B2B marketing leaders are at a crossroads. Organizations demand that initiatives must continue to have a direct impact on the sales pipeline and company bottom line. However, the go-to-market (GTM) strategies, systems, and strategies used by many teams are not tied to how buyers and businesses research and make purchasing decisions.

To predictably generate revenue and customers in today’s digital-first world, marketing and GTM leaders are rethinking and restructuring the demand strategies, tactics and mindsets that drive and contribute to pipelines and revenue. .

A transformation of demand generation is needed because business relationships and buyer-solution alignments do not work when demand transactions, automation, or quantity approaches are applied. But too many of us focus on generating leads to hit our quotas on our websites, forms, events, and social platforms, even before delivering value to our audiences, prospects, and customers. I’m here.

This is not “MQL is dead!”. rally cry. Instead, it’s essential to let go of ingrained unhealthy habits by starting with:

• Buyer/lead/audience ‘earn’ vs ‘generate’ demand mindset.
• An obsession of belonging to proving and earning credit rather than measuring to improve performance and engagement.
• Seek alignment between sales and marketing by offering sales rather than an integrated effort to please buyers and accounts.

Even organizations using models such as frictionless forms, propensity models powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and buyer and account intelligence are slowly adopting the “lead generation” mentality.

For example, AI identifies accounts and intents indicate in-market account activity and buyer signals, while still using automated emails and 3-Rhythm BDR scripts to engage with buyers. These shortsighted approaches prevent organizations from generating real demand from the best opportunities, customers and accounts.

Break down the three bad habits outlined above and transform them into new areas to improve your ability to identify, engage, delight, and consistently convert prospects into customers.

Ditch the “lead generation” mindset and reinforce an engagement-first approach

capture: Possess or control by force.

Similar Words and Phrases: Take Prisoner, Grab, Capture, Catch

oxford dictionary

It takes a cross between an anthropologist and a therapist to get to the root cause of the “capture” mindset. But in a nutshell, it starts with B2B marketing where sales are viewed as customers. Today’s demand stagnates as marketing has focused on sales delivery, “marketing-sales alignment,” and high-volume lead generation to make salespeople more productive.

To ditch this mindset, the highest performing marketing teams partner with sales to focus on customer preferences, account needs, pain points, requirements, and how to integrate those efforts. I’m here.

Also contributing to the demand challenge is marketing automation. As marketing’s central system of record, it’s still unleashed to generate, store, and score leads captured in forms through third-party syndication, webinars, and an explosion of emails. To meet your quota of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).

Acquisition is essential in the process, but starting with a “earn first, pick later” mentality is not buyer-centric. It also prevents the engaging experience of experts researching solutions and options. Often times, we develop processes and programs to help our prospects with what they need or are looking for before adding value to them.

Here’s the good news. Based on observations from several conferences this month, we are seeing a shift towards deploying more engagement-focused methods. We witnessed the following examples:

• Timely outreach based on intelligence.
• Use your customer’s preferred channel with buyer-specified content options.
• We focus on increasing engagement within the market and with highly engaged accounts.

All obvious moves from lead generation and random phone calls. It’s not perfect, but more and more teams are moving from Capturing his island to more timely buyer and purchase engagement strategies, moving across marketing and sales.

Dig Deeper: How to Leverage Intent and Engagement in the Buying Cycle

Stop chasing attribution: stick to customer experience and engagement metrics

A lead-centric approach gets worse when you put too much emphasis on attribution. The B2B buying and selling process is complex and dynamic. It involves multiple people involved in enterprise transformation initiatives that drive business model and transformation. So it doesn’t make sense to tie every tactic, campaign, and touchpoint to every spend. This chasing is a never-ending game of trying to take credit for leads and measuring investment impact more holistically.

To be clear, B2B marketing should be held accountable for the return on investment (ROI) of marketing spend.High performing teams start with results (revenue and pipeline generation) and work back to understand all Touchpoints and channels involved during a specific time period.

This effort requires analytics across the buyer journey and sales and marketing efforts to understand buyer and account behavior. Predictable demand outcomes should also apply buyer and account intelligence to present appropriate information and options to meet audience/buyer/visitor/attendee needs.

Dig Deeper: How to Leverage Intent and Engagement in the Buying Cycle

Elevate your go-to-market strategy across your organization by abandoning your obsession with sales and marketing alignment

Today we are constantly trying to align sales and marketing based on strategy, campaign or play. training, discovery meetings, certifications) and marketers (running campaigns, creating engaging communications, social media pros).

Both teams use technology and data, so they often build separate technology stacks, workflows, processes, and data models. The unintended result is an onslaught of communication and outreach that turns buyers off and crushes the buying group experience.

The alignment of marketing and sales is too small a thought. His successful B2B team connects sales, marketing, customer success, product, and operations to develop his GTM strategy that addresses buyers and accounts wherever they are in the research and buying journey.

Sales, marketing, and customer operations should be integrated into a single team with integrated workflows, connected systems, and buyer and account intelligence. This integrated GTM strategy aligns resources internally for agility and scalability, and addresses the dynamic nature of how companies and purchasing teams make decisions. This cross-functional mindset is essential to today’s trade agreements—software and service subscriptions that live in the cloud and are updated frequently.

Digging In: Creating B2B GTM Strategies That Buyers, Executives, and Revenue Teams Love

Breaking away from the “lead generation” mentality

no excuses No pacifier. It’s time to let go of lead generation. This shift in demand requires marketing to move away from outdated lead-centric strategies and tactics. Instead, B2B organizations should focus on buyer and account engagement.

To achieve this, B2B organizations develop and adopt a more holistic GTM approach leveraging integrated buyer- and account-centric strategies, roles, data, and systems beyond sales and marketing. is needed.

Undoubtedly, this change requires courage, grit, and change management. With the progress we’re seeing, I’m more confident than ever in demand marketing professionals.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

About the author

Scott Vaughan is a B2B CMO and Market Development Leader. After several of his CMO and business leadership roles, Scott now works with CMOs, CXOs, founders, and investors on business, marketing, products, and his GTM strategy. Active advisor and consultant. He works in the world of B2B SaaS, technology, marketing and revenue. His passion is fueled by working in the marketplace to create new levels of business and customer value for B2B organizations. His approach is influenced and driven by his diverse experience as a marketing leader, revenue driver, executive, market evangelist, speaker, and writer in all areas of marketing, technology and business. He is drawn to innovative solutions and dynamic companies that need to transform.