Consumer marketing might have grabbed many of the headlines around data-driven marketing, but B2B marketing is also going through a revolution thanks to digital change
The desire to improve the B2B sales and marketing journey was the motivation behind national communications and IT company, Amcom, implementing marketing automation platform from Marketo.
Related: Is B2B marketing boring? We ask the industry
Its general manager for marketing and customer experience, Jon Amery, says the technology is moving his company to a point where it can see a more detailed return on investment on everything that is going into its marketing mix.
Read more: CMO50 #10: Jonathan Amery, Vocus Communications
Amery says the sales and marketing journey for Amcom’s corporate customer base can last up to a year or more, making it vital for marketing to be able to hand leads over to its sales team at the most appropriate time.
“It’s a lot less about huge amounts of data and more about controlling the sales journey,” Amery says. “In the past, we would drop a piece of content into a channel and hope we were hitting the right person in the right part of the journey, and hope that they responded.
“Automation means we can start mapping out that sales and marketing funnel. Instead of just relying on throwing out information and hoping they have moved to the next level, we are controlling and measuring that movement.”
While he claims it is too early to determine the true impact of Marketo on Amcom’s sales success, the technology has delivered insight into the efficiency of what content created by Amcom works, and what doesn’t. The next step will be to use that knowledge to better optimise content and the right channel for specific leads.
“Instead of working with big data, it’s just data,” Amery says. “Unlike B2C organisations, which are more about macro-trends and applying those trends back to a large group of people, we are looking at the behaviour of individuals or smaller sets of customers. And that is a lot more interesting then massive trends.”
B2B marketing is also an area of focus for Salesforce. According to the company’s director of product marketing management for ExactTarget, Derek Laney, there is a strong movement to adopt data science practices into B2B marketing.
“Sales analysis and sales operations have been doing data analysis and crunching since Adam was a boy, but technology to make this accessible to everybody is relatively new,” Laney says.
Much of Salesforce’s efforts are wrapped up in its Wave platform, which seeks to make to take data and analytics out of the hands of specialists and make it more usable. One of the outcomes of Wave is the ability to interrogate very large data volumes and visualise them in real time on a mobile phone, as demonstrated through a pilot application in the commercial finance group at GE.
“GE has to crunch numbers quite a lot through the process of sales and marketing to custom create solutions,” Laney says. “That means staff want to pull up the analytics and interrogate the numbers on a mobile phone in real time and work with those in the field rather than push back to a specialist team in data analytics or ops.
“What we learnt from consumer technology is that if you make these types of tools interesting and fun to use, they are much more effective.”
The company has made a number of investments to bring this vision to life. In mid-2014 Salesforce acquired RelateIQ, which combines data from email systems, smartphone calls and appointments to assist sales teams in making better decisions.
“Rather than you having to figure out when the next best time to call someone is, this system looks at the call and email patterns and decides how you should be contacting people,” Laney says. “That’s an example of data science becoming more important and more obvious in a B2B selling environment to support the sales teams, and our focus over the next 12 months is to incorporate more of these technologies into our core offering.
“From a sales support point of view, these types of data science techniques are using the data we have available to make the sales people more effective.”
ExactTarget had also previously acquired B2B marketing automation technology maker, Pardot, in 2012. This company’s technology examines the behavioural data of customers and to determine how they are engaging with communications, to determine the right time to pass prospects across to the sales team.
“All of this is designed to get the top of the pipeline filled with high quality leads to make sales more efficient,” Laney says. “We are trying to give great service to everybody by providing automated campaigns and bring people through the sales funnel to a point where they are ready to talk to a salesperson.”
Pardot has been used by New Zealand peer-to-peer lending startup, Harmoney.
“The company has started from scratch to acquire a database using standard digital marketing techniques and use Pardot to nature and educate people around their model,” Laney says. “It’s about trying to educate a market and find people that are getting closer to the point of decision. Loans are a reasonably high-involvement product with a long sales cycle, but Harmoney has a limited number of resources to act on.
“The company uses Pardot to make sure it focuses people on the most sales-ready contacts, and for the rest of the people are using nurturing campaigns. That means the sales team doesn’t have to engage with those people until they exhibit behaviours that indicates they are sales ready.”
Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO Australia conversation on LinkedIn: CMO Australia, or join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia
In the third and final episode of our 3-part CMO50 video series exploring modern marketing and why it’s become a matter of trust, we’re delighted to be joined by Telstra’s former CMO and now digital services and sales executive, Jeremy Nicholas, and Adobe VP Marketing Asia-Pacific and Japan, Duncan Egan.
Flash back to the classic film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Television-obsessed Mike insists on becoming the first person to be ‘sent by Wonkavision’, dematerialising on one end, pixel by pixel, and materialising in another space. His cinematic dreams are realised thanks to rash decisions as he is shrunken down to fit the digital universe, followed by a trip to the taffy puller to return to normal size.
Why is it there is no shortage of leadership development materials, yet outstanding leadership is so rare? Despite having access to so many leadership principles, tools, systems and processes, why is it so hard to develop and improve as a leader?
As a nation united by sport, brands are beginning to learn money alone won’t talk without aligned values and action. If recent events with major leagues and their players have shown us anything, it’s the next generation of athletes are standing by what they believe in – and they won’t let their values be superseded by money.
