The fundamental shift from capturing individual leads to engaging buying within target accounts is a multidimensional change many B2B marketers are struggling with as they look to adapt their approach strategies, processes and tools.
This will be a recurring topic of discussion during the upcoming B2B Marketing Exchange, taking place February 19-21 in Scottsdale, AZ. In a session titled “Life Beyond The Lead,”, Terry Flaherty, Senior Research Director at SiriusDecisions, will kick off the track at the event’s Demand Gen Summit track by discussing the ongoing growth and adoption of the company’s Demand Unit Waterfall, a framework that highlights the growing importance to not focus solely on individual leads within target accounts and the effectiveness of understanding the pain points and needs of buying groups to close deals.
“[The Demand Unit Waterfall] impacts how we think about campaigns; it changes everything because we now have insight that can fuel the process,” said Flaherty in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “We’re excited about this framework because it positions marketing and sales with a new level of granularity to help understand how buying groups align with messaging, personas, sales conversations and overall strategy.”
Flaherty’s session will also serve as a springboard to the connected themes running across the event’s six tracks, which include the Demand Gen Summit, Content2Conversion, ABM in Action Live, Sales Impact Summit, Digital Strategy and Channel Enablement. Flaherty will be one of five SiriusDecisions analysts providing track keynotes at the events, with Matt Senatore, Phyllis Davidson, Maria Chien, Rachel Young also sharing research and best practice guidance.
Focusing On Buying Groups And ABM
The expanded influence of buying groups within B2B organizations has been one of the key drivers of ABM’s explosive as a practice over the two years. In a session taking place during the ABM In Action Live track at The B2B Marketing Exchange, Christopher Engman, CRO and CMO of Climeon and author of the book Mega Deals, will share key insights into effective ABM strategies designed to engage buying groups at these “Mega Deal” companies, while also providing use case examples of these strategies at work in his own company.
“ABM is a perfect marriage with Mega Deals,” said Engman in a Q&A on the B2BMX blog. “Many of the parts of the Mega Deals framework are improved with ABM, such as the perceived risk of a deal and the consensus creation among a much larger buying committee. [During the session], attendees will get the Mega Deals framework (useful both for marketing and sales), best practices condensed from both Climeon and from more than 100 Fortune 500 cases, as well as concrete examples of how we run it at Climeon and what the future developments are.”
Enhancing Personalization By Understanding Buying Intent
With new strategies comes the continued strive for a balance between streamlined communications with prospective accounts and hyper-personalized messaging. SiriusDecisions’ Flaherty noted that individuals within these buying groups are still important to this effort.
“This is because the accounts aren’t the buyers, the individuals are,” Flaherty said. “The earlier we can surface the concept of engaging stakeholders with context to the purchase decision, you can calibrate marketing and sales’ thinking about engaging potential opportunities based on their needs and turning them into real opportunities.”
In a case study session illustrating how B2B brands are using intent data, Lenovo’s Senior Manager of Global Digital Marketing Mike Ballard will provide insight into his company’s ongoing development of marketing efforts with the help of intent insights to better personalize Lenovo’s web and email experience with prospective accounts.
Developing An Agile Digital Strategy
As B2B marketers wrestle with the need to shift their campaign models and be more responsive and relevant to targeted buying groups, many organization are adopting new management and collaboration models.
In a session taking place in the new Digital Strategy track at B2BMX, Andrea Fryrear, President of AgileSherpas, will highlight how these new focuses for marketing teams can have a positive impact on any agile marketing effort within an organization. Fryrear will also share how to make the most of agile marketing efforts while providing a step-by-step guide to adopting an agile approach to B2B marketing.
“There are three big drivers pushing marketing towards agility: the complexity of marketing operations, the sophistication of audiences and speed of market evolution,” said Fryrear in another Q&A on the B2BMX blog. “Marketers have all this technology to help us, but if we try to shoehorn new tools into an old process, we miss out on all the benefits martech has to offer.”
Marketing Beyond The Marketers With Sales Enablement
After marketing is positioned to engage buying groups efficiently, they can then begin equipping their sales teams with the tools, content and messaging needed to drive conversions with the right opportunities
In an upcoming session during the Sales Impact Summit track, Tabitha Adams, Senior Manager of Demand Generation at D-Link, will share the benefits of focusing on not only what sales needs, but what they do best — build relationships. Adams will also share tips to optimize your sales and marketing processes and programs so you’re really working as one team with one goal.
Fueling Marketing Performance With Partners
While analyzing buying groups can help create more informed marketing teams, it is also easy to position channel partners with that insight to increase their relevance with potential customers.
For example, in a session presented by SiriusDecisions’ Maria Chien, she will introduce a best-in-class methodology for driving greater engagement and performance with channel partners with an emphasis on uniting the elements that drive rapid revenue growth through partners.
The B2B Marketing Exchange has a plethora of sessions covering a variety of topics that are crucial to the ongoing success of B2B marketing and sales teams in the industry. Here are a few additional sessions slated to take place February 19-21 in Scottsdale, AZ:
- Next Level Native: B2B Advertising Gets Personal, presented by Edwin Wong of BuzzFeed
- B2P: The Rise of Business to People, presented by Paul Peterman of Facebook and Ada Agrait of Microsoft
- Putting Personalization To Work In B2B: How Brands Are Building Contextual Customer Journeys, presented by Jeff Marcoux of Teletech
- Content ROI: Put Your Metrics Where Your Mouth Is, presented by Katie Thornton of Datto
- Creativity: The New Marketing Imperative In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence, presented by Author James Taylor
- Embracing Buyer-Focused, Visual Storytelling: How OpenText Transformed Its Content Marketing Approach, presented by Ericka McCoy of OpenText
- Balancing Community, Conversation & Conversion, presented by Brian Fitzgerald of Veracode
- Bingeing on Demand: The New Engagement Equation for B2B Buyers, presented by Ardath Albee of Marketing Interactions, Inc.
