Are you working on your 2023 budget? Are you totally confident about what's next? Listening to prognostications of the future raises concerns. War. Pandemic. Inflation. Recession. So much uncertainty. What is a B2B marketer to do when building next year's budget? A recent Forrester report and an interview with Ross Graber, a Principal Analyst at Forrester, can provide some guidance.
Fortune Favors the Bold
“In 2023, smart business leaders will get focused — pruning efforts that aren’t bearing fruit and prioritizing long-term growth.”
During the past two years the entire organization—B2B Marketers, Sales Rep, heck, even those Finance folks—have had to be scrappy in figuring out how to do business. Some of these changes have been very positive. For example, sales teams that said video conferencing could never replace good old fashioned sales reps on planes finally got the digital transformation that's been too long in coming. Is in person good? Yes. For every conversation? No.
But that scrappiness has led to a thousand flowers blooming and not all of them are pretty. It's time to weed the garden. Your budget request is going to be a lot more compelling if you're trimming the things that aren't yielding results along with the requests to double down on those things that are working. This is a trust moment between you and the budget gods.
It's time to shift from short-term dopamine hits and back onto your long-term strategy. Get the entire team focused and accelerate. Be bold where you know you have leverage. Be bold in shedding that which doesn't add value.
Say goodbye to demand
"...the number of [demand] teams reporting into sales organizations will spike to 20% by the end of 2023."
No, not demand. The demand team. We're seeing the worm turn on this one. Just like the Marketing<>IT struggle for control of martech, the great sales<>marketing cold war on who owns demand generation seems to be swinging back to sales. Last week I spoke with a B2B SaaS sales exec and she mentioned that she’s trying to wrestle control of the demand generation team so that she can control the sales process, cradle to grave.
What’s driving this is not some petty corporate real estate grab. As times become uncertain and the velocity of early stage deals slows the higher ups may believe that better alignment of lead generation and sales is going to make things better.
But organization chart changes rarely solve alignment problems. It’s usually some combination of the management system, metrics, and process. If results are poor those aspects need to be dug into in order to get root cause.
One key thing to uncover in the metrics and process review is whether you’re building customer experiences that are compelling. When you’re weathering tough economic times creating a customer experience that delivers compelling value wins.
CX is critical. CX skills are lacking.
“a majority of customer experience (CX) teams lack crucial skills”
Speaking of customer experience, the biggest challenge will be the CX skills in your organization. Some of this can be outsourced to your agency but at the end of the day this comes home to roost in your organization.
The critical skills gap covers the entire range of CX. According to Forrester, design thinking, inclusive experience design, survey design, journey mapping, and data literacy and storytelling are among the most critical. And the most lacking.
The best teams are going to get that the importance of CX and are going to up the game of the teams. Those that fail to do so are going to continue to struggle to deliver compelling experiences that deliver the numbers. Take a critical look at your team.
Martech will consolidate. Yeah, right.
“The rapid influx of new tools has outpaced evolving go-to-market processes, leaving organizations with siloed and poorly aligned technologies.”
Marketers are innovators. We have a bias to learn and discover new techniques always seeking better ways to accomplish our goals. Some of the things we discover have value. Some don’t.
Pessimists call this “shiny object syndrome”. We run for the latest thing to the next best thing and then fail to clean up the mess behind us.
And it is a mess. Overlapping functions, overlapping processes, and data duplication. Confused employees. Confused prospects. And that’s not to mention the confusion of Finance when you come to make another request during a challenging budget cycle.
If you want to improve the customer’s experience rationalizing the tech stack that delivers it will be critical. Simplifying doesn’t mean that you’re going to have to do some heavy lift IT project. It could be as simple as throwing off redundancy.
The hardest part of all that will not be IT stuff, it will be getting people on board. Everyone has their favorite toy and they’re not going to want to give it up. You’re going to have to use organizational influence, hierarchical power, and the budget process to create leverage to drive simplification.
Don't count on getting airline elite status
“B2B organizations developed new aptitudes using digitally oriented ways to connect with customers that are both more meaningful and increasingly accountable…”
One of the things that was awesome about the pandemic, at least from an organizational transformation perspective, is that it forced digital laggards to finally get off the fence.
Event marketing is a key component of B2B demand generation and sales reps will tell you that getting in front of the customer is the best way to qualify and progress deals. They’re not wrong.
Event marketing will come back but will not achieve the scale that it once did. And sales reps will continue to get on planes. But the main reason that both will be less important is that your prospect’s behavior has changed.
We’ve all seen the research data. Your prospects don’t want to see your sales team until very late in the buying journey. So reallocate the event and travel budget to digital engagement. And maybe give a bit back to the finance gods as a peace offering.
There’s no telling what’s in our future. But it’s certain that we are moving from an era of total uncertainty to an era when the uncertain things are at least familiar. We know how to deal with recession and inflation. It’s time to get strategic again and to invest in the processes, technology, and people/skills that are going to help you succeed in this budget cycle and in the coming year.