PipeAlign


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Complexity and Misalignment in B2B

These common lead-related problems exist for two key reasons:

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Complexity. Quite simply, selling and marketing to businesses is complex. This complexity occurs for three primary reasons:

–	Business buying behavior. For most B2B products and services, vendors interact multiple times with the same account—often over many months—before that account makes a purchase decision. Within the account, the interactions generally involve two or more people who can influence the decision. The accounts differ in size and growth potential. For large and medium-sized accounts, the deal size can vary. Individual buying influencers also fluctuate in their loyalty to a vendor, their authority, and their level of interest.
–	The relative complexity of business products and services. Businesses need considerable time to understand what various products and services can do and how well they meet the company objectives.
–	The evolving and growing array of contact methods and sales channels. In the last ten years, B2B companies have had to integrate banner ads, search engines, email, text chat, blogs, print on demand, web casting, and many other forms of contact into the marketing mix. The web is also creating new possibilities for traditional methods of contact, like telemarketing and direct mail. Methods of market contact differ in cost, scalability, capacity, and effectiveness.

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Misalignment. Because of this complexity, B2B companies must coordinate many moving parts to guide a prospect efficiently through the Business Buying Cycle. Some of these moving parts are within marketing. Some are within sales. Others are actually in post-sales, which can greatly affect sales and marketing efficiency. The growing array of contact methods and sales channels ( teleweb, e-commerce, and an array of indirect and OEM models) generally leads to staff specialization. This specialization results in duplicated and fragmented efforts. Unfortunately, rarely do the moving parts between departments align, especially between sales and marketing. Instead, the fragmented efforts within marketing and between marketing and sales generally create significant inefficiencies.

Each of these internal and external factors should affect decisions on the allocation of sales and marketing resources. Which market segments should receive the highest priorities? Which inquiries warrant an expensive field sales resource versus a telemarketing call versus a simple email? Unfortunately, few companies have a workable game plan for dealing with this complex set of market factors on an account-by-account and inquiry-by-inquiry basis. As a result, improving go-to-market processes and practices continuously—a staple of the back office—is generally foreign to most B2B companies. Click here to see how PipeAlign improves B2B ROI.

The B2B Refinery^® Methodology: Sales and Marketing Efficiency through Strategic Lead Generation and Lead Management

The B2B Refinery Methodology addresses the universal challenges companies face when implementing lead generation and lead management capabilities:

•	Contact Strategy. What is the most efficient form of contact, both inbound and outbound, for generating demand, converting inquiries into leads, and converting leads into sales? The contact strategy must consider every method of contact in marketing, post-sales, and sales and all the variables in the marketplace (e.g., buying potential, purchase probability, and depth of interest). With new methods of contact emerging and old methods evolving, B2B companies need a conceptual framework that can adapt to the ever-changing possibilities.Click here to learn more.
•	Dialogue Strategy. Because the information needs of prospects change as they investigate a solution, B2B companies need a strategy to map pre-sales questions and content to the appropriate stage of the Business Buying Cycle. This strategy must make relevance the center of communications, take full advantage of Digital Dialogue, and deploy respectful but practical privacy policies. Click here to learn more.
•	Management Strategy. The complexity of B2B requires a new approach to address staff specialization, coordination, and consolidation. This same complexity also makes measuring ROI and analyzing cause and effect difficult. As a result, efforts to improve lead generation and lead management processes and to allocate these resources more effectively can create unexpected inefficiencies. The B2B Refinery Methodology offers a proven approach for increasing ROI on these investments. Click here to learn more.
•	Information Strategy. The sophisticated Contact Strategies, Dialogue Strategies, and Management Strategies depend on a comprehensive information strategy. In the B2B Refinery, our vision centers on a centralized set of streamlined processes powered by high-velocity data exchange enabled by data standards. Scalability and agility occur through automated data hygiene, distillation, inquiry evaluation, solicitation, inquiry routing, lead assignment, and lead tracking. Click here to learn more.

These four practice areas, which we cover extensively in our book, The B2B Refinery, affect all the elements of lead generation and lead management, including budgeting, media strategy, messaging, and CRM systems. Most importantly, this proven methodology improves sales and marketing ROI for Fortune 500^® companies.

Improved B2B ROI on Lead Generation and Lead Management Investments

The PipeAlign B2B Refinery Methodology results in four key benefits:

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A Better Yield from Demand Generation. The PipeAlign B2B Refinery increases the yield from demand generation in several ways:

–	More responders, callers, attendees, and web visitors from print, mail, email, events, and other demand generation investments;
–	Significant yields (at a very low cost) from the essentially free interactions that occur every day in post-sales operations;
–	Additional areas of interest from each prospect through a variety of cross-selling techniques;
–	A higher percentage of likely buyers in the response pool;
–	A greater percentage of responders who will place larger orders in the response pool.

More efficient demand generation is the first step to better go-to-market ROI.

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Higher Conversion Rates of Inquiries to Sales. The ROI on demand generation investments depends on the conversion of the inquiries into sales. Typically, PipeAlign clients will achieve closing ratios of 20 percent or more on marketing leads, depending on the channel and the product or service category. These kinds of closing rates help marketing win significant political support from sales leadership.

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Greater Sales Productivity through Lead Generation. When compliant with the B2B Refinery Methodology, lead generation increases sales productivity in three key ways:

–	Increasing the number of deals a representative can handle;
–	Improving the closing ratio on those deals; and
–	Increasing the average selling price of those deals.

In some cases, direct channels can see significant gains in revenue production without adding headcount. For indirect channels, our approach increases mindshare and loyalty and lowers the percentage of revenue required to support the channel.

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Better Measurement and More Predictable Forecasts. Not only do PipeAlign clients close the loop, the metrics themselves provide deeper insight into cause and effect, a key challenge in the complex environment of B2B sales and marketing. The B2B Refinery Methodology puts all demand generation investments on a common financial and operational yardstick that facilitates improved forecasts, more efficient resource allocation, and continuous process improvement.

For more information about the ROI of the B2B Refinery Methodology for your organization, use our web-based go-to-market efficiency model. You can also download our case study.

The B2B Refinery^®

A Roadmap to Improve Lead Generation Profitably and Materially.

Our book identifies the underlying reasons B2B companies struggle with lead generation and provides a clear executive and operational guide to better ROI.

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The Keys to Closing
the Loop

Closing the loop is not impossible. This paper will help you understand the underlying issues and the practices necessary for success.

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Five Reasons Digital Dialogue Will Change B2B Forever

Database marketing concepts are creating entirely new possibilities for engaging customers and prospects in a “Digital Dialogue” via email and the web.

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