From the Desk of Rick Pedersen, CEO of The ROM Group

In my last blog, I wrote about the success many companies have achieved after aligning their marketing and sales departments—both working towards the same goal to drive leads through the Purchase Decision Process to sales-ready and then to close.

In this blog, I’ll focus on the challenges B2B companies face and what they are doing to elevate marketing’s effectiveness from lead generation to sales conversion. I found that MarketingSherpa’s 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report is a great source for this information. They found that companies who weathered the recent recession were those who “applied the most efficient marketing tactics for every stage of the sales funnel, from lead generation to sales conversion, and then closed the loop with sound marketing analytics for continual improvement.” The summary goes on to state the marketing challenges that these companies face and the tactics they plan to implement based on the previous year’s results.

Marketing Challenges
According to the survey, the greatest challenge B2B companies faced from 2009-2010 was generating high-quality leads. The next challenge they faced were generating a higher number of leads. The third largest challenge was marketing to a lengthening sales cycle, which is some cases can be longer than a year.

How They Plan to Solve These Challenges Based on Previous Outcomes
1. Define a sales funnel process: creating a lead nurturing stage for those not ready to buy now, but within the next six to eighteen months, and implementing lead scoring methodologies that define when a contact is ready to be handed to sales.
2. Increase investment in inbound marketing tactics: website design, management and optimization; social media, virtual events or webinars and SEO
3. Decrease or unchanged investment in outbound marketing tactics: telemarketing, direct mail, tradeshows and print advertising.

My Thoughts
My colleagues here at The ROM Group and I have come to understand the B2B buying cycle is the same as that of the B2C sector—only theB2B cycle is often longer. The big take-away from this is how important the Web then becomes in your marketing tactics, social media in particular. It has become very obvious when P&G, Coca Cola, Ford and Starbucks have become experts at using it. This report states, social media is in its infancy and should not be dismissed just because it has not shown to be that effective. It is effective, but many are not sure how or why it is.

The full report is divided into four parts: Generating Interest and Attracting Prospects, Qualifying and Nurturing Sales Leads, Maximizing the Lifetime Value of Each Customer, and Closing the Loop. The first three being major components of the buying cycle and the fourth focusing on analytics, which has become critical in showing marketing’s value. It analyzes the individual execution and effectiveness of each tactic for varying sizes of organizations and industries. To download the full free Executive Summary: 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, click HERE.

Until Next Time,
Rick

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