Advances in martech and the growing role of millennials and Gen Z in business decision-making mean that the B2B buying process is becoming increasingly familiar to consumers, with an omnichannel presence, intuitive interfaces, and positive user experiences. According to a 2023 report from Forrester, these generational cohorts will make up 64% of business buyers, and their “digital literacy” will lead them to seek out self-service transaction channels and information from a variety of third parties rather than the seller. The scale and impact of these changes are so far-reaching that B2B companies need to embrace them as the known, not as a new or passing trend.
In our experience, companies that have undertaken this transformation and achieved the benefits highlighted in Figure 1 have built such connections, adopted new marketing technologies and tools to gain more insights from existing data, and optimized and improved processes across the funnel shown in Figure 4. They also made complex transformations less intimidating by breaking them down into smaller integrated initiatives.
The consumerization of B2B marketing and sales requires the marketing function to upgrade from simply generating awareness to a role as co-owner and primary driver of the entire sales conversion funnel. This requires a new marketing and sales operating model that covers the entire funnel, with the demand center as the new function for lead generation, qualification, and nurturing.
To take advantage of this changing environment, companies must align the roles and responsibilities of marketing and sales to tightly integrate the two functions to include clearly defined collaboration and handoff points to ensure a seamless customer journey.
The primary deliverable of the demand center is the marketing qualified lead (MQL). Each should contain required and optional qualitative elements that enable the sales team to efficiently convert these leads into sales qualified leads or SQLs. The automated demand center in the funnel in Figure 4 uses available data to qualify and evaluate potential new business and prospects from existing business (upsell and cross-sell opportunities and churn risk). The highest priority leads are sent to sales for further qualification and eventual conversion, while others are given lower priority and sent back to the nurturing process or demoted. Demand Center’s GenAI module can incorporate a wide range of contextual data to scale and personalize lead generation and enrichment while accelerating the process.
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Spending resources on improving marketing or sales alone is like having state-of-the-art wheels on a car but no axles or transmission. Strength and momentum come from full integration. This means not only breaking down organizational silos, but also the thinking behind them.
