Whether you’re trying to put on a webinar, working on a lead generation campaign or updating your sales processes, connecting your marketing and sales teams is non-negotiable with the new generation of B2B decision makers.

Creating The Next Generation of Buyer Personas

Personalization in your marketing materials is not only recommended but is expected from today’s B2B decision makers. This puts even more emphasis on things like consumer research, journey mapping, marketing automation and programmatic advertising. Whether you’re putting together your first draft of what a buyer persona could or should look like, or you’ve been an expert at it for a long time, getting insight from the sales team can help amplify your results.

Not only should we understand our personas, but we should understand them in context to the sales process. Can we niche out and create new groups of personas that can help tailor our messaging? Can we mark different groups and niches with different levels of engagement or readiness for the sales team? How do we best communicate with our personas throughout the process? Getting this data and working with the sales team to map everything out is critical.

Creating Buyer Personas:

• Identify common data like interests and behaviors (we recommend grouping these buyer personas to make multiple niche audiences)
• Identify common challenges and needs

Your persona should feel like a person because at the end of the day, that’s who you are talking to.

Thinking Beyond the Lead

Throwing leads that are unqualified to the sales team will not make for a happy sales team. But, if you work with them to determine engagement and lead scoring for buyers who are not ready to talk to sales (and process for when they are), the most qualified leads will make it through the funnel and provide the data the sales team needs to empower a higher close rate.

So what about after the lead? Are these tire kickers? Are they just not ready to buy? What happens after we’ve talked to them? B2B marketers need to put more emphasis on what happens after, or the nurturing process. What is our content strategy? Engagement strategy? How are we leveraging our average life cycle? It’s time to stop thinking about lead generation and start thinking about nurturing our most qualified, highest value opportunities that we’ve already gotten in the funnel.

Thinking Outside the Static Content Box

Every other savvy B2B company that is doing digital marketing has an endless supply of case studies, blogs and other static content that is competing with yours. Not that those things aren’t important, but to start breaking through the noise you’ll need content that provides a two-way conversation that’s personal to each of your personas.

Webinars have come a long way since boring slide presentations. Give your prospects and customers something they can engage with, and on-demand when they want it. Open forum webinars can offer your business the opportunity to present new products, customer spotlights and other content that is relevant, while providing an archive database of content for them to video and engage with.

Other content ideas:

• Interviews (1 on 1 or group panels)

• Video content series

• Coffee discussions

• Customer and employee spotlights

The Next Wave of Innovation in B2B Marketing That Drives ROI

Whether your sales team is just starting up, has been around 50 years with the same processes or just never communicates with your marketing team, now is the time to shake things up. With today’s buyers being more educated than ever, it is critical to create an experience that your customers rave about from beginning to end. Long gone are the days of treating sales and marketing as two separate entities. The next wave of most successful companies are those that will integrate their team to deliver customer-driven strategies that matter.