Market View
Beyond MQLs: Reframing success in B2B marketing
Sponsored by:
Produced by:
Dimitrios Kales
Head of Commercial Marketing at Informa Markets
About Dimitrios Kales
Dimitrios Kales is the Head of Commercial Marketing for the Food portfolio at Informa Markets – managing major global brands such Food ingredients Europe, Vitafoods Europe and digital products like Smartcore. He is an accomplished marketing leader with a proven track record in driving the Digital Marketing Strategy, Marketing Automation, and B2B Lead Generation campaigns, while building high performing marketing teams. Moreover, Dimitris is passionate about analysing data and translating it into actionable marketing strategies, enabling the business to take advantage of opportunities and achieve further growth.
Dimitrios, could you describe how the shift towards account-based marketing in B2B sectors is altering the way we measure marketing success?
Absolutely. There's a significant shift towards account-based marketing in the B2B space, which is quite different from B2C strategies. This change is driving us towards more personalised experiences and targeted engagements. When we started transitioning to ABM, we first defined the scope of ABM for our organisation and sought leadership buy-in. We then trained our teams, including marketing, content, sales, and customer success.
For targeting and account selection, we initially focused on two groups: new business and retention/upsell for existing customers. We started with customers to generate quick results and gain business commitment. However, we learned that our approach was too broad, so we narrowed our focus to accounts with existing relationships and further refined it to focused sprints around quarters and months.
This change is driving us towards more personalised experiences and targeted engagements. We're moving away from broad reach and focusing more on quality, which really transforms how we measure success. Now, we closely monitor metrics like account engagement, account penetration, and their impact on our sales pipeline.
‟
Now, we closely monitor metrics like account engagement, account penetration, and their impact on our sales pipeline.
What are the top three key performance indicators your team is focusing on currently?
Our main KPIs are the number of marketing qualified leads, or MQLs, that we pass to sales, the total revenue pipeline from these MQLs, and the revenue from closed-won MQLs. We also pay close attention to the conversion rate from MQL to closed-won, as it's crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns and reflects our emphasis on quality over quantity.
Between being a prospect and an MQL, we now measure three stages: cold, warm, and hot. This helps marketing identify and target cold leads to make them warm or hot, and it helps sales prioritise the hot leads to push them further along the pipeline. Tracking these stages in our Marketing Dashboard gives us a better handle on the full journey from prospect to revenue.
What are the primary challenges in aligning marketing with sales, and how do you approach these challenges?
The main challenge is elevating marketing to a strategic, revenue-focused partner. This begins with securing senior stakeholder buy-in, crucial for resource-intensive initiatives like account-based marketing. We've addressed this through several strategies. We standardised our lead scoring model, clarifying lead definitions and reducing conflicts. This model assigns points to prospects, designating them as MQLs when they reach a threshold. We've redefined success metrics, focusing on quality over quantity, monitoring account engagement, penetration, and sales pipeline impact. Our shift to account-based marketing drives more targeted, personalised experiences, necessitating closer collaboration between marketing and sales. We're also leveraging technology, particularly AI, to enhance marketing automation, optimising email timing and subject lines, resulting in a 10% increase in open rates. These initiatives position marketing as an indispensable partner in driving business growth, directly contributing to the bottom line, and achieving organisational objectives. We're moving beyond traditional functions to demonstrate our crucial role in the company's success.
‟
We standardised our lead scoring model, clarifying lead definitions and reducing conflicts.
From a CEO’s perspective, what metrics would be critical for measuring marketing's contribution to business growth?
From a CEO’s perspective, I’d definitely consider several KPIs such as the Marketing Qualified Lead Revenue, Marketing Cost, Marketing ROI and percentage of Marketing Revenue compared to Total Sales. Furthermore, measuring the marketing revenue per marketer indicates the effectiveness and efficiency of our team and resources, which is a great productivity metric for a CEO.
Another interesting indicator is the Marketing-influenced revenue which provides a holistic picture of how much revenue our campaigns have contributed, even if not all revenue can be directly attributed to marketing. In addition, measuring marketing’s contribution to customer lifetime value, which showcases how much closed-won revenue and total customer lifetime value we’ve brought in through our efforts, gives a better perspective of our actual contributions to new business.
Looking ahead, what key trends and challenges do you foresee affecting sales and marketing collaboration?
I foresee ABM continuing to dominate, particularly in B2B industries where customer lifetime or contract values are high. ABM programmes will emerge and gain more focus within our marketing communities. Another key trend is buyer intent - understanding our prospects' intentions at the contact or account level and using those signals to personalise content and move them through the funnel. Big data, data analytics, and AI will also play a role, though we're still taking baby steps in this area. As marketers, we need to keep an eye on new technologies and how we can embed them into our current martech stack or adopt new marketing technology that incorporates artificial intelligence into our campaigns.
However, a significant challenge will be navigating the tighter data privacy laws, which requires us to adapt our strategies to focus more on first-party data to proactively address these concerns. There's increasing regulation around how we use and collect data, including first-party and third-party opt-ins and cookie policies. This is definitely a challenge we need to be mindful of and prepared for as marketers. We need to focus more on first-party data and build those assets to mitigate risks around potential new data privacy regulations in the future.
‟
AI has significantly boosted our marketing automation, especially in two main functionalities: send time optimisation and subject line testing.
Finally, how is generative AI shaping your marketing strategies, and what outcomes have you observed?
AI has significantly boosted our marketing automation, especially in two main functionalities: send time optimisation and subject line testing. Send time optimisation uses historical data to send email campaigns based on the best-performing time at the contact level, while the AI-powered subject line tester provides predictive analysis of how a subject line would perform in terms of open rate against our benchmark.
Since implementing these AI-driven tools in 2023, we've seen a 10% increase in our email open rates. It's a true example of how embedded AI within your martech stack can drive actual results on main KPI performance, clearly demonstrating how AI enhances the tactical aspects of marketing and provides measurable improvements.
About Informa Markets
Informa Markets creates platforms for industries and specialist markets to trade, innovate and grow. Informa Markets provides marketplace participants around the globe with opportunities to engage, experience and do business through face-to-face exhibitions, targeted digital services and actionable data solutions. Informa markets connects buyers and sellers across more than a dozen global verticals, including Boating, Pharmaceuticals, Food, Fashion, and Infrastructure. As the world's leading market-making company, Informa Markets brings a diverse range of specialist markets to life, unlocking opportunities and helping them to thrive 365 days of the year.
About 6sense
6sense is on a mission to revolutionise the way B2B organisations create revenue by predicting customers most likely to buy and recommending the best course of action to engage anonymous buying teams. 6sense Revenue AI is the only sales and marketing platform to unlock the ability to create, manage and convert high-quality pipeline to revenue. Customers report 2X increases in average contract value, 4X increases in win rate and 20-40% reduction in time to close deals. Know everything, do anything, with 6sense.
