Editor’s Note: This series, “The Three Alignments,” examines three common misalignments that erode the productivity of B2B revenue teams — and how to fix them.
Below is Part 1, which focuses on ways to better align your marketing and sales teams so they operate as one cohesive unit. Part 2 examines a common disconnect that keeps revenue teams from recognizing the most valuable sales opportunities. Part 3 looks at KPIs and how the wrong metrics can hold back and even undermine ABM efforts.
B2B marketing organizations are the sensory system for B2B revenue teams, establishing “eyes” and “ears” in the marketplace to detect selling opportunities.
For over 20 years, the primary instrument B2B marketing organizations have used to sense these selling opportunities is the website and website forms. Interested buyers, so the logic goes…
- Are lured in by the promise of content or insights
- Provide their contact information and other data via website form-fills
…and, if they consume enough content, become marketing qualified leads (MQL) that are then delivered to sales.
The assumption underwriting this is that an MQL is a legitimate signal of a selling opportunity. Belief in the MQL as a buying signal has persisted for two decades, despite a failure rate of 95% to 99%.
Despite this atrocious track record, and despite fruitless decades of efforts to improve MQL quality, sales keeps asking for more. “Sure, make them better, but if nothing else, just give us more!”
An Analogy to Chew On
As with so many things in B2B, there’s a fascinating analog of this phenomenon in the animal world.
A few years ago, researchers wanted to understand how animals sense the opportunities in their environments. They presented an artificial sweetener — which smelled and tasted like something nutritious but wasn’t — to hungry lab rats.
The rats’ gustatory systems (smell & taste) were fooled by the smell and taste of saccharin, so they ate it. But, the rats’ satiety systems, which detect nutrition and signal back to the brain to stop eating, were not fooled. The rats binged, to their peril.
What Really Belongs on the Table for B2B Sales Teams
MQLs are the saccharin of B2B. Marketing serves up its quota of MQLs, while sales is starved for real selling opportunities.
This, above all else, is the source of misalignment between sales and marketing. Marketing’s sensory systems are fooled by saccharin MQLs. The satiety systems of sales are not. They never get their fill of real selling opportunities to work. But, absent alternatives, they keep asking for more.
To align with sales, marketing should really look for buying groups that demonstrate the overall interest of a buying organization, not simply individuals who show personal or professional interest. As you’ll see in Part 2 of this series, a B2B buyer doesn’t operate alone, but is nearly always part of a buying group.
Individual leads are far more likely to be junk food than leads from several people from within the same organization.
B2B buying groups range in size from five people for smaller deals to 20 or more for larger deals. And the number of individuals who may contribute some research to a buying process can be five to six times that number, according to a PathFactory Report.
Here’s the rub: 6sense’s research shows that nearly half of B2B organizations do nothing different when they receive multiple leads from the same organization. Most lead scoring processes do nothing to distinguish in-market buying team members from others who are simply acting on their own professional curiosity. This represents a substantial missed opportunity.
Finally, sales will eventually need to identify who the key buying team members are. Clearly, the more of these individuals that the marketing team can attract and deliver to sales, the easier it will be for sellers to prioritize and develop opportunities.
There’s another pitfall that involves “duplicate” leads from the same account. Even if some of these other buying team members identify themselves through forms or at events, they’re often worked separately — as if the two leads are disconnected — rather than being treated as two team members who are part of the same opportunity.
The Connective Tissue Tells the Real Story
The most important thing marketing can do to sense and deliver legitimate opportunities to sales is to distinguish active buying teams from the professionally curious web visitors who make up the vast majority of visitors grazing on B2B web content.
This means B2B organizations must systematically notice when multiple visitors from the same organization — whether known or unknown — are demonstrating interest. Those opportunities must then be packaged and prioritized for BDRs and sellers.
How Marketing and Sales Can Align on the Right Opportunities
Our data suggests marketing organizations are already addressing part of the alignment problem.
In a recent survey, we found 78% of respondents reported that their organizations have an account-based marketing or target account program. This ensures marketers are working to surface demand within accounts that the sales team agrees are good target accounts.
However, since just 10% of target accounts are likely to be in-market, further steps are needed to ensure that they’re worth pursuing:
- Acquire third-party intent signals. This enables revenue teams to see buyer research that happens outside their digital walls. Gartner estimates that this makes up 83% of B2B solution research.
- Identify the source of anonymous web traffic. Ninety-seven percent of all traffic on B2B websites is anonymous, as is 90% of buying team traffic. Without these signals, organizations can’t tell when traffic is coming from real selling opportunities.
- Connect same-deal form fill leads to each other. The data suggest that organizations will receive from two to 20 form-fill leads from an in-market account. When multiple buying team members are engaged with you, it is a huge signal of intent. Noticing when this happens is perhaps the single best way to separate the real from the saccharin selling opportunities.
- Intelligently combine all these signals to form a single coherent signal. AI is required for merging and making sense of the variety of signals that are available. That is why we couldn’t do this well just a few years ago. We can now.
By collecting all the relevant buying signals and intelligently parsing those signals to identify real selling opportunities, marketing can finally deliver selling opportunities that will nourish sales pipelines.
That is what sales and marketing alignment is all about.
