Whats changed with sales and marketing in the MarTech industry?

I've worked in sales for 30 years. For the last 23 of them I've sold MarTech solutions to brands across four continents, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia. I've built a Marketing Cloud business from zero to $22M ARR and 40 staff and transformed a product led sales approach to a value based one, quadrupling the AOV.

As a sales rep 15 to 20 years ago, the B2B marketing team was largely there to support the sales team. In 2007 I recall working with my marketing team to create content that I knew would help develop and accelerate my pipeline - about specific topics I was using to position value to my prospects. Largely using LinkedIn and email i proudly developed the majority of my own pipeline and regularly hit 200+ my annual quota. I found my own system that meant every year I would smash my number, I knew exactly what I needed to do and I believed in myself.

Between 2010 to 2020 we saw the development of B2B growth marketing and the proliferation of content and insight creation, and strategies like ABM (Account Based Marketing) were introduced to help scale pipeline creation - this was the knowledge era, where insight could be used to teach buyers a new perspective and open doors with buyers eager to learn about new technologies. And there were a lot of them, this was the First Golden Age of MarTech. ?The marketing ecosystem grew by $120 Billion and the MarTech industry from $2 Billion to $35 Billion.

Product Marketing would typically define the value proposition, perhaps with the help of the services team (if you had one) and then marketing would use this to help define the messaging they would use for building awareness and nurturing leads, targeting the ideal customer profile, within the target audience.?Sales and customer success would then work with product marketing to understand the commercial value to better understand how they might position value and teach buyers a new perspective based on the value they could deliver. If you were a company that understand this would be the driving force of your operating model, you were likely one of the MarTech businesses acquired as we saw consolidation in the market.

Sales leadership (enablement if you were lucky enough to have them) would then help sales quantify the differentiating commercial value that product marketing created, so the sales team could qualify potential buyers priorities, and work with the buyers to define the purchase criteria before helping them build consensus with the different stakeholders influencing the purchase process, and this approach would often require the seller to teach the buyer how to build consensus effectively and ultimately close the deal - which was becoming increasingly more complex with the number of stakeholders influencing the purchase decision increase from 5.4 to 6.8.

It was becoming harder to sell effectively as competition increased, failed implementations rose, and buyers became nervous of sellers providing poor advice or promising things that could not be delivered. For several years we experienced a constant theme of “we need more from less”, work the machine harder but, it doesn’t work like that.?Buyers have experienced how to buy software, often with a very poor sales and customer service experience - buyers were not buying unless they knew and trusted you. Not the company, butt he seller. People bought and still and always will buy from people they like and trust.

The current state

• Buyers have zoned out of marketing and sales messages and choose what they engage with and engage only with those they trust.
• Buyers are fed up with sales and marketing messages constantly searching, nurturing and qualifying them.
• The concept of the traditional sales funnel is broken. Unless you have an unlimited budget and time (which most companies don’t), annoying your prospects and customers is the one reason why they won’t buy from you.
• Creating and building competitive differentiation is different now. We live in a different era, one that has shifted from insight to one based on shared values and beliefs where the dominant logic is co-creation.?Not from a brand, but from an individual perspective - after all people buy from people, that’s one constant in business that will never change.?

The future state

• We need a new strategy, one that is future proof, one that empowers every employee to grow their own network and create content that amplifies their shared values and beliefs and encourages your target audience to walk towards you and your business, at scale.
• This new approach requires a change model that focuses on the individual. One that helps each team member understand their reaction to change, what it means and how to manage it effectively.?
• A new approach requires a new set of dashboards, one’s that measure behaviours that contribute most to achieving your commercial objectives. ?=
• Why measure vanity metrics, when you can measure behaviours that align your teams, and deliver on the metrics that really matter to your business, like conversations, aligning value and pipeline.

Our future state requires a social selling operating model, a new sales go-to-market strategy that has relationship building at scale, at the heart. Not selling but building relationships. Only then will businesses own their own destiny. Grow at the pace they want to.

After 18 months of testing and 7 months of sales performance data across a range of different sales experiences in MarTech, all following our social selling methodology as an operating model, we have benchmark statistics. From the data we know our program delivers a 9.9% conversation rate and a 33.6% call progression rate.

To learn more about the future of sales and marketing and how you can benefit, drop me a DM.

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