurturing to sales team engagement.
Keep in mind, it’s nearly impossible to move a B2B buyer through the decision-making process more quickly than he or she is ready to go. Buyers are in charge these days, and according to MarketingSherpa’s “2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide,” approximately 59 percent of potential B2B buyers in the market for a product or solution will take longer than three months to make a purchase decision.
The sum of our marketing and sales tactics must be more focused on educating empowered buyers, rather than on trying to aggressively “sell” to them.
Nurturing Roles Will Change
The marketing and sales organization of the future will look very different than today’s organization. We’ll see marketing take a more active role in monitoring and managing all points of nurturing, via marketing operations teams and led by an evolved field marketing organization. We’ll also see the sales role begin to subdivide —to “atomize” — according to the nature of buyer and stage of the buying cycle. For instance, we’re seeing the rise of the “call qualification” role, which is a hybrid between telemarketing and telesales and is designed to provide a human touch point that is integrated into your automated demand generation process.
And this new organization will depend on a new infrastructure one that combines CRM and marketing automation for the closed-loop orchestration of all of our nurturing activities across marketing and sales.
Adam Needles Director, Field Marketing and B2B Marketing Evangelist, Silverpop
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