During my career, I’ve worked with many businesses that have had a variety of marketing challenges:

• How to drive more traffic to their Website – for example, a new CMOs will rebrand the website, which has the unintended consequence of crashing the SEO traffic.
• How to reach more of their target accounts (with the highest customer lifetime value).
• Ensuring their marketing efforts get all the right contacts at those target accounts.
• How to guarantee that they hit target accounts at the proper stages in the marketing and sales cycle (Awareness, decision, Purchase).

I’ve faced many hindrances– from poor web design and uninspiring ad copy and creatives; to misunderstood web analytics or siloed marketing teams that don’t communicate.

Events are often an essential component of the B2B marketing mix. But they can never replace high-quality multi-channel digital campaigns. 

You may think, ‘hey, Events are driving leads. What does it matter if our Website is bad?‘

But get this: 80% of a buying decision in B2B Software will soon be made independently of the salesperson. 

If your website sucks, your sales team will lose 80% of their ability to close sales.

I’ve also worked for startups (and even large companies) with no real demand generation engine to create leads for the sales team. In that scenario, it can be hard to convince a board of directors with little or no knowledge of or interest in marketing to spend $100,000 or more on a CRM and Marketing Automation tool and ad campaigns in Google, Linkedin and other platforms.

But doing so is vital if you want to scale your business.

The Digital Marketing ‘Flywheel’

I’m a firm believer in Hubspots inbound marketing methodology to drive sales. I read Brian Halligan’s book when it came out in 2009. I also couldn’t agree with Brian more that it’s time to retire ‘the sales funnel’, which is so 1990s.

We need a fast-moving, dynamic sales/marketing flywheel in the digital age. In my next post, I will describe how to generate leads through such a flywheel (Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing, Email Marketing, Content Marketing and so on)…………

Marketing continually tries to define ‘success’ and find the perfect metrics to measure it. Is it the number of leads? Is it conversion rates? Is it sales meetings, pipeline, or even sales revenue generated by Marketing (Notoriously hard to attribute in b-2-b SaaS businesses)?

Ultimately the best marketing tends to have a flywheel of content that includes every channel – email, paid digital, organic and events (virtual, real, hybrid) – all working in harmony. Account-based marketing tools like Demandbase or 6Sense can help you identify if you are reaching your target accounts at every level. 

And, of course, a powerful paid advertising campaign – on LinkedIn, google, and perhaps Twitter and other platforms too – will ‘rocket propel’ your B2B Sales and Marketing strategy.

It’s also important to remember that accomplishing results is a team effort. I’ve been lucky to have worked for some amazing sales and marketing teams in my career!