Almost every organisation now strives to become data driven – as shown by the fact that 94% of companies that believe data and analytics is essential to their growth. Despite this, marketers are missing out on a huge opportunity sitting right under their noses – data from their digital marketing teams.

Given its unique position at the fore of both awareness and consideration, data generated by marketing is an (untapped) asset for the entire business– especially sales and service teams. However, all too often data remains siloed away in multiple platforms, meaning organisations are failing to see the advantages and importance of streamlining processes and aligning teams.

Decentralising data and bringing sales, marketing, and service teams closer together is key. Complete with a look at the ways effective data management and revenue operations (the framework that focuses on business alignment to drive revenue growth, known as RevOps) can be the key to unlocking your data, getting ahead of the competition and driving the bottom line for your business.

Empowering sales and service teams with digital marketing data

Many companies are capturing data around existing customers to understand what their likes, improve personalised experiences and identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell. But marketers are also becoming well versed in buyer intent data, which can be fed back to sales teams to help them reach prospects at the right time, on the right channels, with the right messaging when they are most intent on buying.

Ultimately, this data can provide insights across the entire organisation – be it sales, marketing, or service. Data can provide throughout the buyer journey by supporting everything from nurturing prospects and delighting existing customers, to mapping personas and uncovering emerging trends.

But of course, achieving this isn’t easy. Unlocking the value of data is both a science and an art.

RevOps: aligning teams with an agile, data-driven framework

One way forward-looking organisations are striving to get ahead is via revenue operations (RevOps). In a nutshell, RevOps is a method that focuses on alignment between marketing, sales, customer service and executive functions to establish an agile, data-driven framework throughout the entire customer life cycle.

Traditionally, these functions have operated separately, giving rise to siloes where data is managed independently. This in turn impacts its quality, completeness, and accuracy, and ultimately fails to provide a single source of truth. RevOps can play a pivotal role in overcoming this. It can help to establish a framework where you can deliver the unified data strategy that supports an end-to-end perspective which all teams need to grow revenue.

So much so, that 75% of the highest-growth companies will have a RevOps framework by 2025. But successfully using your RevOps framework requires the input of quality data, the ability for teams to easily import data, a healthy marriage of internal and external data, and effective data management.

Harmonise organisations through master data management

While organisations recognise the need to be data driven, 80% currently struggle to manage the volume, variety and velocity of their data.. Gathering, managing and making sense of marketing data therefore requires master data management (MDM).

Simply put, in the words of Gartner, this is a tech-enabled discipline where IT and the wider business work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of the enterprise’s official shared master data assets. Data is of course fundamental to this. But above all, it’s a coalescence of people, processes, policies, and technology, to transform data into insight.

This is a journey which requires a clear roadmap to understand the current state of data in your business – and the people, processes and technology that underpin it. Only then can you look to break down silos, harmonise your approach, and empower people with a single source of truth to drive decision-making,

The power of partnerships in becoming truly data driven

Data – including that from digital marketing – is essential to guide investment decisions, keep the wider business informed and ultimately fuel success. Freeing up data flows to better support your organisation, however, comes with complexity.

Fortunately, there are partners you can lean on to bring the expertise and a rich track record of mastering data management and RevOps in their own organisations, and for countless customers as well.

It’s strange that B2B marketing has always been seen as the less creative half of marketing.

Consider it. We have long sales cycles, big purchases that affect people’s careers, and few ways to stand out. There is often a lot of information about buyers, and the lifetime value of a customer can be very high. What could be better for making campaigns that stand out, challenge, and connect on a deep level?

Research from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute shows that emotions play a bigger role in B2B decisions than in B2C decisions. So, when B2B marketers say that their company is becoming more open to creative risks or that creativity is essential to meeting marketing KPIs, the only thing that really surprises me is that we didn’t get there sooner.

There are many reasons to make marketing work that is interesting and effective. So, why are so many B2B campaigns so… well… not?

There is a big difference between saying you want creative marketing and delivering creative marketing. Brian Macreadie and I will talk about how to get from one to the other in our session at this year’s B2B Ignite London.

Wanting creativity is one thing; delivering it is another.

As the creative director of a writing agency, I’ve seen how a brief that seems creative at first can turn into something much less interesting over time.

There may have been other people involved. Maybe sales kept adding more and more information about the product or trying to reach more people, until the message was no longer clear. Someone may have insisted on making the language “more businesslike,” which means “fuzzier and less clear.”

Most of the time, it’s the stakeholders.

It’s easy to understand why. In many B2B markets, there is a well-defined set of factors that buyers will look at: the usual suspects. So for a B2B brand, there’s a good reason to look like your face fits. Stepping outside of the usual way of doing things is risky, which can make it hard to get approval for new ideas.

Because of this, the recycle bins of B2B marketing teams and agencies are full of creative work that has been thrown away.

How to be creative: 3 steps

Lucky for me, I also get to watch the clients who do come up with creative ways to market their products. And if you’re serious about using creativity to give your marketing an edge, I see three clear steps that will make you more likely to succeed.

1. Pay attention to small, careful tests

Creativity doesn’t have to make a big splash, and you don’t have to risk everything at once. Instead, you can try out a creative solution to one problem or area in your market. Even if the idea doesn’t work, you’ll still have learned something.

This is important because it makes it easier to sign off on your creative ideas. The stakes for each bet aren’t too high, and saying “We’re trying out a new method” is easy to explain and agree to. Then, when you need to make bigger changes, you will have more information to help you make a decision.

2. Make your goals and limits clear.

Creativity is how smart people use their minds. So you have to decide what the rules are.

You might think that people who are creative want the most blank paper, the biggest canvas, and the fewest rules. And that the work will be more creative the more freedom you give. But the right limitations can often be a source of inspiration; knowing what you can’t do is a great place to start.

“When you have to work within a strict framework, your mind is put to the test, and that’s when it comes up with its best ideas. If given free reign, the work is likely to get out of hand”

TS Eliot,

Clear boundaries don’t stop creativity; they let it happen. Because when you say where the lines are, you also say that everything in between is up for grabs. Plus, you’re less likely to get work that you can’t use at all.

“Give me the freedom of a tight brief,” said David Ogilvy.

3. Finish what you start, and do it often

In the movie Return of the Jedi, Admiral Ackbar, the leader of the rebels, says, “It’s a trap!”

And here’s a secret: when a client asks us to be creative, writers and designers can quickly start to feel the same way.

That’s because we know there’s a good chance we’ll put in extra work to come up with something really new that we really believe in, only to have it watered down or rejected outright the first time it reaches a wider stakeholder group.

Putting forward a creative idea can make you feel exposed; it requires a certain amount of trust. And it’s hard to get creative people to do their best when the “creative approach” is often just a small change from what the client already had. This is fine, but it’s a letdown.

But there’s another side to it. If you always do what you say you’re going to do, manage the expectations of stakeholders, and bring those valuable ideas to market, your creatives will notice. You can quickly become a favourite customer, and everyone will go the extra mile for you.

Make the odds work for you.

No one will judge you here. Being creative in B2B marketing isn’t easy. The topics are often hard to understand, sales and technical colleagues can get in the way, and there are many reasons to avoid taking risks.

But keep in mind that the marketers of all your competitors are facing the same things. And if you can find a way to be even a little bit different, you can really stand out, get people’s attention, and increase your share of mind.

At Ignite, Brian and I will go into a bit more depth about the problems our audience faces, and we’ll bring perspectives from both the agency and client side that you can use to bring out your creative side.

In the meantime, start with small problems, define them as clearly as you can, and show your creative people that they can trust you with their ideas. You might be surprised at how far you get.

While data has become an important tool for marketers trying to personalise CX, data privacy is becoming more and more important to both governments and businesses. This is why companies like Apple have stopped allowing third-party tracking. But there’s another way for companies to better understand the whole customer experience while still meeting privacy rules: First-party data on how people act. Once thought of as information that only product and engineering teams could use to plan their strategies, today’s top companies put product data at the centre of their marketing plans. Here are the reasons why that change is so important now.

The end of data from third parties

Marketers have used third-party data for a long time to help with everything from designing campaigns to retargeting to making decisions about how to market products. But in recent years, data privacy has become one of the most important things to think about when using third-party data.

Consumer privacy is important to both governments and businesses, which is why they are cracking down on groups that track users’ data across the internet. For example, in several European countries, it was found that Google Analytics didn’t follow EU GDPR rules. This is a big problem for marketers in the EU.

With the release of Google Analytics 4, Google tried to respond to changes in how people behave (GA4). But this new platform isn’t likely to fix some privacy problems that already exist, like how Google Signals works.

Google Signals, which is how Google Analytics finds out who anonymous visitors are and adds more information about them, is currently allowed under GDPR as long as certain rules are followed. If Google Analytics is any indication, though, this might change. If these decisions keep coming down, Google Analytics could lose some of its best features in the EU.

The increased focus on privacy issues is a reflection of how people feel, as many people today are reluctant to give their personal information to large corporations. But customers still expect B2B brands to give them the personalised experiences they’ve come to expect from B2C brands. So, how can marketers do this now that third party analytics are being phased out?

Making your product the main focus of your business

In B2B, it goes without saying that most of the buying process happens without the brand being involved. The pandemic has made this behaviour even worse. It’s not a good idea to count on prospects to get in touch with sales. Customers prefer to research or try out products online and only get in touch with sales when they are ready to buy.

This customer behaviour gives marketers a chance to start using product data to collect information about how their customers act, giving them a better understanding of the customer lifecycle as a whole. Product data tells us what content or features users are interested in within the product. This helps teams find key growth metrics like increases in subscriptions, retention, or revenue. All of this information can then be used to launch marketing campaigns and new features that are more proactive and tailored to each user.

The most successful marketers know that they need to switch from the old sales-driven model to a new product-driven model. Some marketers still base their strategies on vanity metrics, such as the number of website visits, downloads, and total users. Surface-level web analytics lack context, don’t make it clear what the goal is, and can’t guide action or learning. This makes it hard to figure out “why” people act the way they do. With first-party product analytics, companies can track and analyse how users interact with their products, and then they can build cohorts to make the customer experience more personal.

Personalization without putting more money into marketing

In today’s market, people in charge of marketing have to show that their investments have paid off. In the coming year, they won’t have the time to waste on failed campaigns. Marketing teams will need to be data-driven if they want to drive growth with few resources. To save money, marketers should try to get rid of tools that do the same thing and give priority to solutions that improve data quality and analysis. Instead of using one product to gather all of your data and another to analyse it, you can and should combine these functions to save money.

Data management is a big part of improving personalization, which can help your bottom line in the long run. But many businesses get what they need from a number of different places. For example, a business might use a customer data platform (CDP) to store their data, another platform to analyse it, and a third platform for testing and personalization. What’s wrong with this? When you move your data between different platforms, each step is a possible point of failure that could lead to differences in the data.

Start with the tools you use to create a culture of good data hygiene. This will make sure that all decisions are based on accurate, real-time data and that personalization efforts work better.

In the past few years, it has become more and more important for marketers to drive business growth. As long as the economy is unstable, all leaders, not just marketing leaders, will need to defend their investments and use data to help them make decisions. With behavioural data insights and strong data governance, it is possible to improve personalization without spending a lot of money on marketing or breaking privacy laws. The companies that win their markets will be the ones that can respond quickly to changing business conditions and grow in a way that is efficient and based on their products.

As the leader of B2B marketing, it’s my job to make sure that all parts of marketing are “firing on all cylinders.” That includes making sure we have the right overall GTM strategy aimed at the right customers and a well-tuned marketing team that can bring together the essence of the marketing story to build awareness, drive engagement, satisfy consideration, and ultimately drive conversion (and the elusive but highly desired “loyalty”!). To do this, you need a great plan, good communication, creative ideas, digital skills, research, and so on. But if there is one part of marketing that has stood out to me since I was in business school, it’s brand.

“Brand” is not just a trendy word. It’s an agreement.

And the value promise of the product or service you are selling is where the brand starts. If your value proposition is wrong, the rest doesn’t really matter. If your product doesn’t do what you say it will, you’ll never get the customer loyalty you want. Probably the most important part of the marketing function is building and caring for the brand.

Trust me, there are a lot of people in the B2B world who would say otherwise. They would say that the complex value-delivery model in the B2B environment can lower the value of the brand (and the brand message) to the point where putting too much emphasis on this leads to diminishing returns. I’ve felt the same way, especially in a field where it’s hard to get brand consistency from the thousands of individual sellers who are in charge of the most important brand touchpoint: the in-person sales call.

But this is where the Covid-19 world gave B2B providers new opportunities. Marketing has changed a lot over the past two years. Face-to-face communication became less important, and digital communication became more important. Digital became the most popular channel, and it gave us the chance to speak directly to customers about our value proposition and deliver our brand message more consistently all over the world.

For many of us, we improved our digital marketing tools and quickly switched from live events to virtual ones. We found new ways to get our customers interested, spent money on new technology, and paid more attention to all parts of the marketing stack to make sure we could get the right message to the right customer at the right time.

How important it is to deal with social and political problems

But the way our customers decide what brands are worth is changing. All leaders, but especially brand leaders, need to give direction, help, and commitment to the outside events that have happened and are still happening. Today, a brand is more than just the value of a product. It includes what the organisation that the brand stands for is worth. It’s not just what the product says it will do. It’s also what the company wants to do.

It’s not enough to say that brands must be socially responsible today. In one of my earlier articles, I talked about what “purpose” really means for a company. This is even more true today. People today want products and companies that solve problems in all areas, including health, the environment, safety, and the future.

Add to that the fact that our brand now has two important and separate targets: our customers and our employees, and you have a tough situation. With the “Great Resignation” in full swing, the marketing team is under more pressure than ever to make sure that we are using our best techniques to attract new employees. Competition for talent is tough, and you now have a new idea of what competition means. It goes across industries, and because people can work from home, it also goes across state and country lines. But the future employee cares about the value of the company just as much as the customer does. They, too, know how important a company can be, both in their own community and in the world at large.

Keeping ahead of the pack

I was on the team that made the schedule for one of the biggest business-to-business events of the year. This year’s Ignite USA schedule will make every marketer think about the opportunities and problems we face in a world after Covid. And it will do that by making the brand the most important thing.

Hear from companies like Kyndryl, which is a spin-off of IBM’s IT services, that have amazing stories to tell about how they changed their brand strategy and brand message to connect with customers today. This is a great opportunity to learn from some of the best and brightest who give us the tools, processes, and insights we need to do our jobs well and efficiently.

And we’re going to do it face-to-face. Face to face, which is the most powerful way to get a message across. As I already said, I call myself a “czar” of brands, and I’m excited to learn more about the power of brands at Ignite USA.

When sales pipelines are managed well and information is shared between the sales and marketing teams, they can give a lot of useful information. It can help you with things like:

• Which marketing and sales activities are making the most difference?
• How many leads can sales reps close in a certain amount of time?
• How close are they to meeting their goals?

All of these questions can be answered with the help of a collaborative approach to pipeline management, but 56% of managers say they aren’t good at managing pipelines or aren’t sure.

Here are some actionable tips for pipeline management that will help B2B sales and marketing teams improve the lead generation, qualification, and nurturing processes, which will increase sales success in the long run.

First, there must be good leads.

It is important for pipeline management to be based on data. Using the right metrics to intelligently score and qualify leads will help businesses put prospects in the right order. To make sure that engagement with prospects is timely and useful, the sales and marketing teams need to agree on these metrics. Creating an ICP can then be used to rate leads, while demographic and behavioural information should be used to help teams prioritise prospects who are most likely to convert and deliver the most value.

To make the sales pipeline even more efficient, the marketing and sales teams need to agree on what a dead lead is and when it should be dropped or given back to marketing. With sales data and metrics, it’s easy to find leads that don’t respond and take them out of the pipeline. So, the marketing team can take care of leads that need more work, and sales reps have more time to focus on prospects who are ready to talk.

Review and change processes

It’s important for sales and marketing leaders to look over processes together on a regular basis so that the sales pipeline can be changed to meet the needs of leads as they change during the cycle.

Using marketing automation and web analytics, sales teams can mark the important stages of the buyer’s journey. When teams look closely at sales and customer data, they will be able to find inefficiencies that could lead to missed opportunities. By taking a closer look at the places where communication and engagement happen, both marketing and sales can learn important things.

Persistence is still a key part of closing deals, and the best way to follow up on high-quality leads is through multiple channels. Lastly, a win-loss analysis will teach you useful things that you can use to improve the way you do business in the future.

As many businesses have learned the hard way, some sales can take months to close because of long sales cycles. But longer sales cycles also make it more likely that a prospect will be contacted by a competitor or decide not to go through with the deal.

This can be shortened by reviewing the core activities at each step: How well does each activity work? Can steps that aren’t needed be taken away?

In this way, it is important for sales and marketing to work closely together to get the most out of each team. By sharing ideas, agreeing on strategies, and working together to measure performance, the sales cycle can be sped up.

CRM helps you see things better.

Pipeline management tools are very important for keeping track of leads and deciding which ones to follow up on first. CRM systems let you see where each lead or opportunity is in the sales pipeline and how it got there.

With a 360-degree view of each prospect from the first time they interact with the business all the way through the customer life cycle, a CRM system gives B2B businesses a lot of information about how leads move from the beginning to the end of the sales process. The sales and marketing process can always be made better by figuring out which activities work best.

In B2B lead generation, the chance of getting a customer is directly related to how quickly a business responds to a lead. This means that sales teams need to know right away when they get a new lead.

It also means that the sales team needs to know as much as possible about the lead, such as how they have interacted with marketing materials in the past, in order to have a conversation that is tailored and useful.

If the process of notifying leads is done manually, meaning that someone from the marketing department has to send an email with the lead information, this will cause delays. Even small delays like these make it less likely that the lead will turn into a paying customer.

Email automation helps with this.

At its most basic, marketing automation software sends an email to all relevant users when a new lead comes in. This could mean that each member of the sales and marketing management teams gets the same email.

It works well because everyone on the team knows right away who is in the lead, but there is still time for things to go wrong. It still requires talking about who will be in charge of following up, as well as emails or phone calls between team members to share the marketing history of this particular lead, such as what content they’ve downloaded, what web pages they’ve looked at, etc.

Email automation will take care of all of the above for a smarter and more efficient way to do things.

First, the system will be set up so that new leads go straight to the person who is in charge of making contact, based on the lead’s information, such as the region it is in.

Second, automated emails can be sent with a list of all the prospect’s past activities. This way, the assigned team member can see how engaged the lead is and learn more about their pain points and interests.

Third, now that the lead is assigned to a specific team member, that person can choose to get more automated emails that will help them keep track of valuable lead actions online. For example, they could choose to get daily emails that tell them what their assigned leads are doing online. Or, they could choose to get email alerts every time a lead is active on the website.

This is just one example of how internal teams and processes can benefit from email automation, but you can see how it leads to;

• Streamlined how leads are handled.
• Better sales and marketing alignment.
• A faster rate of leads following up.
• A higher rate of making sales.

Of course, automated emails can be used in many ways for internal communications, such as nurturing programmes for your employees, contractors, suppliers, and others.

Have a new worker coming on board? Send them automated emails to take care of all of their onboarding.

Running campaigns to hire people from within? Use automated emails to handle the application process for candidates.

Offer a programme to encourage sales? Use automated emails to tell people about the benefits and how things are going.

A marketing automation expert does have one piece of advice, though: keep your internal contacts very separate from your prospects, leads, and customers. You don’t want to make your marketing email data hard to understand by putting all of your contacts in one place.

Email automation can be used for a lot more than just sending marketing emails to prospects and customers. I hope this article will give you ideas for how to get more out of your marketing automation tool and also improve your internal processes.