Defining the B2B Marketing to Sales Lifecycle

Too many B2B marketing teams fail to consider the bigger picture. The main mistake is focusing on just one relationship stage in the marketing-to-sales lifecycle. Successful inbound marketing assesses customer experience at each stage in the buyer journey.

In defining your enterprise's marketing-to-sales lifecycle, consider first the stages your customer is experiencing. This model exemplifies a B2B technology provider’s customer lifecycle.

Defining your enterprise’s lifecycle, or buyer continuum, can assist the efforts of all teams involved in generating leads and revenue. This process could begin with examining where customer needs are being met and identifying areas of weakness hurting customer experience at all stages of the lifecycle.

Defining the B2B marketing to sales lifecycle

For most B2B businesses, the following core stages will resonate:

Aligning marketing and sales team involvement in the service and solution stage, merging support into this stage of the lifecycle, can help with analysis of conversions and retention and improve in lifecycle definition.

Mapping activities through each lifecycle stage and integrating these activities into marketing automation stages will help both marketing teams and sales teams better understand their value and progress over time.

Workflows and email nurturing within an automation system can be used to scale marketing activities and conduct smart, metrics-driven communications.

Consider an example from the Hubspot blog, where Lead Nurturing workflows deliver content via email over time to a user with TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU.

• Email 1, TOFU Offer: Delay 3 days. Promote an offer that relates to the one from which they became a lead.
• Email 2, MOFU Offer: Delay 3 days. You should promote a MOFU offer, like an ebook or case study, related to what they originally downloaded.
• Email 3, BOFU Offer: Delay 3 days. The last email to the workflow would be a BOFU offer, such as a free consultation, review, trial, or demo.

The example above is from Blog.hubspot.com, 6 Essential Nurturing Workflows For Every B2B Company, by Olivia Allen.

Defining Lifecycle Together

The divisive approach that focuses on initial marketing as one stage and the sales period as another doesn’t take into consideration the ongoing need to improve retention and build customer happiness across the entire B2B lifecycle.

Taking a more holistic view and involving sales and marketing teams in defining, servicing, and providing feedback on the marketing and sales lifecycle can deepen the enterprise’s understanding of its customer’s needs and perspectives.

The discussion involved in defining lifecycle also enables shared definitions of “lead,” reducing the angst in marketing that sales doesn’t convert and the grumbling in sales that marketing’s leads aren’t up to par.

Each lead needs to be managed differently by sales and by marketing, but only when the enterprise understands its lifecycle and its criteria for defining where a lead falls in the cycle stages will customers get the focused, appropriate attention that matches their needs. There needs to be a common definition of what constitutes a subscriber, lead, MQL, SQL, opportunity, and closing as a customer. Also, contacts need to be clearly segmented according to their current lifecycle stage--and these segments should be shared between marketing and sales.

Tools to consider when implementing your marketing-to-sales lifecycle within your marketing automation system:

• Personas to guide marketing and sales team -- helping to foster a common understanding of the buyer types.
• Lifecycle definitions: what constitutes a lead, MQL, SQL, opportunity, and so on. How are these tracked?
• Calls-to-action relevant to your buyers' needs.
• Email nurturing to help leads discover, learn, investigate, and be inspired.
• Workflows to provide automated communications, internal notifications, and data field updates to demonstrate a change in lifecycle status and set goal activities.
• Smart and dynamic content related to personas and lifecycle stages.
• Lists and segments to track contacts at each stage are also used for communications and email nurturing.

B2B Lifecycle: Ideas in Action:

• Sales and marketing should work together to develop a shared definition of the lifecycle stages.
• Determine which metrics will be gauged to better understand where buyers are in the cycle.
• Seek ongoing insights into what improvements can be made to appeal to the target audience at each lifecycle stage.
• Don’t treat the lifecycle definition as a set-and-forget model. Revisit and revise often based on team feedback, customer response, and revenue generation.

Source:

• Blog.hubspot.com, 6 Essential Nurturing Workflows For Every B2B Company, by Olivia Allen.
• Marketingcharts.com - https://www.marketingcharts.com/online/b2b-marketers-turn-to-buyer-journey-maps-to-craft-better-content-61252/