In recent years, almost every industry has experienced significant shifts in buying behaviors of its customers. In the B2B marketplace for instance, trust and partnership between the buyer and seller has become far more important than the product, technology, or the service offering. You could have the shiniest, most cutting-edge product to offer but if you fail to build trust in the marketplace, your growth is significantly limited. Go to market models are also evolving at a rapid pace, to catch up with the changing marketplace. Marketing and Sales processes are becoming more customer centric than ever before. Traditionally, marketing’s role was predominantly at the top of funnel building brand awareness in the market and generating leads; then passing over to sales to qualify further. On the other hand, Sales has typically only focused at the middle and bottom of funnel to qualify prospects into opportunities and making a sale. The new world order (also thanks to advancement in Martech, AI and ML) has stretched marketing’s role into the very deep ends of the funnel by enabling behavioural insights on target audience and building hyper personalized journeys for prospects, depending upon their maturity on the buyer journey. Similarly, the new work culture has made it even more crucial for Sales to play an important and active role throughout the buyer the journey, for instance, at awareness stage Sales has an immense responsibility of building and banking on social (media) economy to position the organisations and themselves as trusted advisors.

Therefore, it is not a matter of if, but a matter of how much the marketing and sales processes need to evolve based on the shifting marketplace. And it all comes down to your audience, commercial ambitions and available resources.