Approach

The B2B marketer's mission is to build a brand that pulls people in, then accurately nurture them for Sales to realise a revenue benefit for the company. Operating within a modest $350k marketing budget for the financial year - covering brand creation, launch, tools, and ongoing activities meant cost efficiency was paramount. From constructing the foundational martech stack to implementing sales enablement, we built cost-effective B2B go to market fundamentals.

1. Martech Stack: Despite budget constraints, as a B2B company we needed to prioritize the solidity of the marketing stack. Salesforce was selected as a familiar, market leading CRM and combined with Pardot email automation and lead scoring functionality to enable Account Based Marketing. WordPress was leveraged for the website, leveraging an off the shelf template to avoid costly customization, but was heavily adapted via implementation of the new brand guidelines, including font, colour, illustrations, icons and copy tone of voice. Google Optimize provided free A/B testing for conversion rate optimization, while Agora Pulse managed Social Media at a budget-friendly $49 per month. Reporting was streamlined via a consolidated dashboard following the classical B2B sales and marketing funnel, including top of funnel traffic (website and social), middle of funnel engagement (page views, white paper downloads, and social media engagement metrics) and bottom of funnel opportunity (new prospects, MQLs, Opps, current pipeline, closed sales and lifetime value).

2. CRM structure and data management: Collaboration with Salesforce customer support formalized Prospect, Lead and Opportunity structures, campaign sources, mandatory fields and general flow. Mandatory fields required to create a Lead included Name, Company, Email and Lead Status, with progressive profiling collecting further data. Lead Status was designed in collaboration with Sales, covering clear ownership at each stage (e.g Open → MQL → SQL → Sales Unqualified (no contact) → Sales Unqualified no opportunity) → Sales Qualified → Converted (to an opportunity). SalesForce Path was also implemented to help sales adhere to correct processes. This involved embedding a list of requirements that need to be met before the salesperson could move to the next stage. 

3. Prospect collection and data cleaning: We wanted high volumes of deep, accurate prospect and customer data. Therefore, establishing standardized CRM terminology was paramount for consistent understanding and use. For example, there was a huge variance in the understanding of what a ‘Lead’ was, so much work was done with Salesforce to ensure correct terminology was defined. Data collection primarily came via sourcing cold prospects that met the target market criteria (Industry and job Title) and Pardot forms that included progressive profiling. Data quality was monitored via the creation of a ‘CRM Quality Score’, which was made up of three components relating to field penetration, accuracy and recency. Quarterly audits were completed to quantify the score and identify areas for improvement.

4. Marketing Automation: Our email marketing strategy encompassed a quarterly newsletter, solus email campaigns, and trigger-based lead nurture. Leveraging digital body language and offline interactions (email opens, website visits, white paper downloads, form completions, event attendance etc), a lead scoring model automated the creation of MQLs when prospects reached a particular score that indicated they were warm enough for proactive contact from Sales. While the newsletter was a templated email, A/B testing confirmed that plain text emails from the salesperson generated significantly higher responses, albeit at the expense of some tracking.

5. Thought Leadership Content: Acting as both a brand consideration and lead generation tool, significant investment was directed to outsourcing the creation of 20 articles and one white paper each quarter. This had the added advantage of the content provider promoting it in their well known marketing publication the target audience read. The content was repurposed across channels, including infographics and social media posts

6. PR and Social Media: Focused PR efforts on the initial launch event and seed investment from a prominent brand garnered attention. The social media approach was to ‘build the brand within LinkedIn’ and began with “filling the restaurant” enough to gain baseline credibility. Targets were set at 100, 1,000 and 10,000 LinkedIn followers. The community was initially built by leveraging the “invite connections” feature and leveraging staff accounts. Investment was subsequently made in paid follower ads and sponsored posts. The CEO’s LinkedIn account was leveraged for personalised inbox messaging to key personnel at relevant companies.

7. Account Based Marketing (ABM): Targeting Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Data Officers and Audience Managers in large corporations operating in particular industries called for an ABM approach. A relatively expensive tactic, we needed to start with the top 5 companies in a high potential vertical and ensure articles and at least one white paper in the content stream were industry specific. Highly targeted LinkedIn advertising, inbox messaging and plain text sales emails were used to open up conversations and nurture prospects down the funnel

8. Sales enablement: A high quality credentials and proposal deck was required to facilitate the custom needs based solutions required to progress opportunities. Over 140 slides were created based on a combination of sales team interviews, desk research and third party review. Pre built slides were created to communicate the company's background and value proposition, services and data governance. Additional templated slides were available to showcase an understanding of the client’s requirements and present the solution, scope, investment and timings.

Results

• 50% of new business acquisitions over the following two years were marketing originated, representing millions in lifetime value

• A meticulously maintained CRM database with thousands of prospects and contacts was established

• The LinkedIn community exceeded 4k followers within two years, while the website consistently attracted 2-3k monthly unique visitors, on average viewing 2 pages or more