The single most powerful differentiator between B2B organizations who struggle and those who repeatedly succeed is people-focus.
Today’s marketers should take note from legendary actor Charlton Heston’s desperate plea, “Soylent Green is people!” In B2B marketing return on investment is dependent on people and people are essential to the modern marketing strategy that actually drives real ROI.
A combination of client observations, developments in AI and recent announcements from certain tech companies regarding their own learning about marketing’s impact on earnings and business health-all prove ROI is the key to success in B2B marketing. Personnel challenges remain a basic, stubborn impediment still keeping many companies from making substantive, scalable marketing progress.
ROI is people
In terms of the marketing performance, if it is assumed that people on teams are essentially interchangeable and then maybe the performance status quo will do. This lack of gravity in people focus remains the key to disproportionate success, and then the leadership probably needs to put people higher on its list of priorities. Given the complexity and comprehensiveness of modern B2B approaches like account-based marketing, it is believed that people-focus could be the single most powerful differentiator between those who struggle and those who repeatedly succeed.
Also Read: Marketing Process Improvement is imperative for Challenging Times
Four reasons why B2B continues to fail at marketing:
B2B is different fundamentally
Marketing is an integral part of B2B. Both the large deal sizes and small deal volumes don’t lend themselves to a B2C approach. B2B companies once tech innovation gave the websites and email, the cost of entry dropped and the door was opened for every marketers to begin figuring out a B2B marketing model. Those, who studies the industry can dispute that marketing is delivering substantial competitive advantage at many B2B companies, without even huge paid media spending. Given the nature of B2B marketing, treating extended teams as interchangeable is a recipe for disaster.
B2B marketing is not the ‘Only’ thing
B2B marketing consists of a set of complex connected processes. Gaps between essential elements create points of failure that bring down performance of the whole. If anyone fails to close those gaps or even allow them to open again the system begins to fail. It’s hard to get everything running smoothly again by the time management recognizes the effect. It take years to turn the flame back on could.
B2B excellence takes time
B2B marketing can never count on higher education as a source of ready skill. It takes time for content team to get a handle on things like the differentiators of your company’s offerings and the nature of your audience. Great marketing capability can’t happen overnight —the bottom line.
Treating marketing as a cost center
Many B2B companies are making the mistake of treating marketing that way – as something that is easily paused or even cut with little downside. For today’s young marketers it will be defined by a combination of how the industry treats them and how they react to that. If marketing is a competitive weapon, marketers need to chart a growth course for themselves.
The CMOs takeaway from this
Delivering B2B marketing improvement requires a concerted focus on both highly specialized individual skills and remarkable team cohesion, organizations that are unable to invest their energies. Those who continue to look for quick fixes to difficult challenges will never achieve the impact many of today’s teams are consistently delivering.
Also Read: Three Strategies to make your Marketing Agile
Marketers need to remember that they need to:
- Tune the marketing engine – Commitment to people will help win the race.
- Never follow the shortcut route on enablement.
- Do not go it alone; work with the right partners to scale and sustain success.
People are essential to B2B marketing success
No matter how powerful the tools of marketing become, it is very likely that expectations will always overshadow them. That’s just human nature. The more holistic the solution, the higher the expectations, the truer this is. There is never been a better time to make investments properly in individuals and teams. People have never been more essential to building the high-performance marketing engine every company needs to win.
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