Bridging the gap and driving growth with revenue marketing
Revenue Marketing differentiates heavily from traditional marketing, while the traditional performance marketing approach is to generate leads and hand them over to sales with no or minimal follow-up involvement, revenue marketing kicks it up a notch and works together with sales in the bottom of the sales funnel to achieve set goals. It’s a very effective approach that increases the collaboration with both teams.
This approach addresses a major challenge that has been hunting tech companies for years. Which is the conflict between Marketing and Sales. More than a third (33.7%) of B2B marketers frequently find themselves in conflict with the sales team, according to new Marketing Week research.
The most popular marketing argument was that sales does not conduct an effective follow up, while sales complains about the quality and quantity of the leads generated by marketing. It does not solve these challenges directly, it increases the level of collaboration between the two teams which majorly reduces the finger pointing between Marketing and sales. And prevents these challenges from coming up in the first place.
Here are 5 elements for a successful Marketing and Sales collaboration, which is the cornerstone to create a growth oriented revenue marketing strategy. While most of them can appear highly radical, the application can guarantee a big turn around for your revenue strategy. Please also note that revenue marketing is not achieved by just implementing these changes, but they are according to our experiences within different B2B tech companies the main attributes that get the wheel rolling. Some of these suggestions are tactical and some are high level, but all of them can be practically implemented:
Revenue oriented CRM architecture and collaboration
A well-integrated CRM system is the backbone of a successful revenue marketing strategy. Workflows integrated in the CRM have to serve the joint goals shared by marketing and sales and be aimed into generating revenue. Both teams can track a prospect’s journey, share notes, and analyze progress without silos. Effective CRM collaboration enables better lead nurturing and personalized follow-ups. Automation is key, preventing entering too much information by hand. Free Tip: To assure a consistent feedback structure, Use AI software that takes notes within discovery meetings and integrates them directly in the CRM (build in integration or Zapier), this way you hit two birds with one stone, marketing doesn’t need to follow-up on statuses of leads with individual sales reps but can take action immediately through getting their feedback from the meeting notes and you lighten up the workload on the post meeting operational work that sales needs to do, like leaving feedback on MQLs and SQLs.
Revenue operations and architecture are large topics that will need an article on their own. I recommend the Revenue Architecture book from Jacco Van Der Kooij and his company ‘Winning by Design’, which elaborates on how B2B SaaS companies with a Recurring Revenue product can transform their GTM strategies into a what he calls ‘revenue factory,’ driving growth, cutting costs, and enhancing product quality. The book takes a lot of practical examples and real graphs to simplify the process.
Transparent tracking
My previous CEO used to say that “The most two important assets of any company are their employees and their data”. This part alone can improve your business decision and outcome, even if you ignore the rest of the 4 elements, you will still win if you focus your budget on improving your data quality and tracking. Tracking is a big topic, a lot of companies do not provide clear tracking. I even have seen companies that sell tracking software or data collection software that do not see the importance of investing in sophisticated tracking tools. All steps in the customer journey are important, they need to be tracked correctly, not knowing where your leads are coming from or going might even raise conflict between departments. A multi touch-attribution-model is hard to implement, but when implemented correctly can increase your ROI drastically, when data is used correctly to optimize your marketing campaigns, sales process and overall funnel.
Full-funnel involvement and messaging alignment
Todays B2B buyers ‘don’t think the same way they used to in 2018. Nowadays, buyers go through many more touchpoints before making a decision. Some might see your ads and then search for your company online. That’s why it’s crucial to align your key message across all assets and channels, including sales pitches. Every department should maintain a consistent and clear message throughout the entire funnel. Sales must be involved in marketing strategies for the coming quarters, sharing their input on pain points, while marketing has to be involved in identifying high revenue accounts with SDRs and providing the right support at the deal stage by supplying the relevant materials, aligning messaging and optimizing brand identity and pain points.
Bring goals and bonuses together
Revenue marketing requires departments like Customer Success and Product to join in and increase collaboration with marketing and sales. Most of the time Customer Success is responsible for expansion and retention of existing customers (in addition to support of course). However aligning Sales and Marketing around shared OKRs such as ARR, CAC, CLTV, or pipeline growth is critical. This alignment encourages teamwork and shared accountability.
Regular (short) alignment meetings can be quite beneficial to review goals, track targets, and keeping both teams on the same page. Sales and Marketing should share high-level OKRs while focusing on tactical goals for the quarter. Bonus incentives tied to these shared objectives can further strengthen collaboration.
Put SDRs under Marketing
This is one of the most controversial topics in the B2B SaaS marketing space. Should SDRs (Sales Development Representative) work under marketing or stay within the sales team? This question has no easy answer. In order to answer this as precisely as possible we need to define what the role of an SDR is. An SDR tries to generate pipeline through cold to warm leads; some who have been in the CRM for a long time, they qualify those and hand them over to their Account Manager. They also analyze and search for new opportunities in the market, they send emails to those opportunities. They are the first human touchpoint that interacts with a potential customer.
All these tasks can be supercharged by the right collaboration with marketing, marketing would take a supporting role, helping in identifying opportunities and speeding up the approach. E. g.: A potential customer that comments under a paid social post on LinkedIn can be identified by marketing and contacted with a very well targeted message through the SDR, a sales message that can be influenced by best practices the marketing team can offer. Integrating the SDRs into the marketing team brings a lot of benefits, it can reduce the Average Time of Reply (ATR), align messaging, improve collaboration between the two teams and use the momentum of demand that is captured through marketing.
Conclusion: Revenue marketing isn’t rocket science, but it’s also very strict, requiring discipline and few compromises on the elements that make it successful. At the end of the day, revenue is generated by optimising workflows, tracking data correctly, but also ensuring that demand is created when it’s not there, captured and converted effectively.
Practical implementation
All these elements to kick-start your revenue marketing strategy with a strong focus on cross-departmental collaboration may seem rather theoretical, but they are based on practical examples we have gained from working with various B2B software companies in the DACH region. If you would like to know more about revenue marketing, how to implement these elements in your company and which tool stacks are best suited, please feel free to contact me directly.
Hassan Kazziha, Growth Marketing expert and founder
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