Rekha Thomas, CEO at Path Forward Marketing, provides marketing strategy and fractional executive services to high-growth companies.
The quest for go-to-market (GTM) alignment at B2B companies is a never-ending journey, since evolving buyer behavior requires go-to-market teams to adapt to keep up.
Before diving into the future of B2B GTM strategy, let’s look at the waves of B2B marketing since 2000.
The 2000s: The One-To-Many Wave
Mass market inbound-driven marketing was spurred by the changing content consumption behavior of customers and fueled by the meteoric rise in internet, mobile and social media usage. Content marketing and SEO became the primary tactics for companies to develop and activate content for their target customers.
The goal was to offer valuable content to buyers that educated them and addressed pain points. Unfortunately, the pressure on marketing to generate leads to pass on to sales created suboptimal behaviors, such as prematurely passing prospects on to sales before they were ready to buy.
The 2010s: The One-To-Few Wave
Strategies like ABM (account-based marketing) were developed to address the needs of enterprise accounts with long sales cycles and multi-member buying committees. Social media became a preferred channel for building targeted, personal relationships with decision-makers, influencers and users at these accounts.
To activate ABM and social selling through marketing channels and sales outreach, the wall between these functions began to break. Additionally, go-to-market teams welcomed sales and marketing operations to the table as key contributors to strategy.
However, most B2B companies continued to measure marketing and sales success differently leading to ongoing tension between the teams.
The Early 2020s: The Hybrid Consumption Wave
Unprecedented times due to the pandemic upended buyer behavior. To adapt to a hybrid world and to combat digital content clutter, B2B companies tried to use personalized content, intent-based data and sophisticated go-to-market tech to deliver comprehensive buyer journeys that extended beyond purchase to customer expansion.
Customer service joined the go-to-market team, sales enablement became a thing and sales ops and marketing ops united to become revenue operations.
The Next Wave
Where are we today? It’s the perfect storm for customer behavior change—yet again, and at a more rapid pace than before.
Let’s take a look at five key trends shaping this next wave:
1. The buying journey is not linear. According to Gartner, B2B buyers tend to loop back and forth between various stages of the journey as they seek information, compare alternatives and validate their choices. This looping behavior makes it harder for marketers and salespeople to identify and influence buyers at the right moments. According to Forrester, B2B buyers have 27 interactions with vendors before making the decision to buy. Attribution is not only complex but inherently inaccurate with many touchpoints not captured.
2. B2B buyers are increasingly demanding self-service. Despite the complex purchase journey, buyers expect to be able to navigate most of it on their own. According to McKinsey research, 70% of B2B decision-makers prefer remote or digital interactions over in-person ones. In the year ahead, brands who build intuitive self-service pathways will differentiate themselves from their competitors.
3. Buyers expect a single omnichannel experience. The walls between personal and professional lives have come down. You may be selling to a team in a large enterprise, but it’s individuals who will ultimately make the purchase decision. Ensuring that your message reaches your audience requires you to be on the right channels and engage with them in channel-appropriate ways. Per McKinsey data, B2B customers now extensively use 10 or more channels to interact with suppliers.
4. Only 5% of buyers are “in market” to buy at a given time. The 95:5 rule of marketing states that 20% are in the market for software in a given year, and only 5% in a quarter. The other 95% are not in the market at all. Investment in creating demand through brand-building efforts is critical. B2B brands should aim to be memorable so that they are top of mind when the customer is “in-market.”
5. AI will materially influence customers’ buying decisions through instant content. Tech-savvy customers are becoming confident navigating much of the buying journey with a generative AI assistant in tow. Multi-click searches for thought leadership or product information are slowly being replaced by multi-threaded prompts that result in AI-generated product and vendor research summaries in seconds. Forward-thinking marketing teams should rethink their content strategy by publishing primarily product info on their own corporate websites and distributing educational, thought leadership and research-based content on other sites (with high domain authority) that are likely to be used to train LLMs. Search optimization is evolving into LLM-optimization.
The Mid-2020s: The Handraiser Wave
Given the five trends outlined above, successful B2B go-to-market teams need to recognize where their customer is in their journey—and respect it. Marketing should focus on arming prospects with valuable educational assets, thought leadership content, product info and demos to educate and inspire buyers. Recognizing that buyers can navigate much of the buyer journey on their own and making it easy for them to raise their hands when they are ready to speak to a seller should be the priority.
How Can B2B Marketers Stand Out?
Handraisers are potential customers who express interest in engaging with vendors by taking actions to contact sales. Handraisers are valuable for B2B marketers and salespeople because they have explicitly signaled that they are “in market” and should be contacted accordingly.
Delivering integrated omnichannel experiences is the key to standing out. Prioritize the creation of valuable, educational content that addresses your buyer’s pain points, building trust and credibility. Then, deliver this content through traditional channels (digital and in-person) and activate community events, executive thought leadership and employee advocacy. Create engaging content that doesn’t sell but provides easy off-ramps for buyers to contact sales when they are ready.
The time is now to ask yourself if your go-to-market organization has what it takes to succeed in the “handraiser” wave of B2B marketing. The first step? Accept what’s happening in the market and commit to adapting your teams and strategies to keep up.
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