Why Pipeline Marketing is important right now

We all are into a 2020 world of the sales processes where every single customer or sales initiated action is examined, scrutinized, and obsessed over by salespeople, sales managers, sales operation people, and senior management. Like everything else in the world today, sales stages are much more granular, objective and should be more accurate than ever before.

Pipeline Marketing is the method of not only concentrating on Lead Generation efforts including the visits, average time on the website, bounce rate, etc. Instead, it’s based on revenue contribution and working from revenue back to the top of the funnel to dictate decision-making. Visits, average time on site, or bounce rate are some of the aspects that marketers can use to higher their contribution to the pipeline.

It is also the  B2B strategy that combines sales and marketing around the same goal of revenue generation. It differs from activity-based marketing, as it focuses on revenue, rather than campaign diagnostics and results.

To be successful in Pipeline Marketing, not only your platforms must be aligned to track attribution, but also your techniques and team must be wholly lined up around their goals. This alignment is important because marketing is held accountable as a “customer” which leads a sales team to deliver qualified leads, while sales must also endorse its side of the SLA from SQL to close the opportunity.

Pipeline Marketing needs a more personalized approach. When prospects are at the top of the marketing funnel, the goal is to help them become aware of a problem and educate them on how you can help them solve it. There are also a lot more contacts at the top of the funnel, so traditional marketers tend to work more at scale and may rely on marketing automation to help them educate those prospects.

If you’re not already leveraging pipeline marketing, the first step you can take to start initiating this approach would be to identify what type of content resonates with your personas at each stage of the buying process. This content will differ from company to company. At New Breed, we use blog posts and guides as educational content for contacts at the top of the funnel, or the awareness stage. We leverage case studies, assessments, or demos for those in the pipeline when prospects need more substantial evidence that our offerings are a good solution to their problem.

The buyer’s journey is organized in these 3 stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. The best way is to think about the last purchase decision that you made and what led you to succeed. The process probably began when you realized you had a problem, but you weren’t sure of the best solution.

While all three stages of the buyer’s journey are important, the decision stage is the most critical and is why pipeline marketing is so important. In the opportunity lifecycle stage, your contacts are in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey — and it’s your job to prove your solution’s value. Your sales team may be able to verbally speak to the value of your product, but it’s your job as a marketer to create content that shows that value. There are many trust marks you can leverage throughout the pipeline to bolster this effort, including:

• Case Studies
• Assessments
• Testimonials
• Customer Reviews
• Demos

By offering your consumer with a specific case study with reference to their industry or a great testimonial from a happy customer, you verify that your skills and expertise match what you have promised during the sales process.

Here are 3 ways your marketing team can ensure your company’s B2B website is sourcing and influencing more marketing and sales pipeline:

1. Foo trackable pipeline objectives and metrics for your website.
2. Let visitors determine their strategy by offering stepwise CTAs.
3. Provide measurable user experience which will support your lead segmentation and qualification.

Note:

When working in the pipeline, double-, or even triple-check that follow-up email to your prospect and then have your coworker take a look at it as well. But it’s more than just checking every minor detail of your campaign. The other important element is hyper-personalization. When contacts reach the pipeline, you should know them so well that it’s flattering yet borderline creepy at the same time. You should be tailoring your content to each individual client with specific details about their company. The more ways you can personalize the content you send to your pipeline contacts, the more confident they will feel to achieve the goals.

Key Learnings:

Pipeline Marketing illustrates why your marketing efforts should not end at any stage of the sales funnel, especially as we move into the era of the marketing flywheel. Also, let’s keep in mind that the buyer’s journey is now seen as a never-ending cycle that places equal emphasis on your customers.

Just because the opportunities in your pipeline are sales-focused, doesn’t mean you have to ditch your marketing efforts, they can still be effective in this portion of the buying process. By leveraging these efforts all the way through the funnel, marketing and sales teams can be even better aligned in their messaging and tactics. Pipeline marketing is a win-win situation. It improves marketing and sales unification and provides your prospects with a more frictionless funnel. Are you ready to start focusing on improving your customers’ buyer-journey by adopting a pipeline-oriented strategy that connects lead-generation to revenue attribution? And you came to the right place. VSynergize can help reach us on +1-732-481-9424 or email at info@vsynergize.com