Welcome to a curated collection of inspiring and insightful reads and podcasts to help you boost the effectiveness of the marketing function within your organisation.
The age-old struggle for alignment between marketing and sales is a well-worn path. Marketing creates fantastic content and engaging campaigns but sales don’t use or support the initiatives. Sales feels relevant sales enablement resources are lacking, while marketing struggles to understand their needs. This disconnect hinders revenue growth; and this is the key point, we’re all in it together, and creates a frustrating experience for everyone involved.
The answer lies in a powerful combination: agile marketing, a robust sales enablement strategy, and the strategic integration of Revenue Operations (RevOps). RevOps takes a holistic approach, aligning sales, marketing, and customer success teams across the entire customer lifecycle.
Building the foundation: communication & alignment
It all starts with open communication and clear alignment. Here’s what you need to establish a solid foundation through RevOps:
Empowering your sales force: The sales enablement arsenal
Agile marketing allows you to adapt and create content that directly addresses sales needs. Here are some key weapons in your sales enablement arsenal:
Feedback loops: Continuous improvement for sales success
Don’t let content become a one-way street. Utilise feedback loops to gather insights and improve the effectiveness of your sales enablement efforts. Here are a few ways to do this:
Personalisation & nurturing: Tailoring the buyer journey
For high-value accounts, go beyond generic content. Implement Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategies:
Optimising personas & filling buyer journey gaps
Analyse your buyer journey to identify areas of underperformance in volume, velocity, and deal value. Here’s how to optimise:
Embrace experimentation: Start small and utilise an agile approach. Test different strategies and continuously iterate based on data and feedback. These article on experimentation in marketing and the experimentation framework offers valuable insights on building your experimentation strategy .
Tailoring the approach: Recognising team variations
Acknowledge that different teams may have varying needs in terms of content consumption and support:
Conduct surveys, focus groups, or interviews regularly and during any discovery phase for campaigns to understand your sales team’s maturity and capabilities. Collaborate with existing sales operations initiatives (e.g., regular sales force surveys) to gather valuable data. Streamline these processes and ensure insights are shared effectively with both marketing and sales teams.
An empowered and united team
By adopting an agile marketing approach, building a robust sales enablement strategy, and leveraging the power of RevOps, you can transform the relationship between your marketing and sales teams.
This fosters collaboration, empowers sales to close deals more effectively, and ultimately drives revenue growth. Remember, it’s not about creating content or campaigns in a silo; it’s about creating a collaborative and aligned approach where marketing, sales, customer success, product and other revenue generating teams work together in perfect harmony to achieve a common goal: exceptional customer experiences and sustainable business growth.
Senior marketing leaders – Supercharge your marketing department with the game-changing strategies that can unleash hidden opportunities and eradicate inefficiency.
This is NOT your average marketing webinar. This is your chance to take your marketing from good to legendary in 2024!
Speaker: Lydia Kirby, Marketing Transformation Director and ICAgile Certified trainer
Reframe Cards enable you and your team to have a different kind of conversation, re-think strategies or tactics and highlight learnings that you can take forward to optimise and generate better outcomes.
These Reframe Cards are focused on having conversations to help improve your marketing effectiveness, and empower your team to challenge their thinking. By changing their frame of mind to continually learn and grow, you can yield real business results and make a positive impact on your businesses bottom line.
We’ve curated collection of inspiring and insightful reads and podcasts to help you boost the effectiveness of the marketing function within your organisation.
Much debate continues in the B2B world around the value of brand marketing. While some organisations believe you should invest in it, the results are more challenging to quantify than demand generation campaigns, which deliver leads for products and services.
According to a study by BCG*, 99% of B2B marketers agree that trust in their brand is essential. Yet of the companies studied, 44% allocate less than a third of their budget to brand marketing. Reasons for low investment include key stakeholders not seeing the impact and the inability to measure the value.
*Source: 2021 BCG B2B Brand Marketing Study
However, in the same study, when companies were segmented based on their marketing and brand maturity, a correlation was found that indicates that increased marketing maturity leads to higher returns on brand marketing spend.
The bottom line is that B2B companies that underinvest in brand marketing or invest without a strategic plan are selling themselves short.
The main challenge the organisations face is looking at marketing spending from a long-term perspective. Creating a long-lasting impact in people’s minds is beyond logos and taglines; it’s about regular conversations with them, building trust and then delivering on their promise.
Brand marketing involves crafting a cohesive brand identity and messaging strategy to promote the brand through various channels like advertising, content marketing, and public relations. However, for the ecosystem to function effectively, brand marketing must be complemented by high-quality products/services and employee satisfaction. These elements contribute to positive brand experiences, fostering customer loyalty and advocacy. This holistic approach strengthens the brand’s reputation, enhances customer trust, and ultimately drives business success.
Regardless of the budget allocated, many organisations still grapple with prioritising short-term or incomplete metrics, leading to uncertainty about the true impact of their marketing efforts. As a result, they may question the effectiveness of their strategies or allocate resources ineffectively, hindering their ability to achieve desired outcomes.
To solve this, we recommend organisations look at the Balanced Scorecard. It provides a useful tool for translating strategy into measures to communicate a company’s vision. Harvard Business Ideas voted it the most influential idea ever presented.
Developed by Dr. Robert Kaplan of Harvard University and Dr. David Norton, the Balanced Scorecard revolutionised organisational performance measurement. Traditionally, companies focused solely on short-term financial metrics, but the Balanced Scorecard introduced non-financial strategic measures for a more holistic view. Kaplan and Norton’s approach, detailed in various publications, emphasises the importance of balancing financial indicators with measures of long-term success. They argue that while financial metrics reflect past performance, a comprehensive approach is needed to guide future value creation in the information age, prioritising investments in customers, suppliers, employees, processes, technology, and innovation.
It starts with four perspectives, i.e. financial, customer-centric, internal processes, and organisational capacity. It asks the organisations to define their goals across these aspects, plan a strategy to achieve them, and then determine the metrics to measure the success.
If your company also focuses on or values another perspective, it must be included in the scorecard.
It sounds simple and intuitive. However, the most critical aspect is establishing a relationship among all these. For example, you need to invest in your internal processes to deliver a quality product or service to your customers and enable you to achieve financial performance. This allows you to define your goals and plan your actions according to them, and then it’s essential to pick the metrics based on these goals and actions.
Let’s take an example of Company A and see how it can use the Balanced Scorecard to achieve its goals:
These metrics provide a comprehensive view of the SaaS provider’s performance. A strong financial performance, driven by ARR growth and healthy CLV, reflects effective marketing strategies in acquiring and retaining customers. Positive customer metrics, such as high NPS and CLV, demonstrate the brand’s ability to deliver value and build loyalty.
Efficient internal processes ensure that marketing efforts are optimised for maximum impact while investing in learning and growth opportunities for employees, which fosters innovation and keeps the brand competitive. Moreover, by monitoring marketing-specific metrics, the SaaS provider can gauge the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, optimise resource allocation, and enhance brand awareness and visibility in the market. This integrated approach ensures that marketing initiatives contribute to financial success and strengthen the brand’s reputation and market position over time.
In conclusion, as B2B companies navigate the evolving marketing landscape, embracing the Balanced Scorecard offers a strategic compass for long-term success, enabling them to build enduring brand value through consistent, trust-building conversations with their audience.
In our latest panel discussion we explore the vital role of communication in driving successful organisational change. In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, the ability to effectively communicate strategies and engage stakeholders is paramount to achieving desired outcomes. We delve into the intersection of strategy and action, offering practical insights and guidance on how to craft compelling messages, foster buy-in, and inspire action at all levels of the organisation.
In this session, we cover:
Emma Sinden
Content & Communications Director, Taulia
Emma is a seasoned communications expert with a track record of collaborating with global leaders like Salesforce, Boston Consulting Group, Oracle, and Infosys. Now serving as Director of Content and Communications at Taulia (Part of SAP), she leverages her expertise in change management, communications, and marketing to deliver impactful programmes for clients, employees, and the business.
Natalie Cannatella
Communications & Content Strategist, Bright
Natalie is an experienced Content and Communications strategist from Bright. She’s delivered change communications programmes for global organisations including Jacobs, the Financial Times, Informa, Boston Consulting Group and BAE Systems. Natalie uses her blend of comms and content experience to craft effective strategies and clear, impactful communications that drive business change.
Zoë Merchant
Managing Director, Bright
Zoë is an agile marketing aficionado — a passionate believer in staying ahead of the competition with resilience, adaptability, and pace. After 20 years of delivering B2B marketing strategies. Using agile marketing to test, learn and build on success. Zoë leads the team in delivering results through continual and focused improvements to support clients’ business goals.
In today’s dynamic business landscape, the ability to adapt and evolve is paramount. This agility extends far beyond product development and market strategy – it’s crucial for your internal communication too. As a communications expert, I see countless businesses struggle with the inertia of traditional communication plans. Let’s explore why agile communication is the secret weapon for driving successful change within your organisation.
The high cost of communication silos
Imagine this scenario: you unveil a ground-breaking new strategy, complete with detailed reports and presentations. Yet, weeks later, you find pockets of your workforce still operating under the old model. This disconnect, the result of a rigid communication approach, can be incredibly costly.
Studies show a direct correlation between poor communication and decreased productivity, employee disengagement, and even higher turnover. When employees are left in the dark about changes, they become anxious, disengaged, and ultimately, less effective.
Building a strategic communication plan for agility
So, how do we break the cycle? The answer lies in a strategic communication plan that prioritises agility. Here are some key elements:
Making your communication land and drive change
Agility isn’t just about the tools – it’s about the mindset. Here’s how to ensure your communication lands with employees and drives the change you need:
Measuring & showing value in agile communication
Communication isn’t just about sending messages – it’s about driving results. Here’s how to measure the impact of your agile communication strategy:
Real-world example of communication driving change
Think communication is an afterthought? Think again. Here’s a real-world example of how effective communication has been a key driver of successful change:
Monzo, a UK-based digital bank known for its innovative app and focus on customer experience, faced a challenge in 2021. As they matured from a disruptive startup to a more established financial institution, they needed to adapt their internal culture to maintain their core values and agility.
How Monzo used agile communication to navigate their internal cultural shift:
The results of Monzo’s agile communication approach were positive. Employee morale remained high despite the cultural shift, and the company successfully retained its core values while adapting to its new market position. This example demonstrates the importance of open dialogue, data-driven communication, and a focus on employee well-being during critical internal cultural changes within a B2B tech company.
From strategy to action
In conclusion, agile communication is not just a buzzword – it’s a strategic imperative for driving positive change within your organisation. By proactively crafting a well-considered internal communication strategy which embraces a multi-channel, transparent, and employee-centric approach, you can ensure your communication lands, inspires action, and propels your business towards successful and effective change.
Join us for our webinar on:
The session will include a panel of communication experts, who’ll be exploring the role of agile internal communications in driving successful change within organisations.
In the session, designed for B2B leaders involved in change programmes, we’ll be covering…
This promises to be a really informative session with plenty of practical takeaways that will help you drive the change you need to achieve your business goals.
Reframe Cards are an easy-to-use tool intended to stimulate conversations within teams, encouraging them to reconsider strategies and tactics by prompting thought-provoking discussions.
These cards aim to foster transparency and collaboration by prompting team members to share their thoughts and ideas openly. They can be used in various settings such as team meetings, workshops, or planning sessions to focus on goal-oriented actions and results.
The cards are designed to infuse creativity and agile thinking into team communication, aiming to drive discussions towards actionable solutions. Specifically, the Marketing Effectiveness edition of these cards targets marketing teams, aiming to enhance their strategic capabilities and improve results.
Ready to reframe your mindset and your conversations? Download your Reframe Cards today!
Check our on-demand webinar on ‘How to maximise your marketing effectiveness’, our panel of B2B marketing experts address some of these key challenges, and share insights and practical solutions to address these issues – we’ll cover people, process, data and tech.
Here are some additional resources you may find useful:
Times are tough, changeable and high pressured for most senior B2B marketers and CMOs. Aligning to business goals and demonstrably driving business growth is more important than ever.
Over the last few years working with senior marketers to deliver greater marketing effectiveness and agility I’ve learnt about and applied the ideas of Revenue Operations (RevOps) with the principles of agile marketing. Agile marketing, the foundation of Bright’s ethos to help marketers demonstrate value through delivering great work; champions adaptability, customer centricity, and efficient collaboration. The introduction of RevOps expands these benefits across all revenue-generating functions, through improved alignment, efficiencies and effectiveness, and quantifiable growth against shared goals.
Before diving into the relationship between agile marketing and RevOps, I’ve identified common indicators that signal the need for a RevOps framework in B2B organisations:
Lots of firms have these challenges many of them are perpetuated through the organisational culture, the ways of working as well as team and departmental silos. As I share how the integration of agile marketing principles with RevOps, the emphasis on collaboration with the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), cross-functional teamwork, and a cultural shift towards alignment and collective goal pursuit becomes increasingly significant. These are critical success factors for marketers committed to making an impactful contribution to revenue growth.
Collaborate with the CRO
We all know that a productive partnership between marketing leaders and the CRO is critical for sales and marketing alignment and forms the bedrock of RevOps success. For example, when one of our software client’s CMO and CRO began holding regular strategic sessions, they achieved a unified view of the customer journey, enhancing cross-sell opportunities by 10% within six months. This partnership ensures every initiative is directly linked to revenue, creating a united approach to growth.
The power of cross-functional collaboration
Cross-functional collaboration is a key principle of agile marketing and underpins the success of a RevOps approach, reducing and removing (where you can) silos to create greater cross functional collaboration to continually improve the customer experience. An example from our work at Bright is a project with a global HCM software marketing team that focused on improving cross-functional collaboration to improve efficiencies and formed cross functional agile squads/hubs including their sales stakeholders and product Subject Matter Experts (SME), which led to a 20% reduction in lead follow up times and improved conversion rates by >5%. This collaborative approach and culture ensure all departments are working towards common business goals.
Cultivating a culture of alignment and collective goals
RevOps necessitates a shift towards an alignment and collective goal pursuit are prioritised. Everyone moves in sync and are focused on KPI and OKR that are shared and aligned to the business goals. A Bright client – a continual improvement product and services firm – implemented agile marketing and activated RevOps to define, agree and set common goals and metrics as well as ensuring there was data & reporting to support this approach. This included the CRO, CMO and CFO as well as cascading across the sales and marketing teams. This culture of alignment enabled the organisation to adapt to changing internal and external market factors effectively and meet strategic objectives with greater cohesion.
How to get started
Implementing a RevOps model is a strategic shift that focuses on aligning cross-functional teams and cultivating a culture of shared goals and objectives. For B2B marketing leaders, establishing common goals and KPIs is the first step. This ensures alignment across all teams contributing to revenue generation.
Quick-start Agile Marketing & RevOPs checklist:
This approach offers a clear framework for beginning with RevOps, guiding organisations through the early stages of adopting a more aligned and efficient revenue generation strategy.
Integrating agile marketing principles with a RevOps framework is an effective strategy for not only elevating the role of marketing in revenue generation but creating alignment and strategic focus to propel your businesses forward towards its objectives.
In the high-octane world of B2B marketing, standing still is not an option. Agile marketing is not just changing the game—it’s rewriting the rules. This approach, with its heart set on adaptability and laser-focused on the customer, is propelling forward-thinking businesses into new realms of success. It’s about being nimble, quick, and, most importantly, effective.
So, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty, the bread and butter of agile marketing: epics, user stories, tasks, and deliverables. These aren’t just buzzwords; they’re the gears in the engine of change. Through our adventures in transforming marketing strategies with our clients at Bright, we’ve seen first-hand how these components can revolutionise practices and align with OKRs and KPIs to deliver unmatched value.
The essence of Agile Marketing: Where strategy meets action
The core quartet: Epics, user stories, tasks and deliverables
Real success stories
The interplay of components: The engine of marketing effectiveness
Diving deep into the mechanics of agile marketing illustrates the importance of a harmonious interplay between epics, user stories, tasks, and deliverables. These components combined with agile marketing ceremonies, principles and critical success factors to create strategic coherence, responsiveness, and iterative brilliance. It’s about moving with purpose, making every note count, and every action sing. In the end, agile marketing isn’t just a way to do marketing; it’s a manifesto for doing business in the modern world, brilliantly orchestrated for those ready to lead the charge.
In the fast-paced world of B2B marketing, staying ahead means being agile and focused. At Bright, we understand the challenges you face, from making the most of your martech & data to managing resources wisely. Our approach is about being smart with your strategy, how your teams work and making the most of your resources, ensuring you’re always driving towards measurable success.
For senior marketers navigating the complex terrain of B2B marketing, understanding the delicate balance between strategic alignment, collaboration, and customer lifecycle management is pivotal. The long sales cycles, high customer lifetime values, and the cumulative impact of brand investments necessitate a thoughtful approach to marketing strategy.
We’ve put together this guide as your roadmap to a more effective marketing strategy, crafted with agile marketing at its core.
Before diving into the actionable steps, it’s crucial to address the foundational elements that underpin marketing effectiveness in the B2B landscape:
Strategic alignment: Ensuring marketing strategies are directly linked to business goals is key (and obvious!). This alignment drives more focused and impactful marketing efforts but it’s easy for marketing teams to get bogged down in BAU so take a look at where your team is focusing it’s efforts.
Collaboration across revenue-generating functions: Marketing, sales, alliances and customer success teams must work in harmony, leveraging each other’s insights and collective KPIs and strategies to drive growth. Start with sales – this is a key stakeholder for making sure your marketing really achieves it’s potential.
Balancing Marketing priorities: Given B2B’s inherent long sales cycles and the significant value of customer relationships, it’s essential to appropriately distribute focus across acquisition, retention, and expansion.
Brand investment: Investing in your brand is vital for long-term success. However, may be hard to convince your CFO or CRO who is looking at much shorter time horizons in most cases. Investments bolster not just your market position, but they will improve the effectiveness of your demand generation activity. You’ll need to find measures (such as increased Lifetime value/ARR/Retention) that show impact on sales cycle, conversion rate etc over time so key stakeholders feel confident and can see how brand supports both immediate and future revenue streams.
With these considerations in mind, let’s explore practical steps to enhance your marketing effectiveness, starting with quick wins and evolving into comprehensive, long-term strategies.
Refine your personas and messaging: Quickly audit your personas and make and adjust your messaging to ensure it’s resonating with your target audience. Clear, compelling messaging can significantly boost engagement and conversions
Optimise digital assets: Review your website and social media profiles for quick improvements. Simple updates can enhance user experience and SEO, driving more traffic and engagement
Reuse, repurpose and shatter content: Review and reuse your content – shatter into new derivatives and reuse across channels.
Leverage data insights: Use existing data to gain quick insights into customer behaviour and preferences, allowing for immediate adjustments to campaigns and strategies.
Develop agile marketing toolkits and playbooks: Create guides and resources based on successful strategies and tactics. These toolkits should be agile, allowing for quick adaptation as market conditions change. Consider how AI tools could help you here – creating or using marketing or persona based GPTs.
Invest in customer journey mapping: Deeply understand the paths your customers take. This investment helps in tailoring your marketing efforts for better acquisition, retention, and expansion outcomes.
Strengthen cross-functional collaboration: Establish regular touchpoints between marketing, sales, and customer success teams. Shared goals and insights lead to more effective and cohesive strategies. Consider how RevOps principals could help bring alignment and accelerate success.
Measure and adapt brand strategies: Continuously evaluate the impact of your brand investment, balancing short-term gains with long-term objectives. This approach ensures your brand remains a powerful asset in achieving business goals and amplifies your demand generation efforts.
For senior B2B marketers, the path to enhanced marketing effectiveness is multi-faceted, requiring a balance of strategic foresight, agile execution, and continuous adaptation. Backed up with a growth culture and a focus on test and learn to enable innovation to flourish and support your goals. By focusing on both quick wins and strategic, long-term initiatives, you can ensure your marketing efforts contribute significantly to your business’s growth and success.
To further explore strategic alignment, collaborative strategies, or agile marketing methodologies, contact the Bright team for more in-depth guidance and support.
