Building and implementing a marketing engine tuned to your specific business-to-business needs

With apologies to Aprimo, Marketo, SAP, Salesforce.com and others, there is no magic tool to give you great B2B marketing results. There is “The Drill,” the “B2B Black Box,” and “The Handoff.”

Each of these requires very specialized expertise. No amount of money spent on tools, advertising, list buying and analyst research can replace them.

This is especially true of the “Black Box” machine that your marketing needs to succeed.  The business-to-business black box is so unique and important that we made it the name of our company.  Once the also-critical targeting "drill" is completed and the customer/propsect business problems have been prioritized and ranked, it is time to build and tune your "black box" machine.

Building and tuning a lean, mean, “walled-off” marketing and demand generation engine (a B2B black box machine), is a difficult and specialized task akin to assembling a new Shelby Cobra by hand or creating a Rube Goldberg machine - a monumental task for the untrained but imminently possible with the right team empowered to make it happen.

For the processes of marketing to be successful, it is critical that the goals are clear and unequivocal. But once the goals are clear the machine must be allowed to run without intervention from the outside (within budgetary, ethical and legal limits of course).  Even the best-intentioned of executives from other areas of the company must be kept from "dabbling" in marketing when it suits him or her.

To analogize this to the workings of a car, as the driver you make decisions as to steering, speed and braking, and you get clear indications of your performance on the dashboard, but the engine’s management computer is making numerous adjustments every second to optimize performance. If you even try and tinker with the engine management system, the chances are you will make things much worse.

The same model needs to be applied to your marketing machine, where goals and performance need to be looked at holistically, and the actual running of the engine should be handled by the professional marketers inside the machine. You put in fuel, you run the controls, you see the results. 

With clarity of direction and the ability to create a high performance B2B engine your marketing team will be able to drive much higher efficiency and effectiveness, and your executive team and sales organization will be able to measure performance more analytically.

In summary, here’s how it’s done: After conferring with you and the management team, we’ll summarize and agree on the business goals, budgets, and sales expectations with the marketing team. Armed with the knowledge acquired during The Drill (and our experience) we’ll develop and empower your B2B marketing team to deeply engage a tightly targeted market and build, innovate, deliver, and execute a world class buyer's journey based program. We’ll teach them how to build and run an optimal buyer-focused process that progresses and tracks the prospects through the stages of the unique B2B buying journey, ending with the highest quality qualified leads at the lowest cost in the fastest possible time. This includes cost-effective creation of specialized content for each stage of the buyer’s journey that is perfectly attuned to the target audience members.

The “Black Box” refers to the fact that this engine will be walled off from all non-experts and any interference from outside this newly equipped and empowered team. Just like driving a car, you are fully in control, while the engine responds to your direction and takes you where you need to go as efficently as possible.

In Summary

Key elements of your Black Box Machine include the following:

The “walled-off” B2B Black Box separates clear reporting to the executive team (and forecasting to the sales organization) from the professional discipline of B2B marketing execution.

It is this focused approach that can build a unique best practice for each and every business.

With our approach your marketing engine becomes focused on what’s best for your specific business, tuned to your target customers.

The marketing (and sales) cycles for B2B can be long, but using this B2B Black Box approach which drives targeted prospects through a clearly defined and tested B2B buyer’s journey aligned to your personal seller’s journey can continually reduce that cycle time, leading to the most effective (and forecast-able) marketing pipeline you’ve ever experienced.

Costs go down. Qualified leads go up. Sales begins to love marketing. Really.

Oh, and what about all the industry best CRM and campaign automation tools mentioned above? Automation of an inefficient, not-finely- tuned marketing machine just lets you waste inquiries and leads faster while enriching the software vendor. Your team needs to deeply understand how a prospect becomes a lead before you can automate it. But once you build and tune the machine, we can determine when the scale requires an automation tool.

Let B2B³ show you how we can drive this for your company and unlock the game-changing efficiencies and cost savings you want and need.

“Great marketing doesn’t require huge budgets.

In fact we have run some of the most effective B2B marketing with budgets of under 1/8th of 1% of revenue, we call this the B2B3 zero dollar-marketing approach.

The bottom line:

When the message works, and you are clear on exactly who makes decisions and influences decisions in your prospect accounts, you can implement and execute a highly targeted and effective buyer’s journey at very low cost that qualifies and moves prospects towards your sales organization as fast as possible.”