There was a time, many, many years ago, when B2B firms regarded their marketing team in the same way you or I might regard our appendix. Everyone had one, but no one really knew why.
In this era – let’s call it the pre-enlightenment – the sales team generated revenue, customer service acted as the voice of the client and the board set the strategy. Marketing booked exhibition stands for the sales team and made PowerPoint slides pretty.
Ok, maybe it wasn’t quite that bad. But when we compare the influence and reach of B2B marketing today to the teams of old, they’re poles apart.
Sector-wide shifts
A combination of the pandemic and economic turbulence has accelerated marketing’s already growing strategic influence within B2B. The pandemic shifted the buying journey even further online, often out of the hands of salespeople in meeting rooms and onto digital channels. The unsettled economic climate has forced firms to maximise every penny of investment; in particular, looking for ways to generate more revenue from existing customers.
Marketers are integral to this shift, as this year’s Annual Effectiveness Barometer shows. We surveyed 800 B2B marketers in the US, UK, Germany and Australia and uncovered widespread confidence in marketing’s power to affect change within today’s B2B organisation.
Setting the agenda
A growing number of marketers are influencing business strategy through a seat at the top table. Not only does a place on the board allow marketing to set the agenda; it represents a recognition of marketing’s potential contribution by the wider B2B business. Over half (52%) of our respondents said they had a CMO on the board. When we look at responses from leading marketers[1] only, that figure leaps to 78%.
One factor driving this increased influence is that today’s B2B marketing team has put a stake in the ground when it comes to ownership of growth. Only 9% of respondents said that marketing is seen in their business as a necessary cost centre. A significant number of respondents (42%) report that, instead, marketing is perceived as a driver of growth. A further 15% said marketing is perceived as a source of competitive advantage, and 13% that the marketing team are seen as the voice of the customer.
Measuring what matters
Marketing has sometimes been accused of not speaking the same language as the rest of the business. Tell the CFO how many marketing qualified leads (MQLs) your campaign achieved and they are – not surprisingly – likely to be underwhelmed. With increasing accountability for growth, however, comes intensified efforts to track and report against commercial measures. The majority of B2B marketers prioritise commercial impact ahead of marketing metrics, according to our survey. When asked what objectives marketing is directly responsible for within their organisation, 54% said revenue growth, 52% said customer retention and 51% said customer satisfaction. Only 15% viewed MQLs as a priority.
Broadening responsibilities
In previous years, the marketing team’s involvement with a buyer would often end once the deal was signed. The customer was handed over to account management and marketing went back to acquiring more new logos. As budget squeezes impact the number of new deals, marketing’s focus is shifting. Nearly half (46%) of respondents have put more emphasis on growing existing customers or moving them to more profitable products and services. As the economic downturn bites, and marketers develop their capabilities further along the buying and consumption journey, we expect customer lifecycle marketing to accelerate as a key B2B trend.
Challenging as operating in the current climate may be, these signs from marketing departments are positive. The need to be more strategic, to think more laterally about growth, and to prove more substantively the impact marketing has on the business, is making the role of a B2B marketer more rewarding than ever before.
David van Schaick, CMO at
The Marketing Practice