Welcome to Marketing Chronicles. A newsletter where marketers come for expert industry commentary at the intersection of strategy and creativity — every Wednesday sent before daybreak. If you like what you see, join us for free.

In this edition:

• Column: Fixing B2B Marketing

• Inspiration: Museum Advertising Done Right (Royal Ontario Museum)

Column: Fixing B2B Marketing

The world of B2B marketing is confused.

And it has been confused for a very long time.

For starters, marketing and sales are aligned only 16% of the time. By that I mean, only 16% of the folks sales reps are reaching out to have been exposed to any marketing from their company.

Why does that matter? Well, here are some eye-opening numbers from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute quoted from Marketing Week:

• Buyers in financial services are 56% more likely to connect with a seller when they see marketing within 30 days.

• If you remove the 30-day window, that number drops to 50%, which suggests that recency matters.

• If you look at buyers exposed only to lead-gen messaging – so no brand advertising – that number drops to 43%, which suggests that brand matters too.

• And if you look at those same metrics for global B2B professional services companies, the numbers fall to 21%, 16% and 14%, which suggests that execution matters.

The amount of waste taking place in B2B marketing AND sales initiatives is astounding. And while many marketers have a point when they say B2B is years behind B2C marketing, it’s actually not that simple.

Key Figures

For decades the idea of the “funnel” has been hammered into B2B marketers’ heads with the false assumption that a buyer is someone whom you push through a funnel and beat them over the head with outreach until they eventually give in and buy what you’re selling.

But the reality is quite opposite from this. For starters, the average B2B purchase involves around 11 different people in an organization. Whom exactly are we pushing down the funnel here?

Secondly, at any given time only around 5% of buyers are “in-market” to purchase. Meaning, if all that you’re doing is trying to “generate leads”, you’re effectively neglecting 95% of the total attainable market — in other words, you’re neglecting your future leads.

Lastly, the typical B2B sales cycle today takes longer than 1 year, with several categories taking much longer than that.

So, if on average only 5% of the market is shopping around, and it takes 11 people to make a B2B buying decision over the length of several years, then how should we measure success in B2B marketing?

The Buyer’s Journey

Antonia Wade is the Global CMO of PwC and has held several executive marketing roles across companies such as Accenture, Capita and Thomson Reuters.

In her most recent book Transforming The B2B Buyer Journey she introduces a refreshing way of thinking about how B2B buyers move from awareness to advocacy.

In this framework, there are 5 stages in the B2B Buyer Journey:

• Horizon Scanners: typically C-Suite execs thinking strategically about their category and scanning for trends in the market.

• Explorers: senior leaders within the organization that understand they have a problem that needs solving, but don’t yet know whether they can do it internally or need external help.

• Hunters: generally speaking these are more functional experts whom understand the problem and are also familiar with the solution landscape.

• Active Buyers: aka only 5% of the market, comprised of buying teams doing their due diligence comparing a small group of competitor suppliers.

• Existing Customers: self-explanatory, but often forgotten, are your current clients whom trust you and you know well enough to be able to provide advice and grow your share of wallet within their organization.

As you can see, there are several levels of seniority, depth of knowledge, and differing needs along the buyer journey that require different, yet equally important, things from you.

If you’re “dropping into DMs” of C-suite execs pitching your SaaS company rest assured that you’ve just burned your company’s image for the long haul with your cold prospect. Similarly, if you’re talking about market trends and wasting time hammering the problem with active buyers, that’s the fastest way to lose their interest.

Measuring B2B Marketing Success

Understanding the different objectives along the buyer journey is imperative to set the right KPIs in order to measure your progress. If success for you is getting leads at the Horizon Scanners stage, you’ll be doomed to fail.

In simple terms, there needs to be realistic expectations of what you’re aiming to achieve at each stage. Take the following as an illustrative example.

Imagine you’re a financial services account manager looking for companies seeking debt financing to grow their business. In this situation, here’s how you could measure success of your company’s initiatives along the buyer journey:

As you can see, number of leads and closing rate only comes up once. This is because the B2B buyer journey has gotten a lot more complex than cold calls and emails. And while new customers are of the utmost importance, understanding what’s keeping us from getting more of them or what’s driving an uptick in getting them is critically important to continuously improve our marketing efforts — there is a string of things that need to successfully happen first to eventually turn a stranger into a client.

Patience & Consistency

The name of the game is patience & consistency.

If your B2B business has never done any marketing whatsoever it would be a mistake to think that by turning the marketing taps on today you’ll get leads tomorrow.

On average, brand-building efforts take 1 to 3 years to fully materialize, meaning that while your sales teams are busy closing deals with the 5% of active buyers at any given time, your marketing team is working on their future pipeline — one which will yield greater closing rates and even inbound business for your sales department.

In essence, once this B2B marketing machine has been running for 1 to 3 years consistently, you should be able to continually adjust your budget mix away from sales activation (i.e.: lead-gen activities) and toward brand-building efforts (i.e.: ad campaigns and sponsorships).

That is because when you start out there’s an urgency to get leads to keep the lights on — these come from all places: friends and family, old colleagues, past client referrals, and so on. But as your cashflow stabilizes, investing the lion’s share of your marketing budget into driving long-term profitability through brand-building initiatives will lead to lower price sensitivity, gains in market share, and of course, larger sales.

📢 Community Shout Out

Interested in more B2B Marketing content or have unanswered questions? All you have to do is the following:

• Share this week’s newsletter on LinkedIn.

• Write something nice about it and add a question.

• Tag me on LinkedIn so I can see it.

I’ll answer it in the post comments and pick someone to give a shout out in my next column!

Inspiration: Museum Advertising Done Right (Royal Ontario Museum)

How do you transform a museum into a thoroughly modern cultural institution that leads discussions about society and strives to answer big questions about humanity?

Watch below.

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Connect with Pedro on LinkedIn and/or X

• 🍻 Come by the WJ office for a brew

• 💌 In case you missed it:

  • There’s No Such Thing as “Freedom of The Press”

  • How To Build Lasting Brands While Winning In The Short-Term

  • The Marketing Unicorns Redefining Brand Experience

PPA

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing professional with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across Canada. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.