90: You Need to Blow Up Your Approach to B2B Marketing

Brent Adamson has a bone to pick with marketers: the way many of them define their industry is miles off the mark. In fact, Brent may want to abandon the term 'marketing' altogether, because too often the notion of separate marketing and sales departments breeds a lack of coordination. If your marketing and sales teams are not in perfect lockstep, you can count on your business suffering. If you disagree, maybe he can sway you in part 2 of his interview. In today's conclusion to the interview, Brent and Drew get at to the heart of how a marketing team needs to operate to be successful, and it involves a lot more than handing leads off to sales like a relay-race baton. Brent will talk the listener through seven tools that can help make speed up the process of connecting a customer with a product. Then, Drew and Brent talk through the buyer enablement journey, and why breaking down walls between sales and marketing will enable the teams make it as easy as possible for the customer to buy. In the end, that's goal number one. This episode is brimming with wisdom to help you shed some outdated notions of marketing, don't miss it! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts - Stitcher- or Podsearch What You'll Learn Marketing and sales collaboration is the wave of the future - here's why Brent wants every marketer to understand that the role of every B2B business is to make buying easier for the customer. This is achieved through a high level of marketing and sales collaboration. Gone are the days where marketers can simply hand off a prospect to the sales department and hope for the best. If a company knits together the two departments, they will have a competitive advantage over every other business in the industry. Where do buyers look for information validation? During the purchase journey, a buyer is always seeking for validation on the information they receive. After speaking with a sales representative, there are 3 main places where they will look for validation: The company's website SEO organic searches A third-party analyst/thought leader That's why it's so important for companies to be unified in the way they deliver information and lay out why their solution is the best available. If a buyer receives mixed information, they're less like to choose your solution. The 7 main tools that enhance buyer enablement A B2B company with linked marketing and sales departments can work together to create tools that help a customer make easier buying decisions. There are 7 main categories of tools that can be explored. Calculators Simulators Recommenders Benchmarks Connectors Advisors Diagnostics These tools ultimately allow the customer to choose the best solution to their problem. Brent explains that there is a "huge commercial benefit" to providing tools that make a customer's life easier, and companies can see increased loyalty from customers after they use these tools. Timeline [1:40] Marketing has a new role - make it easier for the customer to buy [4:24] Buyer enablement takes the form of these 7 tools [10:14] You can't fit these ideas into legacy structures for companies and brands [14:20] This is the #1 place customers look for information validation [23:34] Why you should be excited about the upcoming Gartner conference Connect With Brent: Brent's CEB/Gartner webpage Connect with Brent on LinkedIn Follow Brent on Twitter Follow CEB/Gartner on Facebook CEB/Gartner on YouTube Resources & People Mentioned Brent's book: "The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation" Gartner events and conferences Brent's blog on HubSpot Connect with Drew http://renegade.com/ On LinkedIn On Twitter On Facebook On Instagram