3 Ways Buying Group Marketing Helps Revenue Growth

There is a lot of talk about the alignment between marketing and sales, or ‘Smarketing,’ as I like to call it. However, most of the conversation is at a theoretical level. When it comes to implementing alignment into practice, there isn’t a perfect roadmap. Instead of siloing operations, companies should create a unified funnel between marketing and sales, where teams can work and measure together to improve internal operations and enhance the buying experiences. With buying behaviors constantly changing, approaches and strategies must evolve to meet customer needs and expectations.

A Buying Group Marketing (BGM) strategy can help align sales and marketing teams and create more intentional connections with prospects. Using BGM to monitor engagement across buying groups helps teams provide relevant sales and marketing experiences that almost anticipate prospect expectations through their buying journeys.

Operationally I commonly see pain points in business stemming from broken systems, messy data, and a lack of communication between the marketing and sales functions. It derives from legacy processes that no longer work or have not evolved with business needs. Taking a BGM approach enhances marketing and sales collaboration by unifying metrics and reporting systems. Essentially, BGM eliminates siloed work by combining marketing and sales activities and accomplishments. And focusing on overall performance and the holistic view of an account enables teams to discover what works and what doesn’t.

This approach means that a prospect can enter the funnel and seamlessly work through different phases without even knowing it. After all, prospects don’t care about a company’s internal structure and its hand-off between marketing and sales — they are simply focused on meeting their own goals.

Typically, marketing focuses very broadly on engaging an account. But BGM relies on marketing to take a more focused look at accounts and determine the best prospects to engage in the sales process. It allows businesses to ask the questions:

• How do we engage prospects?
• What are their needs?
• What boxes do we need to check to encourage them to commit?
• What do we need to validate that decision?

When teams develop a strategy from a BGM perspective, they rise above the silos of marketing and sales. They begin to think about the experience they want to deliver and how to orchestrate this journey. Each role within the buying group, like key decision-maker, influencer and user, should have its own unique experience. BGM opens up the opportunity to develop strategies that allow the team to engage across all accounts, small to large, with multiple product lines and multiple buying teams.

You can read the full article on Marketing Toolbox