We’re all igniters of the digital revolution. 2021 extended COVID-like behaviors for consumers and B2B buyers alike, and the rules of engagement continued to evolve: office closures and remote workplaces drove B2B buyers to increasingly favor even more personalized, self-guided journeys, across any number of digital channels – from social media to connected TV platforms and even the emerging metaverse where brands are increasingly hosting conferences and building partnerships.
In a recent Dun & Bradstreet survey of sales, marketing, RevOps, and data decision-makers in mid-size to enterprise companies from the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., 76 percent of respondents agree that not only have more buyers gone digital, but the mass shift to remote workplaces has disrupted their abilities to identify and reach buyers effectively.
In the past year, slightly more than one-third (34 percent ) of survey respondents say their company’s marketing and/or sales performance improved greatly, leaving a large majority of respondents realizing that they still have a lot of work to do to better understand their new, more distributed digitally savvy customers. This has created a trifecta of challenges for sales and marketing leaders:
1. Personalization. The pandemic accelerated the consumerization of online B2B sales and marketing; digitization of the buyer journey became an urgency. Buyers have high expectations that their buyer’s journey is personalized and efficient, however, that leads us to the next challenge: privacy
2. Privacy. In this growing digital world, while buyers are demanding a personalized experience, they are also insisting on more control over their privacy. But with the pending cookie-less world, it will be challenging for companies to collect and manage first-party data while balancing the need for customer privacy and preferences.
3. Proliferation. In the race to reach more buyers through more channels, sales and marketing teams are juggling approximately 10+ different tools on average, lacking a streamlined platform for managing all of their data and insights. Tools and the data housed within them – used across teams and departments – have proliferated causing yet more challenges.
What It Takes to Be a RevOps Leader in 2022
If working from home has taught us anything, it’s that the humanization of B2B has encouraged marketing, sales, and advertising teams to come together to better understand – and meet the needs of – the modern buyer who uses a growing number of digital channels to explore and purchase goods.
In the coming year, we’ll see the dismantling of silos that once plagued revenue-generating teams. In fact, the rise of personalized business engagement will give way to a new set of solutions that help marketers leverage both first and third-party data to better understand their target audiences to reach high-propensity B2B audiences more effectively for multi-channel marketing campaigns. And as a result, by the end of the year, we’ll see a growing number of revenue-generating teams, including Sales, Advertising, Marketing, and RevOps teams, get out of the business of wrangling data and technology, and back to engaging with their customers and prospects to drive growth for their companies.
If your organization is like the 64 percent of respondents that are still looking for ways to become a leader and be able to report that your sales and marketing performance ‘improved greatly’; to join disparate teams together and leverage data and insights to drive growth, then it’s critical to take note of some of the strategies that leaders we uncovered in our survey have used in the past year to get ahead.
1. Data. Build a solid foundation of reliable data by investing resources (both time
and people) into better data quality and data governance practices. With the pending cookie-less future, first-party data has moved from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’ opportunity, so it’s important to consider your organization’s first-party data capturing and analysis abilities today in order to prepare for the future. Combining first and third-party data will also give your organization a holistic picture of customers’ accounts, targets, and preferences.
2. Alignment. According to the survey, B2B leaders that successfully improved their marketing and sales efforts tend to share common traits, including a greater likelihood to align around a shared view of accounts, to engage with relevance throughout the buyer’s journey, and to rely on account-based strategies.
3. Integrated Platform. Consider implementing an integrated RevTech platform that encourages collaboration, joining sales and marketing (all customer-facing teams, really), first- and third-party data, both account and people, and technology in a global and local data compliant manner, to converge and work together across revenue teams, to support integrated workflows and teams.
As we continue to work from home and online exploration continues, it’s critical that companies make a New Year’s resolution to slowly break down their internal silos so that revenue-generating teams can easily collaborate and ensure that their collective time and budget is efficiently spent on creating, targeting and reaching potential buyers, and keeping current customers happy.
*Dun & Bradstreet’s 8th Annual B2B Sales and Marketing Data Report reports on the results of an independent survey conducted on their behalf of 605 sales, marketing, RevOps, and data decision-makers in mid-size to enterprise companies from the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. to understand how they approach data quality, data stewardship, and revenue operations. The survey also provided insight into respondents’ sales and marketing performance during the 12-month period, October 2020 to October 2021.
The author, Stacy Greiner, is General Manager of the Sales & Marketing business at Dun & Bradstreet.
