Inbound Marketing Age

There's a new decision-maker entering the B2B sales funnel.

Curious, socially aware, digitally native and research driven, millennials are more involved in making decisions about which products and services companies are using than ever before.

The B2B Millennial Marketing Report states that 73% of millennials are involved in product or service purchase decision-making at their companies.

By 2020 millennials will represent a third of the workforce so you can no longer deny their power and influence in the B2B marketing sphere. 

Simply put, don't let millennials be an afterthought.

We live in a world of social media and instant communication, peer review sites and messaging. People are sharing their experiences of products, service brands and life in general, more than ever before. And not just people – the people that your business deals with – your customers and prospects – your buyers.

This has several implications for a business, firstly your product or service has to do its job, it has to be fit for purpose – otherwise, your customers will share their feelings and views on its shortcomings with other customers and potential prospects. Word will soon get around, and you will find it hard to improve sales without fixing the product or service and publicising the fact. Secondly, your customer support has to be fit for purpose too – you have to keep your customers happy, or again, those poor experiences will be shared.

Wouldn’t business be so much easier if you didn’t have to deal with people? Well, today, there’s a whole range of systems, content channels and marketing techniques that allow you to market a business with little or no direct human interaction with the potential customer. Major companies are heavily investing in complex algorithms – often erroneously sold as Artificial Intelligence – that can interact “intelligently” with the prospect and customer.

The Sales funnel has been a cornerstone in marketing strategy for over a century. Believed to have been invented by E St Elmo Lewis in 1898, the sales funnel is widely regarded as the first formal theory of marketing.

However, in today’s buyer-centric environment the model is no longer fit for purpose. The traditional sales funnel prioritises marketing and sales over customer service and favours closing the next deal over your existing customers. Customers are a by-product of the sales funnel, not the central focus.

If you think about how a funnel works. You have a large amount of energy at the top with lots of people aware of your company, a smaller amount of people engaging with your company in the middle, and even fewer people at the bottom becoming customers, at which point they fall out the bottom and the process ends until you then pour more into the top.

If you are working in Sales or Marketing for a growing business, you will undoubtedly be looking for practical tools to help you grow. Tools that can keep pace with your ever-changing business model and that help you streamline efficiencies in the way you market, sell and communicate with your customers.

However as your list of tools grow, the amount of time and attention they take grows. Your tool stack can become disjointed. Some of your tools may not integrate so you spend more time moving data around from one to another.

With HubSpot’s marketing, sales, and CRM software, you can focus on generating leads and revenue and forget about managing a stack of scattered tools.

Here is how.

Throughout my career in marketing, one common obstacle has always remained. Getting Sales to buy-in to and use the company CRM (customer relationship management) system of choice.

In the early days of the internet (yes, I remember them), CRM systems were cumbersome, time-consuming and unintuitive to use. Salespeople were field-based, and spent their days clocking up mileage visiting potential customers. Admin was seen as a frustrating waste of time that they could be spending on generating commission.

Times have thankfully changed, and CRM systems are no longer (or shouldn't be) a big messy anxiety-inducing database. A good CRM system should help you manage relationships and sell more efficiently.

It should be your sales people's secret weapon.

An effective lead generation strategy is a culmination of approaches that when combined, enhance your reputation, increase website traffic, and as a result, attract a steady stream of qualified leads. There are individual strategies that will enhance your overall approach, but what it really requires is a holistic effort.

Changes in customer behaviour are widening the gap between buyers’ expectations and sellers’ tactics. it is well versed that today's buyers would rather conduct their own research online than pick up the phone to Sales.

In response to this savvy marketers are driving traffic to their websites through inbound marketing methods; generating organic traffic and using topics and keywords to boost search engine rankings.

But marketers are also spending budget on advertising.

The Advertising Association is projecting that total UK advertising spend in 2018 will grow 2.8% to £22.7bn. The report also revealed that almost one in four pounds spent on advertising in the third quarter of 2017 went to mobile, which recorded year-on-year growth of 30.7%.

A sales funnel is a visualisation of how many leads you need to convert into business. It helps you to look for areas of improvement in your sales process, forecast future production / resource requirements and ensure Sales are focusing their efforts on the right type of leads.

The first step in creating a sales funnel is to set a quantifiable goal, this will be based on the number of sales you need to achieve in a given period. Then work backwards through each step of your sales process and work out your conversion rate at each stage.

Working backwards from your sales goal, and factoring in your conversion rates enables you to estimate how many leads are required to generate the sales you need.

It is well documented that B2B Sales is changing. Buyers are more educated, not only about your products but also your competitors. They no longer need a salesperson to help them make informed decisions.

If you follow an inbound marketing approach, your sales team have access to information such as: which web pages prospects have viewed and what content they downloaded. This can tell you their life cycle stage and which of your buyer personas they identify with. The lead may have also been nurtured through workflows, at each step attracting negative or positive scoring which helps generate marketing qualified leads (MQL) that are ready for Sales qualification.

The role of Sales now is more advisory, and salespeople need to be cognisant of all the information the buyer has accessed, and adapt their approach accordingly.

Everyone loves to hate Salespeople. Recent research showed that Salespeople rank lower on the scale of trustworthiness than politicians - yes, less than Donald Trump.

Ask anyone what they think about Salespeople, and they will probably think used car salespeople ala Mr Wormwood. But as the power has shifted to the buyer the criteria for being a sales person has also changed.

Regardless of what business or industry you are in, the last thing your customers want is to be sold to. Instead, they want to be advised, counselled and coached through their buyer journey. It is salespeople that have the ability to establish rapport with their customers and create an atmosphere of trust that will succeed. Sales have changed, and you need to adapt.