039 - B2B’s artificial funnel problem

1* B2B’s artificial funnel problem

Original piece posted by Chris Peters

The problem with the use of the funnel is that it sets an unrealistic expectation for what can be accomplished with how your B2B marketing should be set up. As such, how you approach it will be manufactured to adhere to outdated ways of working that help you deliver vanity metrics, such as MQL.

4 points I dive into in more detail in this article

>| B2B buying is a journey, not a funnel.

>| Talk to those today who are buying tomorrow.

>| If your team is ultimately measured on leads and MQLs, this will reflect your marketing strategy.

>| The enabler that unlocks a better marketing strategy is measurement.

Original Source

2* “The most important search engine is still the one in your mind”

Another cornerstone piece of thinking from LinkedIn to apply to your strategic armour.

I often like to apply my own thinking and POV to articles, but these excerpts are so perfectly written it's a simple copy and paste job today.

Here are 4 insightful things you’ll get from this piece.

If you believe most buyer behaviour starts with memory, it then follows that the primary job of marketing is not to generate clicks, but instead to generate memories.
When entering a buying situation, a category buyer first draws on existing memories to identify potential brands for purchase. These memory-generated brands are the starting point for the buying process. Other sources and search engines (e.g., google, colleagues) are usually only consulted if the memory-generated options are insufficient. And, even when consultation does occur, buyers still show a bias for the brands they already know.
Memory-generated brands are the starting point for the buying process.
Working with Category Entry Points. Here are four steps to help you work with CEPs: 1. Identify CEPs in the category 2. Prioritise CEPs for your brand/company/portfolio 3. Build CEPs into your marketing communications 4. Measure how effectively your brand is linking to those CEPs in category buyer memory

Original Source

3* 45% of buyers prefer to conduct buying research on their own

This data is over 2 years out of date, I suspect this figure has increased to over half by now.

The Gartner Future of Sales 2025 report predicts that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels.

Sales teams and B2B businesses need to evolve their org structures that build around how buyers want to buy.

Less than 1 in 5 people want to engage a sales rep in the buying process, more buyers want to conduct their independent research for suppliers to use and buyers want the process on their terms.

Brands need to think about how they deploy their sales team to engage them, the experience they provide and how they’re set up as a business to provide this new buying process.

This is a good piece of Gartner that goes into more detail to diversify digital selling tools and channels, rethink B2B sales enablement and Prioritise the seller experience and coaching.

Original Source