BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

B2B Marketers: It's Time to Become a Growth Engine

This article is more than 10 years old.

For B2B companies to grow, their marketing organizations need to grow up

By Maryanne Hancock, Rodger Boehm, Candace Lun Plotkin

If B2B companies are serious about growth, it’s time they got serious about their marketing. Marketing needs to take on the challenge of becoming a growth engine for companies. That means CMOs have to step up and lead.

The trends that are rocking B2C companies are just as relevant to the B2B world: multiplying customer touch points, changing customer behaviors, massive floods of big data. And like their B2C counterparts, B2B companies need to put the customer at the center of everything they do.

B2B companies are clamoring for the skills and insight marketers can provide. In interviews with more 80 leaders in B2B businesses, we saw three clear needs:

  • A deeper understanding of their customers (and their customers’ customers)
  • Reliable market intelligence to identify where to compete, particularly across digital channels where there’s lots of growth
  • Methods for defining a product’s value and credibly communicating that to customers

But too many marketers aren’t delivering. A wide gap often exists between the importance given to strategic marketing activities such as gathering customer and market insights, and how well companies believe they are actually executing on them. B2B companies don’t want CMOs who can just run events or roll out ad programs; they want leaders who can drive business value and more sales. Marketers need to shift from delivering campaign success to delivering business success.

It’s not easy to be B2B

B2C marketers have generally outstripped their B2B cousins in adjusting to the new customer decision journey. To be fair, marketers in the B2B realm labor under some unique complexities and weaknesses that are tripping them up.

For one, B2B players don’t just need to understand their customers; they need to understand their customer’s customers. Also, procurement has become much more sophisticated and demanding, creating a big challenge for vendors in quantifying and communicating the value their product offers.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the marketing function in many B2B companies often suffers from a deficit of talent and credibility at a moment when it needs to stretch its tentacles deep into the company.

Five steps for marketing to power sales

Starting down the path to more productive B2B marketing means going beyond day-to-day tactics:

  • Know thy customer. Marketers need to dig into both their customers’ business – how they make money, what regulatory issues they face – and their customers’ customers. Marketers should be spending 25 – 30 percent of their time with customers. They should conduct in-depth interviews to understand current and emerging needs, or invest in immersive research, embedding engineers with customers or going to the factory and seeing production cycles live. For example, a well known product company bypassed their distributors and embedded some of its engineers in paint shops because customers had reported having trouble keeping the walls clean. While there, they discovered dust in paint bays was causing defects. So, they created a new system for their distributors that reduced paint job defects by 49 percent.
  • Figure out where to compete. Marketers need to go much deeper on analysis, identifying growth areas by drilling down to the zip code or micro-segment level, and understanding their customers’ value chains. These deep segments need to be prioritized according to value, and analyzed to identify concrete sales opportunities. They then need to feed those insights into product development and tailor market plans for prioritized segments. But they need to go one step further and define key business goals including customer acquisition, cost reduction, and profit growth. This means accepting accountability for, and driving, business growth.
  • Ground decisions in data. Marketers need to ground decisions in data, such as micro-market transaction pricing trends and prediction algorithms. When you develop a program, don’t try to do it all at once. One company identified more than 30 capabilities to assess but wisely chose to start out with just three. Their focus on a customer profitability initiative, for example, was so successful it became a valuable proof point and helped build credibility within the rest of the organization.
  • Be a “best friend” to other functions. Marketers can win influence by sharing market intelligence with other functions and supporting their needs. For example, they can partner with sales in the field and rotate marketers through finance, ops and customer service to get them thinking across functions. In one company, marketing partnered with the sales team in a “Commercial War Room” to provide support and guidance across the customer journey such as providing customer analysis and developing tailored proposals that led to crucial wins in the field. The marketing team at an industrial wholesaler built a churn prediction model that fed data to the sales function on what and how much customers were buying, and pinpointing who was at risk of leaving.  When marketing brings crucial insights to bear, they win a seat at any table.
  • Put the customer at the heart of everything. This requires a significant shift in mindsets at the C-suite level. At one company, for example, executive compensation was partly tied to customer satisfaction. CMOs need to recruit professional marketers to create a customer engagement capability. But the need for deep knowledge of the business and company culture and strong relationships within the organization mean that much of the talent needs to be home grown. That means building in-house talent through applied learning programs as well as clear career tracks linked to performance on delivering excellent customer experience, both within marketing and throughout the organization.

This is the golden age for B2B marketing. Marketers just need to step up.

Maryanne Hancock is a partner at McKinsey in the Atlanta office; Rodger Boehm is a director in the Chicago office; Candace Lun Plotkin in a senior expert in the Boston office. You can also follow McKinsey's Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Forum on Twitter @McK_CMSOForum and read more about marketing and sales at the Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Forum site.