Every B2B business owner and marketer is now up against a fresh set of challenges. The internet has become a bigger and bigger driving force behind business success. Unfortunately, a lot of promising entrepreneurs have had a hard time understanding the factors that go into all dependable marketing strategies. Here are some of the biggest marketing challenges facing modern B2B business.
Sales and Marketing Data
We all know how important data is to support marketing campaigns these days. However, before you can start leveraging this data, you need to secure the right tools to harvest, interpret, and then make decisions based on data relating to your target market. Even when you’ve adopted this kind of tech, there are a range of challenges which small business owners and marketers will have to tackle. Setting goals that will help you determine the data you need, and drafting systems that will execute marketing plans according to the data you’ve gathered, can be extremely difficult, especially in the early stages of a business. New marketing technologies have allowed entrepreneurs to answer questions that weren’t even thought of a few decades ago. Answering just one of these through a reliable system for gathering data will help you narrow down the next steps in your marketing strategy.
Sales Funnels
When you’re operating in an international B2B market, funneling your leads to your sales team can be extremely difficult, especially when it comes to specialised niche products. Your sales team could be rushing around the field, trying their best to crunch through a mountain of work, and all of a sudden some of the guys from marketing can dump a massive list of leads in their lap. Have these leads been qualified? Will they be beneficial as long-term clients to your operation? In this increasingly competitive market, you need to ensure you have a sales funnel that hooks leads in, qualifies them to a level that your sales team can work with, filters out the bad leads, and, most importantly, helps your sales staff close a sale. The best way for qualifying leads can vary greatly from business to business, and be very hard to pin down. However, it’s something you can’t afford to neglect if you want your B2B marketing to be a success.
Executing Campaigns
Possibly the hardest thing for modern B2B firms is actually executing the campaigns they’ve planned. The lack of tools to help companies with campaign execution has been the death of many great brands over the years. If you want to stop promising opportunities and leads from slipping through your fingers, you need to have a strictly regimented strategy, including set workflows, a reliable CRM system, some degree of automation, and constant analysis and improvement. Bringing more tech tools into your B2B operation can often be much more cost-effective than hiring an employee, and will cut back on the room for error.