B2B Marketing Processes

Part #7

Introduction

B2B marketing processes refer to underlying mechanisms (such as the B2B marketing funnel) that help enable your marketing activities and bring order to many components across your broader strategy. The complexity of your processes is completely determined by you and the requirements of your business – so this section will cover some fundamental pieces to focus on that can be applied.

Three main areas will be covered within this section:

Marketing Funnel: A model used to ‘internalise’ the B2B customer journey as a way of tracking and better understanding how the needs to buyers can be met to help aid their progress towards becoming a customer and beyond.
Sales Pipeline: Although not entirely falling under the remit of the marketing team, the sales pipeline is a visual representation and progress monitoring tool of live opportunities once they hit late stages in the buying journey.
Marketing Automation: A key mechanism for increasing efficiency and reducing manual resource across the marketing department.

1. B2B Marketing Funnel

The B2B marketing funnel is a model/framework predominantly used by marketing teams to ‘internalise’ and enable tracking and measurement of individuals across the buying journey.

The key here is the buyer’s journey is fully focussed on the buyer with the majority of buying tasks being carried out externally from you own company. The B2B marketing funnel however, is a way of mapping that externally-facing buyers journey onto an internally-facing model that can be owned and steered by your organisation.

With that in mind, each stage of the marketing funnel contains a ‘status’ or ‘classification’ that illustrates the current context and situation that the buyer is in.

A common B2B marketing funnel would look like this:

1.1 – Visitors/Targets

A Visitor is a potential buyer who has yet to enter your B2B marketing funnel but is actively researching and consuming information related to a particular challenge, need or interest they have, that has led them onto a path of discovering your company/brand. These individuals will be early in the buying journey (identification stage) and are likely to be consuming information and gathering educative resources from a variety of different sources.

1.2 – Lead

A lead is an individual who has initially engaged or interacted with your company through any of your marketing channels. This marks the point where an unknown visitor becomes a known entity and enters your marketing funnel – although they will only have light interest in your company and offering at this stage.

1.3 – MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)

An MQL is an individual with deeper levels of engagement with your company and who has commonly provided more professional insight enabling the ability to more easily ascertain their alignment with your target persona frameworks – thus being able to determine their fit with your targeting criteria.

1.4 – SQL (Sales Qualified Lead)

An SQL is an individual who has displayed ‘sales behaviour’ and engagement with your company. An SQL could flow naturally from MQL status due to their high-scoring or perfect alignment with your targeting criteria.

Another way an MQL becomes an SQL is by submitting a sales-ready CTA from your content or channels (such as a sales enquiry).

1.5 – Opportunity

An opportunity is an individual who has entered the sales pipeline, or more specifically, a buyer/group of buyers or company who is actively involved with your organisation’s sales process due to them being a fit for the value proposition you offer. There are multiple sub-stages held with the opportunity stage which directly relates to the stages of your sales pipeline (if you decide to keep these two frameworks separate).

1.6 – Customer

Once an opportunity purchases from your company in terms of your products or services, they naturally become a customer.

1.7 – Legacy Customer/Advocate

If your sales/account team and organisation products/services continue to satisfy the needs of your customers, you increase the likelihood of repeat purchase and long-term retention.

2. B2B Sales Pipeline

The sales pipeline is a visualisation of ‘live opportunities’ – which are buyers who have reached a late/decision stage in the marketing funnel/buyer’s journey. Although the integration of both elements into a conjoined ‘marketing and sales funnel’ is commonly employed by many organisations, this section will separate the two components for easier understanding.

So then, if this pipeline was mapped with the marketing funnel above then it would range from ‘Opportunity to Legacy Customer/Advocate’, and if mapped to the buyer’s journey it would range from ‘Late-Consideration/Decision to Usage’.

A common B2B sales pipeline would look like this:

2.1 – Qualification

In this first stage, your sales team will perform qualification of an opportunity by exploring their specific needs, requirements as a way of information gathering and insight extraction.

2.2 – Proposal

In this second stage, the discovery process has concluded and there is alignment between your company and the buyer – meaning an initial proposal is crafted and distributed to the buyer.

2.3 – Negotiation

In this third stage, the proposal has been distributed to the buyer and a period of negotiation over the core details and sections of the proposal will take place.

2.4 – Closing

In this fourth stage, there is full alignment between the buyer-side and seller-side, meaning the process comes to a close and contracts/legal obligations are fulfilled along with any finer details regarding the expectations from each side of the agreement.

2.5 – Delivery

In this fifth stage, the product or service is delivered – with the exact approach depending on the type of products or services offered.

2.6 – Expansion

In this sixth stage, the selling organisation and sales/account team continues to build a relationship with the purchasing client, as way of expanding value, ROI and expanding revenue generated for your organisation.

3. B2B Marketing Automation

B2B marketing automation is the streamlining and removal of certain marketing tasks and processes through specialised technology platforms. There are numerous ways in which automation can aid your marketing processes, but a few use-cases in particular stand as the most used which include lead nurturing, lead scoring and marketing logistics automation.

3.1 – Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the automated delivery of marketing assets to specific leads in a pre-planned sequence with the purpose of achieving a specific goal (usually to move a lead down the marketing funnel towards late stages).

To effectively develop a lead nurturing mechanism, several elements needs to be considered:

Triggers & Rules: This includes deciding when your nurture programs will trigger in terms of the criteria set (such as a gated asset download) and the rules that dictate what happens when an event occurs (such as what happens if a user stalls in their journey or when to pause or stop a nurture flow).
Content: Creating a nurture flow and strategically deciding what content (and in what order) should be delivered to the lead who has enrolled in a nurture flow. To improve effectiveness, the flow should follow a common theme or underlying topic to best fit the content with the information needs of the actual lead.
CTA’s: By utilising CTA’s, you allow flexibility for your leads to move between different nurture flows – aligned to their information needs and behaviour. This means that nurture flows can proactively update in real-time, allowing a better way of transporting leads down the funnel/across their buying journey that builds buying intent.
Logistics: The logistical details of the nurture process including the timing and frequency of your drip campaign.
Measurement: Related to the key goal of the nurture flow, you need to decide how you will measure the effectiveness of the nurture flow.

The below is a basic example of how a lead nurturing program initially triggers a content flow upon the downloading of an ‘identification stage’ assets and subsequently delivers additional assets that progressively move the lead towards the ‘consideration stage’ in their buying journey.

3.2 – Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is an automated process of assigning values or attributes to your leads in relation to their interactions with your company/brand as way of determining their value to your organisation.

Leads can be scored in several different ways:

Consumption: This primarily includes the downloading or trackable consumption of content assets and other marketing collateral.
Behaviour: This relates to general behaviour in relation to your content and channels which could include the visiting of a key page, email opens/clicks and sharing/commenting on your social channels.
Firmographics: Through web forms (or manual research) you can capture a whole host of information relating to a leads firmographics including company size, sector or revenue figures – all of which can be used to align the lead with that of your target personas and ideal customers.
Professional Attributes: Data points including persona type, level of seniority and DMU role can all again be used to align the lead with your target customers.

The below is a basic example of how a lead scoring system (built into a lead nurturing program) attributes points to a lead based on the assets they consume, before automatically upgrading the lead to an MQL after meeting a 50-point criteria rule.

3.3 – Logistics Automation

This refers to using a marketing automation platform to integrate multiple tools together to improve efficiency and reduce manual actions. Many administrative tasks across the marketing team can be streamlined for productivity gains and error reduction – it’s also a way of harmonising the marketing and sales team with regards to critical areas such as lead handling and qualification.

The below is a basic example of how marketing logistics automation integrates multiple tools to improve efficiency and visibility whilst improving marketing/sales alignment.