Heinz Marketing's Predictable Pipeline approach to repeatable, scalable demand - Part 2

MariaG

To continue on the joureny to Predictable Pipeline, read on.

Sales Cycle

Buying decisions have become more and more complex. And the need for you to enable your buyers has never been greater. Empower your buyers, affirm decisions, and create frictionless experiences at every stage of the buyer’s journey with a tightly integrated sales and marketing approach. Identify your customers’ unique pain points, needs, and goals to reveal how they buy and to enable your team to deliver value and accelerate revenue at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Sales Process, Stages & Definitions

When assessing your sales process, consider the buyer’s experience. What are the triggers to advance leads through the funnel? How does Marketing and Sales functions work together to drive revenue?

When we think about the Sales Stages, we separate them into 2 primary categories, Lead and Opportunity.

Leads are considered,

• Contacts or Accounts who have not yet been qualified
• Top and Middle stages of the funnel
• Enter the database via inbound marketing, a form on your website, a customer referral, or a purchased list.

Opportunities are considered,

• Qualified leads with a high chance of closing
• Middle and Bottom stages of the funnel
• BANT: budget has been agreed upon or identified, purchase timeline has been acknowledged, a decision-maker is directly involved or is aware of the solution, and/or there’s a catalyzing event or urgency driving the purchase forward.

If upselling or cross selling is a goal, a third stage should be included for customers.

• Customers that show buying signals or intent to add on services or upgrade to a more advanced product/solution bundle.
• Their contract may be ending with another company with relevant services
• Bottom funnel, in a marketing nurture for upsell or cross opportunities

Buyer’s Journey Map

Within the buyer’s journey, it’s important to think about messaging and the content and offers buyer’s receive as they move down the funnel. The Buyer’s Journey provides a road map for how to engage prospects. When building a Buyer’s Journey, make sure you include these  elements:

• Buying Committee Members – Not each member of the buying committee has equal sway in a purchase decision; nor will they be involved at every stage of the sales process
• Messaging & Content – The Buyer’s Journey becomes actionable once messaging and content offers are mapped to each member of the buying committee and each stage of their journey.
• Sales Process – The Forrester (sirius Decisions) 7-Stage Buying Journey model creates a unique buyer’s experience, ensuring marketing and sales strategies throughout the journey are consistent with buyer’s experiences.

Tech Stack

Your digital infrastructure dictates how you go to market. A robust martech stack enables greater agility and data-driven precision. Develop a strategic approach to your marketing and sales technology. One that’s focused on measuring results and ensuring your systems and tools are tightly integrated and able to support the continuous growth of your organization.

Tech Stack Workflow

It’s important to assess what tools and technology are being used by your teams? Are there any gaps or tools being under utilized or not used at all? Do you own multiple tools that do the same functions, are there areas where you can consolidate your tools to free up budget?

Here are some martech stack categories and definitions to consider when identifying gaps or overlap in your tech stack.

• Identification: Identify prospect accounts/targets within your target audience or ICP.
• Attention: Capture the attention of prospects.
• Engage: Allow prospects to engage with your business through content, ads, sales rep, etc.
• Optimize: Allow you to analyze data and provide insights that can be used to optimize performance of marketing and sales efforts.
• Expansion: Allow you to ensure customers are happy, provide great service, anticipate churn, etc.
• Foundation: The base of your business. They connect to numerous other tools and are the core tools/tech to help your business operate from a marketing and sales perspective. This includes behind the scenes, day-to-day tools/tech that help marketing and sales efforts run smoothly.

Data Requirements

After taking assessment of the tools that you own, consider how they support business objectives and how they are integrated.

• Is there sufficient contact data to be able to segment?
• Does your data represent your ICP, target accounts and personas?
• Are marketing operations processes in place to accurately track lead sources? Lead scoring? Reporting?
• Is the data integrated between systems so that all teams are working from a single source of truth for complete information?
• Do you have access to tools needed to support business objectives?

Metrics

Your data is key to creating, growing, and accelerating revenue. It enables you to make confident decisions, justify actions, and act with precision in your B2B marketing and sales campaigns. Measure your outcomes, rather than your activities and transform your data into actionable insights to drive the creation of better campaigns, richer buyer experiences, and more predictable pipeline.

Key Success Metrics

Company metrics, also known as KPIs, communicate an organization’s progress toward certain long- and short-term objectives. When identifying key metrics to measure, consider how revenue is attributed and how marketing ROI is evaluated. Here are some key success metric to focus on based on each funnel stage. 

Reporting Dashboard

When putting your reporting dashboard together consider how pipeline performance is tracked and communicated. Do you have a regular reporting cadence?