The growing complexity of today’s B2B buying process requires marketing teams to be on top of their game year-round. How a marketing team is organized plays a key role in its efficiency and effectiveness, says Matt Heinz of Seattle-based Heinz Marketing. He offers these tips to guide your thinking:
1. Designate someone to own the voice of the customer. Someone (or a team of people depending on the size and complexity of your company and go-to-market strategy) needs to own the ideal customer profile (ICP) as well as the key personas that make up the internal buying committee at current and potential customers. Ideally, this person spends as much time as possible directly in front of customers and prospects, engaged with influencers and analysts that know them best, and influencing the consistency, clarity and accuracy of all outbound communications – from sales, marketing, customer success and more.
2. Dedicate someone to own attribution. Getting true attribution answers in complex buying journeys is incredibly difficult. However, you don’t have to answer every single question to be successful. For every insight you capture, you’re able to make future (including near-term) sales and marketing efforts more efficient and successful.
3. Create a single, integrated revenue operations team. You’ll likely need to combine resources between sales and marketing (often separate budgets) into a single cohesive unit. Only when you combine the teams, tools and budgets can you successfully align the buying journey into a single path, enabled through a more integrated set of tools and processes.
Heinz offers this word of caution: Some companies organize marketing teams by stage of the sales funnel or buying journey. For example, they have a team for the top of the funnel, a team for the middle, and a sales enablement group for the bottom.
This sounds good in theory, but rarely works in reality. Why? “If done right, the majority of resources, messages, tools and content used at one stage can and should be repurposed in another. An insight used to get a prospect’s attention and engagement may be exactly what you need later to help justify the decision with that same decision-maker or with other members of the buying committee,” he states.
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