Boosting B2B Sales’ Marketing Function

To take advantage of this changing environment, companies must align the roles and responsibilities of marketing and sales to tightly integrate the two functions to include clearly defined collaboration and handoff points to ensure a seamless customer journey.

In our experience, companies that have undertaken this transformation and achieved the benefits highlighted in Figure 1 have built such connections, adopted new marketing technologies and tools to gain more insights from existing data, and optimized and improved processes across the funnel shown in Figure 4. They also made complex transformations less intimidating by breaking them down into smaller integrated initiatives.

The primary deliverable of the demand center is the marketing qualified lead (MQL). Each should contain required and optional qualitative elements that enable the sales team to efficiently convert these leads into sales qualified leads or SQLs. The automated demand center in the funnel in Figure 4 uses available data to qualify and evaluate potential new business and prospects from existing business (upsell and cross-sell opportunities and churn risk). The highest priority leads are sent to sales for further qualification and eventual conversion, while others are given lower priority and sent back to the nurturing process or demoted. Demand Center’s GenAI module can incorporate a wide range of contextual data to scale and personalize lead generation and enrichment while accelerating the process.

on a car but no axles or transmission. Strength and momentum come from full integration. This means not only breaking down organizational silos, but also the thinking behind them.

A feedback loop between marketing and sales triggers a flow of data and information, such as buyer archetypes and behaviors and their impact on conversion rates, allowing marketing to improve the quality of lead generation. A unified dashboard linked to a CRM platform gives companies a consistent and systematic way to track KPIs between marketing and sales. This connection also allows marketing and sales to develop a consistent strategy for prioritizing and winning accounts. Regular meetings include market monitoring, goal setting, planning ideal customer profiles, and strategizing customer-based marketing. Perhaps more importantly for internal working relationships, this connection changes the perception of marketing from a quality, nice-to-have feature to a true co-owner and critical function of the sales conversion pipeline. The existence of MQLs creates a quantifiable connection between inbound leads and revenue generation, transforming marketing from a message generator to a targeted engine for tracking specific leads that can generate higher-value sales. This makes marketing activities measurable and easier to understand.

This connection also adds greater meaning to the end-to-end customer journey. An integrated go-to-market strategic plan between marketing and sales ensures leadership and oversight of all pipeline activities that run in parallel with this customer journey.

Marketing must leverage big data and cutting-edge martech to personalize customer journeys and increase conversion rates. This greater use of data empowers marketing to generate leads with higher business value, higher propensity to buy, and supporting information that helps sales qualify them. Bundling all lead data in one place ensures a holistic overview and standardized lead qualification. This not only lays the foundation for scalable lead generation, but also ensures systematic lead enrichment and nurturing to hand over high-priority leads to sales. MQLs derived from this rich data set improve resource allocation by eliminating the need for salespeople to spend time on non-sales activities such as lead generation and initial qualification. They also create opportunities to pursue leads from underserved segments that salespeople have historically ignored because it is generally safer and more cost-effective to deal with existing customers.