What are your B2B Buyers looking for in the later-stage marketing/sales conversation? This…
62% of B2B Buyers count digital content as their most-desired channel. And they see it as so effective that they can finalize a purchase decision based on that digital content alone.
2020 B2B Buyer Preferences Study
Content Marketing Institute
Your Buyers are clearly telling you that they don’t want to speak to sales people until they are good and ready. Instead they want you to deliver far more personalized and tailored sales conversations VIA CONTENT. Oh, and they are typically going to give you no more than 3-5 touches with that content before making their purchase decision.
So…
Is your organization – from the CMO, to the marketing and sales teams, to the content creators – fully aligned and executing to meet this growing demand from your Buyers? The truth is – probably not.
Why? Well, if your company is like most, the above graphic from Gartner’s 2020 Marketing Operations Survey makes it abundantly clear.
It’s the 4 challenge areas highlighted in red that we’ve repeatedly dealt with over the years in our work with B2B businesses of all all sizes from mid-market to F-100 enterprises. In fact, this is exactly what led us to build Splashmetrics – to solve each of these challenges, and enable B2B companies to deliver on this critical and rapidly growing Buyer demand.
Let’s take a quick look at each challenge…and how Splashmetrics solves it.
Marketing Strategy and Execution Not Effectively Linked? Solved.
According to an Altimeter study, only 30% of B2B companies do any kind of documented strategic planning whatsoever for their content marketing/sales efforts. There are many reasons for this. First, it’s hard! You have to sift through all the various marketing and sales models and lingo out there (Lead Gen, Demand Gen, ABM, Revenue Marketing, funnels, waterfalls, cycles, flows, journeys, MQLs, SAAs, etc.). Then you have to get everyone on board with that model and its unique language. Then you have to figure out how and where each tactical team and stakeholder fits into that strategic plan so that they can all execute their own responsibilities at each stage of the journey…ensuring there are no gaps that your Buyers can fall into as they make their way to that purchase decision. So, yes, it’s hard.
Therefore, to be successful in executing these powerful, seamless, personalized Buyer Journeys it is absolutely critical, from the very beginning, that your strategic planning directly involves everyone from the executives, to the tactical sales, marketing, and content teams.
This organization-wide linking of teams and stakeholders within the strategy itself is the only way to ensure optimal execution of that strategy downstream. And it’s exactly what the Manage Component in Splashmetrics is all about…
Executive, Marketing, and Sales alignment – with customizable models, terms, definitions, quotas, commitments, etc.
Lack of team communication and collaboration? Solved.
You simply cannot have optimal execution of a brilliant strategic plan if it’s not communicated well to your tactical stakeholders who have to execute it. And, conversely, you can’t be sure optimal execution is even possible if those same stakeholders are not collaborating on that plan in the first place.
Splashmetrics is all about live, dynamic, strategic planning that ALL stakeholders from the executives, to the marketing and sales teams, to the content creators are involved in from the very beginning. This results in a single-source-of-strategic-truth that is clear to all and ready to execute…
Customizable terms and clear quotas, timelines, KPIs, benchmarks, etc. for every stage of the Buyer Journey.
Poor organizational alignment, transparency and accountability? Solved.
With the above issues of communication and collaboration addressed – alignment, transparency and accountability become natural outcomes. Splashmetrics not only does all the heavy lifting in automating critical strategic and tactical drivers such as benchmarking, quotas, KPIs, progressive linking, etc. so that every stakeholder is fully aligned and knows exactly what they need to achieve to reach revenue targets – it also provides that accountably though holistic, objectives-based and journey-flow-based analytics tied directly to this strategic plan everyone is executing on…
All stakeholders know exactly what they are seeing in the analytics – because they are tied directly to the strategic plan they helped build.
And that leads us to our final challenge solved by Splashmetrics…
Inability to fully utilize existing marketing technologies? Solved.
Your tactical marketing, sales, and content teams leverage various platforms and technologies in their work. So, even if you overcome each of the above challenges – unless these strategic planning efforts take those platforms and processes into account you still have a very large, critical gap in your execution.
How does your marketing automation team set up the right gating and progressive profiling? How does your CRM team set up Buyer-data-driven workflows and playbooks to ensure those later-stage Buyers have the customized on-demand sales support they need? And how do your various content creators build the right conversations, interactions, and linking in the smart content at each stage to ensure that each Buyer has that seamless, compelling pathway to purchase?
Again, helping your tactical teams leverage these platforms through better intelligence, integration, and automation is exactly what Splashmetrics does…
Planning, automation, and integration for every smart content asset (conversation) in every stage of the Buyer Journey.
With a single click in Splashmetrics, you can provide these various tactical teams all the information they need to fully leverage their platforms like Pardot, HubSpot, Salesforce, WordPress, and more.
Conclusion? You can easily overcome these weaknesses – with Splashmetrics.
With the increasing demands of today’s B2B Buyers, you really have no choice but to seriously up your game when it comes to digital smart content and the sales conversations it enables throughout the Buyer Journey.
The choice you DO have is whether to stick to outdated and ineffective tools like spreadsheets and Powerpoint decks in a frustrating attempt to deal with these weaknesses – or whether to step up to Splashmetrics, which was custom-built to solve these challenges and deliver on these demands.
Give us a shout and we’ll show you how Splashmetrics can solve the challenges for you!
