I recently attended a webinar entitled “B2B Marketing Roundtable – Hot Trends
2007”. The webinar was presented by
Sirius Decisions. I was a little
disappointed with the webinar in terms of identifying the “Hot Trends for 2007”,
but nonetheless, there were some interesting points discussed.
The focus of the webinar was on five “trends” that are currently taking place
with B2B marketers and their sales teams. B2B marketers face unique
challenges
but also deal with the same challenges any marketer may face including improving
the efficiency of sales teams and converting leads to sales. The so called
trends discussed in the webinar are really ways for improving the manner in
which a B2B salesperson acquires and handles leads. Here’s a look at the five
trends that were discussed.
- Evaluate Your Customer Buying Cycle – Excuse the blinding flash to the
obvious, but shouldn’t you be doing this anyway? Not quite sure how this
qualifies as a trend. The webinar did point out that you should be aware of
the different audiences that are involved at different intervals of the
buying cycle (champions, CXO’s, users influencers, ratifiers etc). To sum
up, the key here is to try and understand the audience’s characteristics as
they interact at each phase of their buying cycle.
- Field Marketing Balance – Meaning that your B2B marketing budget is
balanced towards demand creation as investment in demand creation activities
should be and is currently the largest component of the B2B marketing
program budget. An interesting point was made by Chris Bombarger of
National
Instruments that traditional media cost per conversion does not measure up
to cost per conversion rates with things such as webinars and online medium.
In fact traditional media such as tradeshows are seeing lower conversions
and as a result higher cost per conversions.
- Commit to Pipeline Contribution – As a B2B company you need to make a
decision on marketing’s contribution to the sales pipeline. There needs to
be commitment to the sales pipeline.
- Focus on Demand Creation Tools – There’s that buzz word again, demand
creation. An interesting point was made here where there should be emphasis
on not doing more, but focusing on what you have and establishing a process
to score behavior. Think lead to forecast, opportunity to close, lead to
qualified opportunities etc.
- Focus on Sales Productivity – There was an interesting finding with this
trend in that too much productivity from sales is lost researching and cold
calling. Over 50% of time is spent on admin (30%) and preparing for calls
(21%) when only 18% is spent on “face to face” calls. I happened to be in
the room with some sales folks and they all nodded their head in agreement
with this.
There were some other items of interest discussed in the webinar that are
worth mentioning.
- Longer sales cycles demand larger pipelines to achieve increased quotas.
Historically experts have said that the average pipeline to quota ratio is
3.1 to 1. For B2B marketers this may be a bit higher at 3.6 to 1. With
longer sales cycles you may want to make this ratio even higher. You
definitely should calculate your pipeline to quota ratio.
- There is a new model for B2B marketing and sales that consists of 3 main
components; sales optimization, demand creation (the largest component) and
reputation development.
- There is a need to
measure insightful KPIs
- As leads come in, the probability of closing will be greater if you have
an immediate “Call to Action”. You will have a ten times greater chance of engaging a prospect in
lead conversion if you contact the prospect in the same day. This does make
sense, I would be curious as to actual numbers in various industries to see if
this is true across the spectrum for any organization utilizing this technique.
Of the “trends” discussed, it appears the hot trend for B2B marketers in 2007 is
demand creation. While demand creation is not new to marketers, the methods and
options used for generating demand are new and innovative. Through the use of
webinars, web casts, podcasts, and video blogs, B2B marketers can improve their
cost per conversion from the traditional media that they are using now. |
enquiro research
Jody Nimetz