Chapter 3

Reviewing Ongoing Improvement for B2B Marketing

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Monitoring the progression of your key accounts

Bullet Prioritizing target accounts

Bullet Providing regular reporting on engagement

You’ve got a lot going on at work. Everyone is busy. The to-do list is endless. Someone always needs something else. Using B2B marketing tactics, you can watch the progression of an account across all stages of the buyer journey from prospect, to qualification, then opportunity accounts, as well as your customer accounts. Your sales and marketing team can monitor how every account is contributing to the growth of your company. For new accounts, it’s powerful proof that marketing is working when you can see engagement building within an account by connecting with more contacts in who see the value in working with your company and become revenue opportunities.

Potential revenue exists in all stages of the buyer journey. You want to look at accounts currently generating revenue, as well as the accounts who represent opportunities. Metrics matter for every account. They’re different depending on the stage, and the activities required. So how can you be sure, with everything going on in your office, that your sales and marketing teams doesn’t let anything fall through the cracks?

In this chapter, you look at how to track metrics for every account depending on their stage in the buyer journey. You also learn the process your sales and marketing teams should take for an ongoing review of your target accounts, and how marketing can work with sales on monitoring engagement within customer accounts to look for potential revenue opportunities. Also discussed is how marketing can continue to provide added value to accounts by sticking to the core of your company’s value proposition.

Ongoing Account Maintenance

The buyer journey is a comprehensive lifecycle, starting from the time contacts first connect with your company. Depending on where the account is on this journey, different people in your company will need to support the account in a variety of ways. Marketing will provide continuous support for sales as they target new accounts by serving content, planning activities, and executing campaigns together. After accounts come on board, marketing must work with customer success on maintaining relationships with customers and developing accounts into advocates. In B2B marketing, the marketing team will always play an integral part in landing new accounts and retaining them as customers.

Delivering reports and results

Because you’re using marketing technology for B2B marketing, you have the ability to produce reports to gain visibility on your activities and campaigns. Depending on the stage of the accounts, you’ll want to report on different metrics. The customer service team doesn’t really care how many accounts progressed from prospect to qualification, because these potential opportunities aren’t yet customers. On the flipside, sales account executives should care about the status of accounts they worked so hard to bring on, as they’re the ones who invested time in building those initial relationships with accounts.

Your marketing team can serve as the connector for bringing all this information together. From your marketing technology stack, you can pull different reports to show vital information to sales, customer success, and your executive stakeholders. These reports provide insights into the health of your business and make everyone aware of potential issues. Here are the types of reports marketing will want to produce and the sources.

  • CRM: Stage progression for accounts. The reporting can be done by setting a filter or running a query in your CRM to product a list of accounts in each stage. This is vital for sales and your executive team to look at the health of your sales pipeline and accurately forecast revenue. Marketing will want to pull reports on stage progression including:
    • New accounts that came in that week from inbound
    • Demos were scheduled by sales development representatives (SDRs)
    • Demos completed by sales
    • New opportunities created
    • Deals Closed/Won or Closed/Lost
  • Marketing automation: This reporting shows your sales team what’s working to move the needle on engagement. Reports can be produced for both accounts in the buyer journey and the sales journey. Here’s the type of engagement reporting you want to see, based on the types of activities and campaigns:
    • Demo request forms completed by qualified accounts
    • Form completions to download content, such as ebooks, case studies, whitepapers, and infographics
    • Webinar registrants and attendees
    • Event registrations for in-person events

Tip The same way you run these reports to see which content is resonating with accounts in the buyer journey, you can pull reports for your individual customers.

It’s important to show customer service and your executive stakeholders what activities and content are helping develop your clients into advocates. This type of reporting will also come from your marketing automation system, including registrants for training webinars, on-site workshops, your user conference, and content downloads from your Resource Library or Knowledge Center:

  • Marketing platform: Show the results of advertising campaigns launched using your marketing automation platform. What’s really cool is to how it’s far less expensive and more precise for targeting at the account level. Account by account, see the cost to reach these decision-makers at the account is far lower compared to the cost per click (CPC) of other campaigns.

    Remember You aren't looking at reports for a CPC or average CPM. You’ll be reporting on the number of impressions for your target accounts, and the actions that were taken on that ad.

  • Support ticket system: Marketing will need to work with sales and your customer service team, as marketing typically doesn't have access to this system. Although the B2B marketing automation industry is seeing some new support service providers operate with database-based pricing models instead of seat-based pricing models. This gives marketing access to support channels. It’s important for marketing to see the types of tickets your customers submit. This allows you to report

    • When several clients say they can’t get a certain feature to work.

      This could be either a product issue or a lack of training contributing to this pain.

    • Response time of support.
    • If the support team is lacking in the turnaround time to get resolution for tickets, marketing needs know it. This harms the development of advocates, and will lead to negative customer sentiments (possibly bad reviews posted about your company online).

People inherently are impatient. Replying quickly, and frequently, to your customers support tickets helps to set the right expectations about resolution time. Ongoing and consistent communication helps customers, even if the issue takes several weeks to fully resolve, because at least you set that expectation in your response to the customer’s support ticket.

Creating a review process

Not all accounts are created equal. For your sales and marketing teams to be at their most productive level, all your team members must focus on one goal: closing revenue. Marketing needs to own an account review meeting, holding sales accountable for coming to the meeting with a list of accounts that marketing can help close. This review process should include

  • Target account list for each sales development representative (SDR) and sales account executive
  • Editorial calendar from marketing with upcoming content and activities
  • Engagement report from marketing automation on active contacts in targeted accounts
  • Pipeline report with opportunity accounts

This review process will help ensure your sales and marketing team members are aligned on what’s happening within each account, and help develop a plan for generating even more velocity within those accounts. In the same way marketing will work with sales on these target accounts, marketing needs to regularly meet with customer success managers for status updates on your key customer accounts. The type of reporting marketing needs to prepare for customer success should include

  • Engagement with contacts in customer accounts (from your marketing automation system, filtered using a customer list)
  • Tickets from support signaling potential issues
  • Any recent reviews or feedback posted on the Internet

Marketing needs to meet with all the customer service managers to review their list of accounts they own. From this list, marketing can get insight into who your “VIP” customers are. These VIPs are the power users who are happy with your product or service and can be leveraged for case studies or video testimonials.

Remember The importance of marketing and customer success working on these reports is to help develop customer advocates for word-of-mouth marketing. These customer advocates will help promote your business in an authentic, organic way and drive new revenue for your company.

Executing on tasks

The importance of project management can't be overstated. Good project managers know how critical it is to document every task, assign an owner, and a due date. Your sales and marketing teams need to develop a list of tasks for each person and how they will work together. This helps ensure your team is tracking the status and deliverables for every account and nothing is falling through the cracks.

Tip Set tasks in your CRM for each account. There should always be a next step clearly spelled out.

Here are examples of tasks which your sales and marketing teams will need to execute based on the stage of the account:

  • SDR: New inbound form completions need to be sent an email and call as soon as possible. If the account doesn’t respond within 24 hours, set a reminder task to follow up the next day.
  • Account executive: When a qualified account has been handed off from an SDR and the demo has been scheduled, make a note in your CRM on the next steps to follow up.
  • Marketing: After your weekly sales and marketing team meetings, document what content sales has requested. Assign a due date for delivering this content and next steps.
  • Customer service: Follow up on tickets and issues need to be remedied. Your clients can’t wait forever to get resolution. If you can’t get clients resolution, then they’ll perceive your company negatively.

Tip Customer service managers need to send an email to check in at least once a week with users in the account. It helps develop a relationship with assists in customer retention. After each check in, the customer service rep needs to email the account with next steps, follow up, and deliver on those action items.

Gauging Potential Opportunities

The steps you’re taking internally with your sales and marketing teams will help make all the stakeholders aware of the status of each of your target accounts. For sales, this means seeing how accounts are advancing to the next stage of the buyer journey and what else can be done to move the account forward. For customer success, this means having inherent knowledge of how the account is doing with your company to look for opportunities to upsell your product or service.

Limiting the margin for error

Tracking success metrics for every account means you’re reducing the room for error. The primary error that occurs in B2B marketing is the lack of follow-up. Lack of follow-up includes

  • When a qualified account downloads content and an SDR doesn’t send an email or calls the contact
  • Sales account executives who hold a demo, then don’t send a follow-up email, or when an opportunity sends an email that goes unnoticed because of a stacked inbox

Tip You can sync your CRM system with your email to monitor all of these email activities and ensure your salespeople are following up accordingly.

Remember This is why it’s important to do a weekly review of your target account list. It provides transparency for what every sales and marketing team member should be doing to grow revenue.

To ensure customer success, limiting the margin of error means ensuring you’re aware of the terms of service and what sales promised your company would do for the account after they became a customer. One of the biggest ways B2B companies fail is when sales promises certain things that don’t come to fruition. During the sales process, marketing and customer success need to be involved in looking at late-stage opportunities.

Tip Providing a statement of work (SOW) helps limit the margin for error. An SOW will spell out exactly what your company will provide for the account after they become a customer. SOWs should be shared internally with the account’s future customer success manager so they understand expectations.

Tip When you have a contract in place for your accounts, customer service managers need to set a reminder for several months before this contract expires.

Your sales team worked hard to bring on best-fit accounts. When there’s a contract or service agreement with an expiration date, the customer service manager must be aware of that date. Most times, an account must give notice that they will no longer do business with your company. The customer service manager must be aware of when that deadline is, keeping it top of mind, so he or she can ensure your team is doing everything in your power to make sure the account is happy and will renew their contract.

Anticipating future needs

The needs of your account will constantly change. Every contact in your accounts is different. You can’t please everyone, no matter how hard you try. What you can do from a service perspective is mutually agree on what your contacts in your account need now. These types of needs are stage based.

Remember Having designed personas for the types of cases you work with will help you understand the needs of your contacts in your accounts based on their stage in the buyer journey.

Tip Having an SOW for each account helps customer success managers to anticipate future needs of accounts after they come on board as clients.

Building an engagement report

Your marketing automation system will provide you with the data needed to build an engagement report. To build an engagement report, you need a scoring system in place with your marketing automation system. Points are assigned for each marketing activity. As a contact engages in different marketing activities, such as downloading content or attending a webinar, points are added to the contact’s score. You can then run a report to show all the contacts in the account to see all their scores.

The value here is looking within your target accounts to see engagement across all the accounts who can influence the purchase decision. When there are upticks in activity, you can see this through the account’s score. Because your marketing automation system is synced with your CRM, you can run engagement reports for accounts based on stage in the accounts journey. The types of engagement reports you should run include

  • Prospects
  • Qualified accounts
  • Opportunities
  • Customers
  • Engagement with contacts in those accounts

Tip Look at churned customers who are no longer doing business with your company, as well as Closed/Lost customers to see whether there’s any sign of engagement. If they're still downloading content even though they told your company “No,” this may be a sign it’s time to reengage or warm up the account to get them back on board.

Providing Added Value

With B2B marketing, you’re establishing a relationship throughout the buyer journey. As you started building a relationship, you asked the key decision-makers in the account about the problems they were trying to solve. You wanted to understand their pain points so your company could provide a solution. The sales team told the account about your company’s value proposition in their calls, emails, and product demos, then marketing provided content to support these go-to-market claims.

Living up to expectations

If you were successful, the account came on board as a customer believing, in good faith, that your company could deliver on what was promised: to alleviate whatever pain the account was experiencing through your company’s solution. Customer service managers must ensure your company delivers. As a team, your company must work together making sure your clients always receive what they were promised.

Remember Always go above and beyond to provide added value to your customers. At each stage in the journey, meet or exceed what you told the contacts in the account you would do. Meeting expectations is essential. This helps to build trust and keeps the relationship going strong so your accounts continue to do business with your company.

Continuing to improve

There’s always room for improvement. If your team members don’t think about new ways to grow, then they don’t develop professionally. As a team, you should push each other to think about ways to improve. B2B marketing helps you think about improvement strategically because you’re considering what also will be best for your best-fit accounts.

Here is how each team member can look to improve:

  • Marketing: What type of content can you produce that will increase engagement? Do you see your contacts in target accounts engaging with one type of content more than another? Does sales have questions or objections from prospects that you can answer with content?

    Thinking through these questions will accelerate the brainstorming process for new content and activities, continuously improving your content marketing efforts and increasing engagement.

  • Sales: Are there places where you can generate more velocity in the sales process? Do you see there’s more time wasted from converting qualified accounts to opportunities?

    Think about what can be done to expedite the process of progressing account’s to the next stage. Get marketing involved to help. Supplying more content, inviting a qualified account to an account, or sending direct mail can all help generate velocity and improve the time it takes to win new business.

  • Customer service: For customer service reps, looking to improve means finding new ways to surprise and delight the accounts you’re responsible for.

    Getting your customers involved in planning your marketing activities is a great opportunity for improvement. Ask your customers:

    • What type of content do you want to read?
    • What topics would be helpful for a training webinar?
    • Would you like to contribute to planning our user conference?
    • Do you want to attend this event with us?

  • Product: Ask both prospect accounts and customers for feedback on your product. Where is there room for improvement? What features are lacking?

    When you’re planning to introduce a new product, or an upgraded version of your product to the market, create a plan for introducing it to your existing customer accounts (or late-stage opportunities) for their input. After all, you’re in business to serve these accounts with products and solutions they’ll want, need, and use.