Many B2Bs that we’ve worked with in the past pursue a commercial strategy that allocates resources to too few channels or approaches – or in some cases, to only one.

This should be regarded as unacceptably risky.

You balance investment risk by spreading your bets across a broad base and across a long timeframe. Then eventually, you become an expert and can start to reliably weight resources to approaches that have proven effective.

Yet often, companies neglect certain tactics or channels, or unduly favour others, for the wrong reasons.

This article draws on our 40+ years of combined experience in sales and marketing, working for companies of all sizes across EMEA, APAC and North America. With this experience, we’ve found that being present in multiple sales and marketing channels in parallel is necessary to tip the odds in your favour.

We’ll look at:

• why business tend to adopt singularly-focussed commercial strategies, and the types of businesses that most commonly fall into this trap
• the different roles of different sales & marketing tactics/channels, and why they’re all important for most companies’ commercial strategies
• examples of common events in the lifetime of most companies, and how pursuing multiple marketing and sales tactics in parallel can help the business anticipate adverse conditions.

You should not do everything at once – but you do need to anticipate different audience behaviours, especially at different stages of the funnel, when customers will be receptive to different kinds of messaging. Otherwise, you will be likely only targeting a small section of your target market, and/or experiencing major losses of efficiency by failing to build on brand awareness, and follow up on leads.

It’s important to recognise that breadth and balance and also implies agility: having a stable base from which to quickly rebalance your efforts, as your growth trajectory evolves, and market conditions change.

The risks of an overly-narrow commercial focus

Every business will naturally favour certain commercial approaches. The best reason to allocate most of your energies to one channel is that you’ve extensively tested different approaches over several years and have proven that you should be heavily geared towards events, or direct sales, or content marketing, etc.

But the truth is that nearly every business underinvests in one or more areas.

For a large business with stable growth, that underinvestment can be an easy problem to ignore. The 5%, 20% or even 40% of incremental growth you’re missing out on, in certain channels, could be considered negligible if you’re still meeting quarterly or annual targets.

In the lifetime of most businesses, however, there comes a time where growth stalls, or where the business is otherwise not meeting its revenue potential.

In such cases, far too many companies continue to underperform, or even go out of business, because they fail to branch out, try new approaches and achieve a more stable platform for growth.

There are three types of business where this most commonly occurs: startups, satellite-offices and long-established firms.

Startups

Startups are founded on the ideas and strategies of a founder, or a small founding team. It’s natural for those leaders to fall back on the go-to-market strategies that have worked before – and if you’re lucky, it works for a second time.

In reality, no two business are exactly alike – and if you hop between industries or countries, or start one business 10 years later than the previous one, those differences will be accentuated. So any biases towards events, direct sales, marketing, etc. should be checked by careful consideration of the unique characteristics of the next business and its target market.

Satellite offices

During our careers, we’ve seen multiple central offices, sometimes from completely different markets, behave dictatorially. Established firms often have entrenched ways of working, which don’t necessarily replicate into new locations. Removing the ability of local sales and marketing teams to think and act independently deprives the business of valuable local insight, risks alienating the team, and also risks alienating customers.

Long-established firms

Some business have simply had it good for too long, to the extent they fail to notice the market changing around them until its too late.

This is amongst the most challenging of scenarios, because even some highly motivated individuals in the company realise the problem, they may be unable to effect change. Even if it’s the CEO, the entrenchment of mindset, processes and systems may simply seem too much of an immovable force.

One of our greatest success stories at Navigate B2B is actually a case just like this, where we introduced a modern inbound content marketing strategy to a 30-year-old manufacturing firm. Previously, the company had relied almost entirely on walking trade and direct sales, and whilst the senior leadership team welcomed the fresh approach, 5 years on, the transformation effort is still ongoing. The work of winning over internal stakeholders, and of upgrading legacy systems, continues.

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Of course, these problems can afflict any commercial leadership team at any business – and as mentioned previously, they may not always be perceived as a problem.

But it’s at least important to consider the unique value of different sales and marketing tactics so that you’re aware of what you might change to accelerate growth, or optimise budget.

Also, some people prefer to engage with prospective vendors or suppliers via different channels; others take longer to buy than others. If you don’t anticipate these natural variations in your commercial strategy, many customers will become easier pickings for more adaptable competitors.

The unique purposes of different commercial approaches & channels

In this section, we’ll look at the main commercial sales & marketing tactics at your disposal and explain the unique value that they offer, focusing on:

• enterprise sales & personal networks
• marketing automation & CRM
• content marketing & organic social media
• automated cold outreach
• events & direct sponsorships.

There are other individual tactics we could discuss such as paid media, influencer marketing, PR and channel sales but the purpose is not to be comprehensive. Rather, the point is to show that each commercial channel or tactic does unique legwork – and so helps you close sales that the others cannot.

Speaking as a content agency, we will naturally be biased towards content marketing. But we have consistently seen that high-volume inbound lead generation only reaches its full potential with sufficient resources and collaboration on the sales side.

Generally, salespeople will be lean towards sales tactics, and likewise, marketers towards marketing. But professionals of both disciplines have a responsibility to understand the strengths and weaknesses of all of these approaches for the sake of productive collaboration.

Enterprise sales & personal networks: needed to capture and convert qualified leads

The most common bias in commercial leadership is towards overreliance on direct sales. This is partly because founders and CEOs are very often salespeople, sticking to what they know.

Direct sales is irreplaceable in B2B because people mostly buy from people on the basis of a trusting relationship. It also has three major limitations.

One is that it’s expensive; your capacity is effectively limited by the number of salaries you can afford, and these staff costs make up the biggest chunk of many commercial teams’ budgets.

The other is that it’s labour-intensive and success hinges on the available time and motivation levels of the sales team. Salespeople will mostly only nurture their lowest-hanging fruit and allow many longer-tail opportunities to come or go as they please – effectively leaving many viable opportunities slip.

Finally, whilst networks and relationships remain crucial, in the mid-funnel, marketing automation & CRM can keep customers engaged at far greater scale, and at far lower cost.

Marketing automation & CRM: for affordably moving audiences down the funnel

Marketing automation and CRM technologies have evolved largely to answer the long-term nurture challenges described above, and to alleviate the £30,0000+ salaries otherwise needed to keep long-tail prospects data engaged manually.

There are 3 key things to understand about marketing automation:

1. the work is revenue-critical, whether technology-enabled or run by a junior BDR. Prospects buy when they’re ready, and during the months or years when they’re considering a purchase, those relationships need to be cultivated to identify purchase intent and ensure they don’t fall into the arms of a competitor. In Fred’s words, “the money is in the follow-up”.
2. it’s become standardised to the extent that everybody’s doing it. The technology needed is several times cheaper than the human alternative, and doesn’t require much skill or training to use. So if you’re failing to use these tools, you’re leaving yourself highly exposed to competitors
3. it helps optimize the use of your senior sales team – yielding valuable data about the target account which can indicate when it’s time to pick up the phone, and generally giving salespeople more time to use their skills where most needed.

This can be incredibly simple.

Sending 4-10 CRM emails per year, to your database of known contacts, keeps thousands of people engaged at low effort and cost. The click/open data can drip indicate audience interests, and cue the sales team to follow-up personally.

It can also be more sophisticated – and at most companies today, it is. Drip campaigns, whereby customers receive sequences of what appear to be manual emails, are now part and parcel of the enterprise sales playbook.

Of course, somebody needs to monitor and operate the software to ensure the prospect is receiving the right message based on their interests and their stage of the funnel. This is now a standard part of the modern salesperson’s role, but can also be managed by marketing (to an extent).

At first glance, it appears expensive; the starting point for the right HubSpot CRM package would be in the region of £10,000 a year for a small B2B sales team (though small startups can get it for a lot less).

But that’s a lot cheaper than the human alternative, and if executed correctly it should more than pay for itself in a higher volume of converted sales.

Content marketing (including organic social media): best for long-term ROI

Every business needs advertising, to help audiences find you, and drop into the funnel in sufficient numbers that a worthwhile number end up converting. In B2B, this advertising is most often content marketing.

Content marketing is loosely defined but essentially means publishing information which anticipates a customer research need. This might include whitepapers, blogs, organic social media, podcasts, infographics, books – anything which catches people early in their buyer journey, and can help to position your brand as an authority in their space.

The major value of content marketing is that it’s incredibly capital efficient if done well. A lot of client work we’ve published at Navigate B2B is still holding top positions in Google, and still delivering readers and leads for clients, 5 or 6 after they were first published, at no ongoing cost.

According to research published by Harvard Business Review, 90% of B2B buyers go with a vendor they found on day one of their search – and there are many other pieces of research indicating content marketing’s impact.

The challenge with content marketing is it’s become intensely competitive, and the payback can be slow.

That slow payback may deter some commercial leaders from content marketing in the initial stages of their business. In truth, content should actually be regarded as the most investor-friendly commercial tactic precisely because of the long-term ROI.

Take for example, this nugget from Fred’s time as commercial director at with fram^, a publicly traded software development company headquartered in Sweden. Under Fred’s leadership, the organisation diversified its commercial strategy leading to revenue-multiplying growth and a much more successful business.

“In our early growth stages, we had an aggressive outbound growth strategy, which was effective to begin with. As the company continues to grow and scale we saw diminishing returns, especially on a proportional basis.

“Initially the directors and commercial leadership were quite reluctant to invest in inbound strategies like content marketing… Eventually, after we got the sign-off and we invested time and resources, the general consensus was – ‘why weren’t we doing this sooner?`’”

Automated cold outreach via LinkedIn and email: best for low-cost outbound at scale

Automated outreach is maligned and at worst illegal. Nonetheless, it works; the spammers flooding your inbox aren’t doing it for fun.

The logic is simply of numbers; if you spam a thousand people, you probably won’t capture a sale. If you spam a million, you probably will – as long as you use high-quality data and execute the campaign according to best-practices.

You can run campaigns like this via email and also, increasingly, via LinkedIn using third-party tools such as Dripify. These tools contravene LinkedIn’s terms of service, but they allow you dodge LinkedIn’s extortionate pricing to direct-message people at mass scale and at low cost.

Such campaigns need skilful management. Like any other outbound effort, messaging must be tailored to fit the needs of the buyer profile, underpinned by relevant and high-quality content, landing pages and other sales enablement materials.

You also need to be watching the data closely and constantly finetuning the approach. Are audiences accepting your connections on LinkedIn? Is click-through rate higher on email versus social? Is your website holding the attention of those targets? There needs to be human resource on-hand to step in as soon as you see signs of positive engagement.

CRM and/or automation software (many solutions do both) is relatively cheap and easy to use. The main question is whether you’re prepared to accept the reputational risk associated with cold-messaging as a trade-off for growth, and how effectively you’re able to drive genuine leads in other channels. The reality is that most companies could benefit from this at some stage of their development.

Events & sponsorships: best for emotional appeal, subject to budget

This is a discipline known as field marketing. Events such as industry dinners, roundtables and conferences enable valuable face-to-face time with buyers, providing emotional appeal, and can build credibility within the market.

Ultimate, people buy from people, so these networking opportunities can help turn an online community or network into a real tangible selling opportunity.

One of the two major drawbacks of field marketing is cost. One conference stand or a niche event sponsorships might only cost a few thousand pounds, but many enterprises allocate six, seven or even eight-figure budgets to field marketing.

The other issue is that it really only captures the small portion of audiences which 1) are actively in the market for a solution and 2) were willing or able to attend the event that day. This makes it naturally a middle-funnel solution, yielding none of the benefits of scale that you really need at the top of the funnel.

Also, the event should be just one ‘stop’ on the customer journey through your other marketing and sales touchpoints. To maximise ROI, you need to manage that journey with content, email, social and manual/automated nurture.

Events and media companies claim to offer content marketing services, but this is mostly just marketing fluff. These firms make nearly all their money from sponsorships and ticket sales and are generally neither motivated nor set up to run proper marketing campaigns.

So in reality, you’ll have to do this work yourself – or the $3,000 or $15,000 or $80,000 spent on each event could be an expensive flash in the pan.

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As mentioned, these approaches have some overlapping functions, and most businesses can probably perform without being present in all channels at once.

But if you heavily lean towards only one or two approaches to the exclusion of others, but it’s markedly riskier.

In reality, common scenarios, which crop up in the lifetimes of most businesses, will likely expose the limitations of the company’s commercial strategy and leave them wishing they’d taken a less single-minded approach.

Balanced strategies for reliable growth

An imbalanced commercial strategy is most likely to be exposed where businesses experience a heightened degree of risk. In such scenarios – commonly including…

• any business facing an adverse economy
• established companies losing market share
• startups, and other companies breaking new ground – either in an unfamiliar market or launching a new product or service proposition.

…the common factor is that the assumptions on which your commercial strategy was built have changed, and can no longer be relied upon to deliver the desired outcomes. So, these events should signal to double down on new business innovation and trying new things.

As to what to try: in this section, we recommend certain sales and marketing tactics which may prove especially useful in certain scenarios.

When facing an adverse economy: tilt towards content marketing

Some people blame the economy for killing businesses. The truth is that downturns are a near-certainty; they happen every few years and so nobody can really claim the market pulled the rug out from under their feet.

Downturns do, however, alter B2B buyer behaviour: deferring decision-making, extending lead-times and increasing price-competition.

They’re also likely change the motivating factors behind buying decisions – from increasing revenue, to lowering operating costs – and put greater emphasis on research, as the customer is also likely seeking to control greater risk at their end.

In such circumstances, shifting budget away from short-tail strategies such as direct sales, events and paid media, and towards long-tail audience engagement, is rational, because it:

• alleviates some of the highest direct costs of sale which may not be justified by revenues
• aligns your budget to present audience behaviour
• allows you build a foundation of data and trust from which to attack the market when the time is right.

This makes a downturn the optimal time to invest in organic content marketing, as customers actively research new purchases even when they’re not buying – with enterprise sales taking 1-2 years to close anyway.

When losing market share: (generally) shift budget away from direct sales

If your business is struggling, having previously been quite successful, one thing that probably won’t steady the ship is harder selling.

In all likelihood, your loss of position has happened due to the market overtaking you: audience behaviour has changed, or competitors have innovated faster. (It may also be because your product or service proposition has gone out of date – in which case, your problems are less commercial than existential, and this isn’t the blog for you.)

These circumstances are incredibly common amongst formerly sales-led organisations which fail to keep up with digital transformation. In such cases, it’s rational to reduce sales headcount, but only if you then shift those energies towards opening new revenue streams and replacing lost revenue.

Nearly all such companies can meaningfully carve out new gains with content marketing – as it’s still a relatively ‘new’ channel in certain sectors.

But crucially, those efforts should happen in parallel with evolving the CRM setup for digital marketing. Without effective CRM, high volumes of whitepaper downloads and top-funnel customer enquiries will probably just overload your remaining sales team, who will struggle to see the value in the mass of long-tail enquiries.

Startups, satellite offices, and other companies breaking new ground: assume as little as possible

Startups are naturally vulnerable businesses, but they face a similar type of risk to a company launching a new proposition, or opening a satellite office in a new country. Namely: a lack of proof as to whether their commercial approach will work.

An ecommerce vendor that we’ve been speaking to for over a year, at Navigate B2B, has had a torrid time breaking EMEA despite major success in its home market. The company has an incredibly narrow focus on events and channel sales, at massive cost. It has not allocated any resources to more affordable top-of-funnel inbound activity – which would better suit the current slow pace of trade in martech.

Failing to anticipate the nuances of a local market can be terminal.

During Paul’s time at startup zulily, an ecommerce startup (which eventually sold in the US for $4bn), the leadership tried to directly copy-and-paste their marketing strategy from the US, which was essentially all based on CRM and organic and paid social media.

This was fine in the US, where the company didn’t need much explaining, but in the UK, some customers really objected to the company’s business model.

zulily had unusually long delivery times – which was fine in the US, in 2012, where many people in remote areas were accustomed to waiting 3 weeks for a parcel. In the UK, however, Amazon had already begun next-day deliveries (and 2-3 days was already standard before then). Paul comments:

“The UK marketing team made repeated attempts to highlight the need for awareness and education-led marketing to help people understand the longer delivery times. But the answer was always, “We do it like this in the UK, because it worked in the US.”

Ultimately, the company died a death by social media, with customers saying zulily had “ruined their Christmas.” We would argue it signed its own death warrant from day one, by flatly refusing to consider the nuances of the local market.

In the case of both of these companies, the safer approach would have been to assume nothing, and hedge bets across multiple commercial approaches. At least then the companies might have seen what was working, as well as what wasn’t, and rebalanced resource-allocation accordingly.

Balancing budgets & ambitions

Of course, costs is a valid concern for every businesses; nobody can afford to ‘do everything at once’. And companies facing the above scenarios – a risky new endeavour, a loss of expected trade, or a poor economic climate – will naturally be more cost-focused than others.

But speaking as two people who’ve held commercial roles at a lot of startups, all the approaches described in this article (except possibly flashy event sponsorships) can be incredibly capital-efficient. And doing several of them, quite well, at low-scale, is a lot less risky than throwing everything at one channel with no certainty of success.

A key factor is a commitment to sustainable, long-term growth – which is where businesses really succeed – rather than chasing short-term wins at high cost.

Some of these strategies will take time to mature and pay off; a new content programme may take 6 months to produce results and 18 months to deliver genuine payback.

But when companies are struggling, it usually takes 6+ months to recognise it, 9-12 months to believe it, and 18-24 months to action any meaningful change.

In that context, the only safe approach is to continue spreading your bets at every life-stage of the business, with a broad and balanced commercial strategy. 24 months is ample time for most businesses to fail, but even 3-6 months can be enough time to rapidly reverse your fortunes, if the right foundations are there.

About the authors

Fred Smith is a commercial director with a 15+ year portfolio helping tech companies scale in APAC and EMEA. His successes include quadrupling the headcount at fram^, a development agency, leading to a successful IPO, and he’s now leading new business initiatives for both ourselves at our clients at Navigate B2B.

Find Fred on LinkedIn here.

 

 

Paul Tomlinson founded Navigate B2B in 2018 off the back of a career working for startups, scaleups and enterprises. He worked for the UK’s first-ever tech unicorn, Powa Technologies, and led efforts by OLIVER, an enterprise marcomms agency, to own its USP in the market, leading to a successful acquisition by The Brandtech Group 12 months later.

Find Paul on LinkedIn here.

 

About Navigate B2B

Navigate B2B is a content agency specialising in niche or innovative propositions. We run full-funnel business development initiatives for companies in tech, manufacturing, marcomms and recruitment, based on market-leading thought leadership and comprehensive management of your data through to close.

To discover how we can help your business grow, click here to get in touch or click here to learn more.