There’s a fundamental truth about business-to-business growth: More alignment between sales and marketing teams drives more growth for B2B businesses. However, achieving this alignment has been a persistent challenge for many organizations.
B2B purchases today are rarely made by individuals acting alone, but by buying groups made up of multiple purchase decision makers within an account. And the number of individuals that make up buying groups has increased greatly to span new roles, departments and seniority levels. This increased complexity makes engaging today’s B2B buyers easier said than done as traditional marketing strategies on their own carry blind spots in correctly identifying the full set of stakeholders and the products they’re interested in.
The good news is, with recent advancements in B2B marketing technology—including generative AI—brands can improve their existing demand-generation strategies by taking into account buying groups to drive more precise engagement and efficient business growth at scale. Here’s how:
Connect sales and marketing teams with marketing-qualified buying groups
Despite having a common goal, marketing and sales teams have long struggled to maximize their alignment, primarily due to differences in the way that each function qualifies demand. While marketing teams qualify leads and accounts, sales teams qualify opportunities within target accounts.
At the same time, these teams have both faced challenges in accurately identifying specific purchase decision makers within an account, and streamlining the way they engage and qualify them. This disconnect can create operational inefficiencies and conflicting brand experiences that can ultimately limit revenue-growth potential.
For example, while lead-based marketing strategies are beneficial to qualifying an individual’s product interests, they often fall short in viewing these individuals within the context of their role in an account. And account-based marketing (ABM) strategies alone lack the crucial ability to identify key stakeholders for specific product offerings.
Marketing-qualified buying groups build on lead and ABM strategies by providing a more detailed view for sales teams, to include such information as account association, product interest, key decision makers, missing members and more. Focusing on marketing-qualified buying groups enables marketing and sales to work as one coordinated revenue team, leveraging unified, real-time marketing data across the enterprise to foster greater collaboration, maximize conversions and business growth.
Align demand generation approaches with a larger go-to-market strategy
A shared focus on buying groups provides a natural forcing function, enabling revenue teams to align their demand-generation efforts to priority go-to-market strategies. This process can begin before logging into any software. Here are some basic steps to take:
- Define your business objectives, for example by increasing revenue with existing customers.
- Confirm your relevant selling motions and target accounts, such as cross-selling of solution A to accounts X, Y and X.
- Determine key roles, like decision maker, influencer or practitioner, who are involved in making a purchase decision.
- Agree on the criteria for each buying group role with sales teams. This could include such decision makers as chief marketing officer or VP of marketing.
- Agree on a threshold for marketing-qualified buying groups with sales. For example, alert account owners when the buying-group engagement score is X or higher.
Generative AI can drastically speed up buying group creation and help marketers scale personalized content based on buying group member preferences. By using unified marketing data—including customer intent, sales opportunity and marketing engagement—generative AI can intelligently provide buying-group insights into recommended buying group roles, solution interest and role assignment.
That’s why we introduced Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition. Built on Adobe Experience Platform, which provides a single view of your B2B marketing data, this new application combines generative AI and automation to create buying groups, generate personalized content and orchestrate highly targeted journeys for each buying group member. This is all based on each member’s role, product interests and even previous interactions with B2B marketing and sales teams.
Learn more about how Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition can help your teams enhance B2B buying experiences and maximize revenue growth potential.
