The Curious Case of Marketing Automation in B2B: India

Far from the madding crowd, where giants fight for the digital real estate and mindshare of a customer, whose attention span is of a goldfish and is ever shrinking, there lies another world where the relation between a customer and the company is of the “till death do us part” nature.

Welcome to the world of B2B, which makes the actual world go round (literally) but seldom comes to fore front until someone slaps a sticker on a laptop which says “intel Inside”.

SALES: THE B2B WAY

In a traditional B2B setup the word "marketing automation" become a bit of a misnomer because sales (which includes after sales services) and marketing usually are so intertwined that its hard to demarcate boundaries or siloed in sound proof compartments.

A normal sales process in such organizations is long, complex and cannot run without frequent marketing interventions to fill gaps in the business customer journey. The sales on the other hand is expected to provide critical high-level inputs to the organizations which marketing and product teams are expected to act on to create and deliver better offerings. Success in such cases might be attributable to teams, failures however are individual.

This is easier said than done, and this is where theory meets practice.

Consider a standard sales and marketing process in the industry: You get a target number for the year, which is broken down into segments, territories and product lines to a point where there is individual quota allocated to last person in the chain of command.

The individual reps then reach out to the accounts creating the first touch point, while using tools and resources available to identify need and explore opportunity. In doing so a lot of information is disseminated to different stakeholders in the account around the companies products and offering. Once the salesperson has identified an opportunity and set of leads associated with it, marketing creates multiple touch points, to generate further interest to a point where the customer shows intent to buy and is further taken down the journey of?demos, pricing, product fitment and solutions which in the end might or might not result in sales.

Something is however amiss in this whole routine. Where is the customer? Customer is always at the periphery either looking away from you at competitors or trying to get a better look inside.

What if there was a way to do this at a lower cost, more efficiently and with greater predictability so that you never miss those forecast numbers. What if there was a way to put the customer in the center of all this?

CUSTOMER CENTRICITY AND MARKETING AUTOMATION

Let us now turn this entire journey on its head. Let us now start with the customer life cycle.

There is a customer somewhere out there in the universe who is looking to solve a problem or doesn’t even know that there exists a problem he is facing to which you already have a solution.

The marketing team using technology (Marketing automation and account based marketing tools) creates smart segments basis the customers attributes and the problems, an organization can solve for them. The marketing team finds these customers as they are customers are beginning to explore solutions either digitally or offline, or proactively reaches out to them with a hypothesis around a problem statement.

They interact with the customer through whitepapers, trade events, webinars, downloadable material, industry reports and begin mapping the decision-making hierarchy and touchpoints.

This entire interaction by the way also has complete sales visibility. So a sales person knows which of his accounts are being targeting, how have the key stakeholders in the account interacted with the organization, the last touch point, requests etc. The leads also get scored objectively basis experiential parameters defined by organizations which can be further optimized.

The marketing and the sales together drive a personalized approach on each account and each lead depending on what they are looking for and this entire data can be integrated with you CRM system.

This entire journey gets even more exciting when the scenario changes from B2B to B2B2C in case of insurance agents, or healthcare agencies.

This customer centric approach when automated becomes a scalable force multiplier for any sales and marketing team in a B2B set up.

Scenarios like new account acquisitions, renewals, Upsells, cross sells, After sales services become easy to manager and customer at each step is a known entity because of the continuity of interaction.

AI IN MARKETING AUTOMATION

By now anyone who has lived the scenarios mentioned above would agree that marketing automations is a glorified IFTTT (If this then that) play. Bring AI into this paradigm and the whole B2B sales and marketing get on steroids.

AI based on predictive algorithms can help you create customer profiles that are ideal for your products services and offering and even before your first touch point give you context on what the customer might be looking for. As the B2B data explodes AI helps navigate and make sense of the data in an efficient manner.

AI based on predictive models can help you maintain and nurture relations with existing accounts. You can proactively invite them to an event, or a webinar, do a health check, know if the customer is ready for an upsell, or renewal.

It can give you the power to engage with accounts on a 1 on 1 basis because lets face it, segmentation is old school boorish concept and in the ideal world we would like to treat every customer individually if we had the means to do so. From providing personalized experience on organization assets such as mobile apps, websites and even forms to sending personalized emails basis relevance and roles within customer organization structure AI can do it all.

END GAME: DEATH OF A SALESPERSON?

Most likely not! Humans like to interact with humans and buy from people like them. The salesperson will always be the prime mover of this value chain, however more efficient, better equipped, and delivering greater results. The sales person in this scenario will truly be a team player and a better listener because we will have taken the mundane, the repeatable and non-productive work off their hands giving them freedom and time to invest in the customer.

PWC: TECHNOLOGY CONSULTING

At PwC Technology Consulting we believe in solving hard problems which have the potential to make a better future. We believe that B2B customer experience is at a cusp of transformation, and are innovating continuously to deliver solutions to problems that matter. We would like to hear from you on your experiences and challenges as practitioners and explore possibilities in terms of solutions.

AFTERWORD:

A lot of you will have noticed I haven’t written a word about COVID, New Normal, Post COVID world etc. because this progression is inevitable just as automobile replaced horse carts and EVs are replacing the IC engine. COVID has just been a catalyst.