Thought leadership programmes - Learn more

INTERVIEW WITH

Erin Marks

Vice President Global Marketing

B2B Customer Acquisition: The role of human engagement in a world of digital-first enterprise marketing

Marketing is then listening to the data generated by this conversation and observing that data journey to understand where and when to engage.

How do you see marketing and sales teams adapting their processes to meet the needs of digital-first buyers?

We are seeing organisations interacting in a different way with customers in a digital engagement. Organisations are creating content experiences that are tailored to the target profile, and the customer then engages with the content.

Marketing is then listening to the data generated by this conversation and observing that data journey to understand where and when to engage. This shift is driving adoption of things like digital sales rooms and customised ABM processes that bring together all of this content and data.

However, people still buy from people, so there needs to be an intelligent balance between self-serve and sales support. Millennials do want digital-first sales, but they also still often need a trusted advisor to shepherd them through the decision support process.

There is a common misconception that the marketing team’s primary function is making brochures, but modern marketing teams are very much about providing data that demonstrates the value of their activity to the wider business.

How can marketing best support the sales team in creating content for these prospective customers?

There is a common misconception that the marketing team’s primary function is making brochures, but modern marketing teams are very much about providing data that demonstrates the value of their activity to the wider business.

The marketing tech stack gives a huge amount of ammunition on what potential buyers are looking at when they’re researching or making decisions around products. What marketing can do is give the sales team all the options, all the data, so they can approach prospects and say, “I think I understand your challenge, and I think I have a solution for you, but I’d love to understand more about how this could help.” It’s about becoming a trusted advisor versus a disingenuous sales pitch.

At the top of the funnel we drive all automation through HubSpot, which is also our website CRM. That means we get a lot of data insights, and we can provide marketing with great information about what people read and use, versus what we can see they don’t care about. We also use that data with the customer success team to run things like NPS surveys.

Analytics are critical in showing the sales team what the market thinks, and where we want to focus our content creation. We capture revenue and brand metrics separately, and we share these across the business all the way up to the board.

We also have a user conference where we invite current customers and prospective users. They all come together and are learning from each other.

ERIN MARKS

Vice President Global Marketing

ENERGY EXEMPLAR

Should salespeople spend more time creating experiences for potential buyers that inspire, delight and challenge them?

Our team is working on use case videos that are experience-based. Each video goes through the use case from start to finish, from how you would do it to what problems that would solve, and the decisions you need to make. It’s creating quick hit, consumable content around the customers’ experience and we do this from multiple angles so that we can understand what resonates. This is a form of storytelling, but it is showing someone how the technology could work for them, this is what this other person wanted to achieve, and what that looked like.

We also have a user conference where we invite current customers and prospective users. They all come together and are learning from each other. This is where the power of success breeds more success, because these are brilliant people learning from one another, from our experts, and the company founders. From a marketing perspective, we are the organisers. Our role is almost to be the party planner, to set the stage and bring people together to have this experience.