Insight50: What’s up with B2B Marketing Operations?

This month’s Insight50 session will be on B2B Marketing Operations – Using People, Process, Tech and Data to Maximize Revenue. Whether your company is just getting started or you’re looking to take your marketing operations team to the next level, look through our resources for more information and to get your questions answered.

Technology has provided B2B marketers with the ability to deliver results that would have been unfathomable a decade ago. A single marketer can reach many thousands of prospects and win their attention in just a single day’s work. But as covered in ON24’s e-book on The Engagement Imperative, it’s all too easy to use technology poorly – and switch buyers off as a result. Plus, with all the potential technology available, it can be a challenge to make the most out of what’s available.

The development of B2B marketing operations has come about to help address this issue, but for many businesses it’s still early days. Ahead of the webinar, here are a few key points to provide some food for thought.

Great B2B marketing operations can deliver a great customer experience

When thinking about B2B marketing operations, it’s easy to think of the benefits that arise internally. Just a few might include:

• Freeing other members of the marketing team to focus on messaging, creative and content rather than spending too much time on making systems work properly.
• Using prospect data to automatically trigger timely and personalized marketing campaigns that increase the number of marketing qualified leads.
• Having leads pass seamlessly and instantly to exactly the right salespeople.
• Being able to connect opportunities within a CRM system back to marketing, helping to prove its value and contribution to revenue.

However, there’s another more important benefit – being able to deliver great customer experiences at scale. For example, effective B2B marketing operations can help with the following:

• Making sure that prospects and customers only receive high-quality communications, based on well-maintained and accurate data, rather than irrelevant approaches.
• Enabling better conversations with sales and customer success teams by sending key insights and conversation points through to CRM systems.
• Ensuring prospects and customers are served as soon as possible by reducing the workload on team members that need to engage with them.

Many B2B marketing leaders feel underprepared

Despite the potential that effective B2B marketing operations offers for outsized results, a study by Sojourn Solutions and Econsultancy found that about one-third of senior executives at companies with marketing operations in place feel that marketing isn’t yet aligned to key business outcomes such as total revenue contribution, market share or customer lifetime value.

A contributing factor to this challenge is that only one-quarter of these senior executives feel their marketing operations teams “fully” possess the knowledge and skills to support all functions expected of them.

It’s more than the tech – the right people are critical

Even the best marketing technology doesn’t do the work itself. Connecting multiple different systems, ensuring that data flows accurately and aligning technology and processes all requires significant expertise. Furthermore, soft skills can be just as important when it comes to bringing together stakeholders from outside of marketing to help drive the best possible results.

Although building a top-performing marketing engine isn’t easy, when the pieces fall in place there can be outsized results. One only needs to look at examples such as Sage Intacct – which drives 50% of its pipeline opportunities through automated daily webinars – to see what is possible.

To learn more about digital marketing, make sure to look through our resources page for further blogs, events, webinars, and more, related to B2B marketing operations.