B2B case studies: How Marketing takes advantage of a hidden sales cycle

These days, buyers are much better informed about the products or services they are interested in. They orient themselves in early stages, even before the first contact with Sales. The time that Sales controlled the sales cycle is over. This makes marketing’s role even more important.

Recently, the B2B Marketing Forum (of which spotONvision is the founder) organized the webinar ‘The hidden sales cycle’ in cooperation with Oracle Marketing Cloud. Guest speaker Mark Emmett, Global Director of Marketing Operations at online assessment platform Trustpilot, told us about the changing sales cycle and how this changes the role of Marketing.

Better content for a more effective dialogue

Since buyers increasingly orient themselves online, Marketing has to offer better content so potential buyers see that you are a strong player in the market. Also, Marketing is forced to create better content to answer the questions that prospects have the moment they orient themselves online in the early stages, ‘the education phase’. If you don’t, they will go somewhere else for their answers. And then chances are high they won’t come back.

Therefore, it is important to create good and relevant content so that potential buyers come to you and not the competitor. Furthermore, Marketing obtains better understanding in what the buyer is interested in and which challenges he/she has. With good content Marketing can help the Sales team so that Sales can have an effective dialogue with the prospect.

Case study Trustpilot: from chaos to a clear insight in the buyer

The problem

When Mark Emmett started at Trustpilot a year ago he came across several issues:

• No insight in behavior of website visitors: nobody knew which people or companies visited the website and which pages they were looking at. This way it was unclear if Trustpilot already had a relationship with the website visitor or whether it was a new visitor.
• Continuous demand to more leads: every week Sales asked for more leads while 40,000 leads still had to be followed up. Furthermore, they didn’t know how to determine which leads had priority.
• No consistent process: every buyer had their own way of dealing with leads, there was no clarity on how to approach leads and it wasn’t known at management level what happened to leads.
• Marketing had no idea which marketing activities were successful and which weren’t.

6 steps to the solution

1. Step 1 – technological infrastructure as a basis: the first step Trustpilot took to solve the problems was getting a marketing automation system. This way, Marketing was able to follow leads and Sales could start successful dialogues. The organization started small with marketing automation, and as the system worked out, it was used much more over time.
2. Step 2 – the content marketing machine: the following crucial step was developing a ‘content marketing machine’. Key in this is really getting to know your target group, what are potential buyers worried about, what is their digital body language and how does the target group look for information? When Trustpilot really understood the target group (using a buyer persona profile) they started content creation and content promotion.
3. Step 3 – optimization and lead scoring: in this phase the first results became visible. Which content is most successful, which subject catches the most and what is preferred, a blog, eBook or video? Based on these insights Trustpilot optimized the content marketing strategy and started to score leads: a system in which you assign points to a lead, based on a person’s profile combined with online behavior. The higher the score, the bigger the chance on engagement, conversion and eventually a business deal.
4. Step 4 – sales & marketing alignment: the next step was to start conversations with Sales colleagues to realize a better cooperation with Marketing. How does our Sales team work, what do we want to achieve together and what does Sales need from Marketing to be successful? Together they defined which personas they wanted to focus on, which way they wanted to engage with personas and what the ‘common language’ is. When do we call it a prospect and when a lead. It also became clear at what point a lead is ‘hot’ enough to be taken over by Sales.
5. Step 5 – sales enablement: actions were taken to promote sales enablement. Marketing developed new email templates so that Sales can make better use of the content that marketing provides so they can have effective dialogues with prospects. Besides, new email templates were now available for every phase of the buyer’s process to help Sales with successfully following up the conversations they have with a prospect.
6. Step 6 – standardization and optimization: during the last step we looked at which other tools Sales needed to be successful and then the CRM system was optimized. Furthermore, the way of working is being evaluated continually: which emails are most effective, which content works and which doesn’t? How can we keep supporting Sales and what are points to improve?

As a marketing department you can take advantage of the hidden sales cycle -the education phase of the buyer’s journey- by following Mark Emmett’s tips. Now is the time to change if you want to be successful with Sales in the future.

The recording and slides of the webinar are available online. Do you want to get started with content marketing, sales and marketing alignment, marketing automation and/or lead scoring? Or do you just want information? Please contact us.