In the shadow of Salesforce’s 2018 Dreamforce convention, 1,600 sales operations, marketing operations, and revenue operations professionals gathered at the San Francisco Mint at
Why Ops Has Become So Important
The consumer buying experiences of today set the bar for the B2B buying experiences of tomorrow. Regardless of your personal view of Amazon, which now commands 44% of US e-commerce sales and 4% of retail, your customers, in their consumer lives, have been trained to expect a high degree of personalization in their buying experiences. Increasingly, they ask themselves, why do I have to put up with spam and cold calls from B2B sellers when consumer brands can both predict what I want to buy and care enough to create a pleasurable buying experience?
While there will continue to be some B2B companies that keep running the same sales and marketing playbooks from decades past, most recognize an enormous opportunity in today’s proliferation of customer data and platforms that can leverage that data into better sales conversion rates, greater customer monetization, and higher customer retention rates.
In this new marketing and sales environment, there is an emerging premium for those who can harness data and technology to shape sales and marketing processes which create relevant, personalized B2B buying experiences.
Go-To-Market Strategies are Changing at an Unprecedented Pace
If you had time to hop between coasts during September, you might have witnessed the bookends of today’s GTM strategies. In Boston, HubSpot hosted its annual Inbound conference, the defining event for content marketing worldwide (particularly SMBs). While HubSpot and the Inbound method have traditionally focused on attracting customers with content targeted to their place in the buyer journey, this year’s conference offered an expanded vision. In his keynote address, HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan provided context for his company’s new Growth Suite (integrated marketing automation, CRM and customer service applications) by underscoring the role of customer experience in company growth. In his words, “If you want to build a great company in 2018, your product doesn’t need to be 10X better than your competition, your customer experience needs to be 10X lighter than your competition.“
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Salesforce hosted its goliath annual Dreamforce conference. Whereas HubSpot’s audience skews toward SMB marketers, Salesforce’s audience skews toward enterprise sales professional. And while Inbound was the central GTM theme of HubSpot’s conference, ABM (Account Based Marketing) dominated Dreamforce. However, if you listened closely to both events, there was an acknowledgment that being successful today requires mastering and orchestrating multiple GTM strategies simultaneously. Additionally, the key to aligning multiple GTM strategies was echoed in both forums, on both coasts: customer experience.
Customer Experience: The New Competitive Advantage
In her opening keynote to the Ops-Stars conference, Laura Ramos of Forrester Research noted the following:
“62% of B2B buyers say they can make all of their decisions – they can select the criteria, select the vendors, and do all of this online without help from anyone else… The real way of getting to success in this age of the customer, this digital world, is by creating customer experiences that differentiate your brand, your products, everything you do for your customers. Forrester feels so strongly about this that we believe the only way to thrive, to succeed in this digital age, is by creating these exceptional experiences.”
To back this up, she cited Forrester research indicating that “customer-obsessed” companies are 3X more likely to exceed revenue targets. She summarized this new imperative for sales and marketing professionals by saying “Don’t just be hungry, be human.”
Craig Rosenberg of TOPO, a research an advisory firm that helps sales, marketing, and sales development teams adopt effective growth practices, built on this theme with the following prescriptions:
- “Think less about ‘Does this convert?’ and more about ‘What is the experience for the customer?‘”
- “Start with the buying experience and work back to the revenue.”
- “Stories are better than value propositions…don’t lead with the tech, lead with their business problem.”
- “Change the conversation from, “How can I get you into the product?” to “Let’s make your business better and, by the way, let’s get going on the product to help you do that.”
Mika Yamamoto, President of Marketo, advised sales and marketing professionals to “Be contextually relevant to your customers, reflect that you know
The customer experience imperative is being driven by a growing amount of 3rd-party and proprietary customer data and AI-driven platforms which can leverage that data into highly-personalized buying experiences. As forward-thinking companies combine data and automation to create these more positive buying experience, laggard companies that employ impersonal sales and marketing tactics are seen as less relevant and less valuable.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
In his entertaining keynote, Nate Skinner, Vice President of Product Marketing at Salesforce Pardot, explored “Unsolved Mysteries: Who Killed Sales and Marketing Alignment?” While S&M alignment is a complex problem many organizations struggle with, Nate described three areas as common suspects and potential remedies:
- People – No organization, even if they wanted to, could hire so many bad people in one functional area that they could be the cause of all problems (i.e. – it’s not just the fault of
sales, or the fault of marketing). Greater communication and empathy is needed. - Process – Marketers are often responsible for defining the processes that nurture leads into qualified leads which are handed off to sales. Inviting members of the sales team to help define these flows and processes can increase sales’ buy-in and investment in the leads they receive.
- Technology – The data quality and integration issues that challenge many marketing and sales organizations occur because platforms and tools are adopted based on siloed interests rather than an integrated, strategic approach.
Dana Therrien, Service Director for Sales Operations Strategies at SiriusDecisions, described three areas in which sales and marketing teams can build alignment:
- Business Alignment – Who are the buyers? What do they need? How do they want to buy?
- Functional Interlock – How should the structure and processes of marketing and sales teams be coordinated to support the go to market strategy?
- Execution Readiness – Do you agree on expected sources of demand? How leads will be measured and tracked? Technology and infrastructure? Data governance and KPIs?
Account Based Marketing: The New Normal For B2B
No topic was more central to this year’s Ops-Stars conference than Account-Based Marketing (ABM). In her opening keynote, Laura Ramos of Forrester Research described how a clear majority of B2B organizations are now implementing an ABM go-to-market strategy and attempting to leverage data and automation to create more personalized buying experiences. As organizations scale the ABM learning curve, Ramos offers several pieces of advice:
- Building competency in customer data management is critical. Knowing more about your customers is the only way to survive in the age of the customer.
- Marketing and sales must view ABM as a team sport, not a relay race.
- ABM is not a substitute for demand gen; smart organizations should do both.
- Adopt ABM-supporting technologies as you need them and avoid the pitfall of allowing
tech to drive strategy.
The Role of Revenue Operations
Success in today’s B2B sales and marketing environment hinges on the ability to align people, processes, data, and technology to create positive, differentiated buying experiences. As a majority of B2B companies implement ABM go-to-market strategies, revenue