B2B Buying – Refocusing Efforts From Sales to Marketing

Brian Cohen and Nelson Gilliat sat down to discuss the B2B Buying Process and how B2B Marketing Leaders like to buy from Software Vendors.

In this short video, our co-founder and CEO, Brian Cohen explains how he has been shifting efforts away from spammy marketing to generating real conversations. Be sure to watch till the end and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Author bio

I build businesses, brands and people by creating unique experiences that make a positive impact. I take prospects from thinking “what is this?” to saying “I need this!”

Brian Cohen is also the Co-Founder and CEO at StoryLab.ai. You can find more info about Brian on LinkedIn.

Video transcript (auto-generated)

A lot of companies are coming to the same realization that you’re talking about and the way that they arrived at that realization is that they’re comparing sales development to marketing. They are analyzing their marketing funnel or splitting their marketing funnel and analyzing the efficacy of certain leads for sales split by lead source and so they’re comparing marketings website demo requests versus sales developments leads from telemarketing email stem and Linkedin spam
and looking at things like qualified pipeline, Revenue number of customers ACV, win rate, sales cycle, cost per acquisition, cost per acquisition payback period, all those real marketing metrics and they’re realizing which side of their bread is buttered on. And they also know that there’s a lot of things that they just is not good about spam that don’t necessarily reflect into those quantitative metrics but that Harmony reputation in Your Word of Mouth Turn off buyers and that you’ve got basically two different marketing approaches that the same company competing for resources and one is counteracting the other and crowding out the other and so they’re making that analysis and comparison and then they’re reinvesting resources they’re repurposing sales development to marketing.

So sales development is a marketing function to generate leads and so they’re just saying hey instead of spamming people why don’t you help with real marketing? Do content, do social, do the website, do partner marketing do product marketing do creative, or video and there’s just so much stuff that goes on in marketing that sales development can help out with. And so, have you done this analysis if so what did you see and then what did you do? How did you repurpose sales development if you did this and if you haven’t done it do you intend on doing it or do you know of other people who have done it and what happened with them?

I  love your questions. Super insightful. I think that, well one I want to say, with this outbound process, not only are they fighting for resources or fighting for credit. Which just creates this bad experience animosity internally as well. So it’s just negative on negative and we’ve done comparisons and I won’t speak to any
of those current, but there is no comparison of outbound and inbound resources if you know. If you’re talking about volume, if you’re talking about cost per, no matter how you slice this coin there is no comparison. Hands down. Generally you’re probably talking 20c to 50x better in marketing and that’s probably low.

But for us, we haven’t quite made that shift yet but it’s something that we’re working on. We’re starting with this model for from the inbound BDR Team of converting them into having these conversations for what we call showcases. Something that is a conversation but isn’t a sales motion conversation. So we’re
showing this experience and supporting folks and as we continue to prove this change which three quarters running now. It’s proven to accelerate the content offer lead conversion from MQL to opportunity from sub 3% to in this process of us not being a selling motion to 18% MQL to opportunity

So a huge jump and leap for us there but still the folks that still come in for a purchase intent like a demo request still performs much higher.

Wow and that see, there you go and you take an experimental approach where you gradually repurpose and then you track the results over time you’re showing the Improvement and then that allows you to double down and continue to do better marketing or good marketing as opposed to and decreasing your bad marketing and one of the ways that you can also do this is not just with quantitative data to say Hey look it’s also qualitative and so the same questions I’ve I just
asked Brian earlier about his buying preferences well the same question you should ask your customers. The ones I bought from you how did they hear about you? How do they like to learn and how do they do that with your company? And then, what you’re going to hear is it was your marketing not your sales development and the sales development probably detracted from that or is unnecessary to that and oftentimes when you have in a company because there’s a mixture of Marketing sales development is that marketing will be doing all these things to charm and educate and woo buyers and then before marketing can finish their job and buyers request a demo sales development will preamp marketing and spam buyers that would have come in anyway when they were ready.

But when they spam buyers, sales development will turn off some of them and then push some of them prematurely to sales and so that’ll mean sales gets less good leads or marketing gets, or there’s less free trial activations so there’s less buy now on the website. But yeah, to the extent that sales has a premature buyer that’s bad news for sales and it’s bad news for marketing too because marketing should be held accountable to the efficacy of those leads all the way through revenue and profit and all those metrics. So I think that’s really good to hear that you’re making that progress as well as many other forward-thinking marketers are doing and that will enable you to do more productive and fulfilling marketing that actually achieves the outcomes you set out to do.

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B2B Buying Videos

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• B2B Buying – What should Software Vendors Include on their Website
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• B2B Buying – Refocusing Efforts From Sales to Marketing