Finding, engaging, and converting B2B sales prospects today is challenging. To be effective, your B2B demand generation, marketing, and sales strategies must all be aligned and focused on customers.
Marketing takes a concentrated effort to personalize your approach to uncover buyer’s problems and craft customized solutions. Without this level of personalization, much of your messaging will be ignored. Personalizing the buyer’s journey leads to better sales outcomes. Here are three reasons why.
1. It’s the Way Customers Buy
There’s been a lot of attention focused on the B2B buyer’s journey and how customers flow through the sales funnel. While it is important to understand how buyers progress, the reality is that every customer’s journey is unique.
The traditional sales funnel oversimplifies the journey by assuming buyers move from one stage to the next in a straight line. Buyers move in different directions at their own cadence and velocity. That’s why your B2B demand generation and content orchestration needs to personalize your marketing to target accounts.
Conventional journey maps typically include some version of the sales funnel, such as Awareness, Consideration, Preference, and Purchase. Most of this, however, is focused inward trying to build awareness and preference for your brand, products, and services.
While building awareness and encouraging preferences is crucial, your focus needs to shift from an inward perspective to a customer perspective. Most prospects don’t begin the journey looking for your brand or products. They are looking for solutions to their problems. Your goal in the early stages should be to uncover the problems your customers have that you can solve.
Once you understand the challenges facing your prospects, this insight allows you to create B2B demand generation strategies to help your prospects overcome their unique challenges.
The more personalized you can make the buyer’s journey, the more effective your marketing and sales efforts will be. Nearly 80% of senior markets that are exceeding their revenue goals report having a documented personalization strategy, such as using an ABM platform.
It’s not just an effective strategy, it’s also what buyers want.
2. It’s What B2B Buyers Want
More than three-quarters of B2B expect more personalized attention from sales and marketing teams. In an increasingly cluttered marketing world, personalized marketing creates a way to cut through the noise and stand out.
B2B buyers want solutions, not sales pitches. Yet, even within a single organization, multiple stakeholders may be looking for different solutions. Today, there may be as many as six key people in the decision-making process for purchases. More than 40% use buying groups or committees to review purchases.
Personalizing content to each of the key stakeholders allows you to meet varying concerns. For example, the CFO may be focused on cost-savings and efficiency, while managers may focus on productivity gains and ease of use.
While much of the sales process has always been about finding customer’s pain points and presenting solutions, it’s become increasingly more difficult to get that information from customers. The days of conducting a Customer Needs Analysis (CNA) to find out pain points are over. Prospects don’t have time to tell you what they need. They expect you to understand their industry, their business, and their problems if you want to have an opportunity to partner.
64% of B2B buyers say that one of the most important factors in vendor selection is a demonstrated knowledge of their company and challenges. Buyers also want sales teams that are experienced and knowledgeable about how to overcome these challenges within their industry.
Personalization should be at the forefront of your marketing efforts and embedded in your B2B account based marketing execution strategy and marketing channel strategy. By personalizing your marketing approach, you are gaining insight into problems and challenges. As you progress through the buyer’s journey, you can customize your messaging to deliver the solutions your customers need.
By delivering relevant content at the right time, you can develop deeper relationships.
3. It’s the Way You Develop Relationships
So much of the B2B sales process has moved online. Buyers now do extensive research on their own before ever connecting with a salesperson. Most of the process and decision-making has already occurred by the time you get to have a substantive discussion with a prospect.
If you don’t engage with your prospects early and often during their discovery phase, you may never have an opportunity to get to the end game.
Personalization allows this relationship to develop organically. By creating relevant content that anticipates and matches the buyer’s interest and interest levels, you can connect at a deeper level. It allows marketing and sales teams to have a better understanding of what content makes a difference, so you can better frame your sales approach when it is time to connect.
Your B2B marketing platform can create nuanced, personalized content to drive B2B buyers forward in their journey. The right ABM solutions allow for personalization at scale to deliver the right content at the right time.
Marketers have always walked a tightrope in managing the messaging, especially when it comes to reach and frequency. You need sufficient reach to find and engage prospects. You also need to deliver your messaging frequently enough that it makes an impact. If your reach or frequency is too small, you risk not being in the conversation when it’s time to purchase. Conversely, too broad a reach is a waste of your marketing dollars and too great a frequency risks prospects ignoring your messages.
Personalization allows you to find out customer interests earlier in the process so you can tailor reach and frequency appropriately. At the same time, you can tailor your approach to focus on the things that are more relevant to prospects, which can help mitigate the risk that they ignore your efforts.
How Folloze Makes Personalization at Scale Simple
To be effective, marketing and sales teams need to take a buyer-centric approach to deliver results. It takes the right ABM platform and a commitment to personalization at scale to create buyer experiences that lead to conversions.
Folloze lets you quickly create a personalized and rich buyer's journey and use automation to drive prospects through the buyer’s journey using:
- Account-based marketing
- B2B demand generation
- Channel marketing
- Virtual events
- Sales orchestration
- Personalized journeys
Contact Folloze today to request a demo.
