The Difference Group is on a quest to help marketers, salespeople, founders, and CEOs understand their businesses and to help unleash the potential of their marketing channels and teams. When B2B sales and marketing work harmoniously, companies see tangible results, and find traction and market position. You need to invest in both of these to get the whole picture and realise the full potential of your business.
This article will guide you through each part of the funnel and give you tactics you can implement to turn that connection request on LinkedIn into a lukewarm lead and a red-hot prospect.
B2B Marketing Funnels
Or top-of-funnel marketing is all around helping you create a hook that brings leads in. The job of the B2B marketing funnel is to inform and educate the lead, sharing what you do and why your solution is right for them and crafting stories that resonate with and connect to help drive awareness and raise interest to find out more.
The power of positioning is critical. If you’re a cybersecurity startup, targeting everyone and just being affordable isn’t enough. You have to be more than the price.
Marketing Funnel – Awareness
This includes all the marketing activities that you do daily to engage customers. Whether it’s the monthly email newsletter push or that article your writing. Every customer touchpoint from the marketing team to secure a marketing-qualified lead.
Marketing Funnel – Interest
Once you’ve got the initial hook, it’s time to connect with the specific problems that your customers are facing; these vary from industry to industry. In The Differences’ case, we approach customers visiting us to have precise marketing, sales or technology challenges that they are looking for our help to create specific, tailored experiences that target the route of the problem.
Splitting the business into three targeted areas:
Strategy – understanding their journey, product or positioning.
Marketing / Delivery – solving a specific marketing challenge.
Innovation-Lab – crafting better experiences through technology.
To raise interest, you’ve got to share how you solve the leads’ problems. This can be done through lead nurturing campaigns like targeted drip email marketing, re-marketing display ads and content marketing.
Marketing Funnel – Consideration
When activated, these leads move from marketing-qualified leads to sales-qualified leads, this can be done in many ways, but it needs to be managed carefully.
The Art Of The Handover From Marketing To Sales
Push the sale too soon, and you risk scaring off the lead too late, and your customer will lose interest or close with a close rival or competitor. It’s like asking someone out on a date too soon, you’ll come across as too keen, too late, and he’ll/ she’ll move on to the next best thing.
