B2B Marketing Blog

Pipeline Marketing, the methodology that focuses on impacting the entire funnel rather than just the top, is being embraced by more B2B marketers and B2C marketers with sales teams than ever. Metrics that capture more of the funnel—sales opportunities, pipeline, and revenue—are increasingly the primary marketing metrics for making plans, optimizing engagement, and measuring success.

Using these down-funnel metrics is paying off, too. Pipeline marketers are more likely to hit their revenue goals, report alignment with broader business objectives, be aligned with their sales counterparts, and be perceived as revenue centers.

The 2018 State of Pipeline Marketing Report, the fourth annual, is based on survey responses from over 400 B2B marketers.

The new report includes powerful, new data about how successful marketers approach the planning, execution, and measurement phases for their organizations, and the benefits of doing it well.

At Bizible, we pride ourselves on having the best customers in the world. They’re hardworking, smart and eager to grow and learn more as marketers. Importantly, they all have one big thing in common: they’re focused on driving revenue.

Ah yes, the match up of the decade: Demand-gen vs ABM. Two marketing approaches that are battling for B2B marketers’ precious marketing dollars.

Some say that account-based marketing is the way of the future. After all, 87% of B2B marketers have agreed ABM delivers a higher ROI than other marketing activities.

But, while this battle makes for great headlines, the truth of the matter is that demand-gen and ABM are actually more like marketing sidekicks rather than rivals.

This story starts a few years ago. I was head of product marketing at a big data company, and my senior director of inside sales and I realized we had a big problem: after years of trying to get a good lead flow going through inbound marketing, our sales team still felt like they were starving for viable leads. In the absence of qualified inbound leads, inside sales would haphazardly try to find good target accounts, and they weren’t having much luck.

What could we do to make sure we were generating high quality leads so that the sales team would be happy? What could we do with limited resources? How could marketing and sales work together to generate more pipeline?

It’s been about a month since we announced Marketo’s acquisition of Bizible on stage at Marketing Nation Summit, and with time to reflect and have many conversations with the Bizible and Marketo teams, I couldn’t be more excited for Bizible’s future at Marketo.

We started Bizible seven years ago with the mission to help marketers connect their marketing to revenue so that they could make smart decisions and grow their companies. It’s a simple idea, but a complex challenge.

I have yet to meet a company only doing account-based marketing (ABM). If a company is doing ABM, it doesn't mean they completely stop doing demand generation. We’re no different at Bizible. That’s one reason I coined the term account-based demand.

After a long run of exclusively doing demand generation, we started to see the value of ABM when our average deal size reached about $24,000 of yearly revenue. Because we now do both ABM and demand generation, we think of about measurement of the two holistically: company growth is always the eventual goal of our marketing and the best way to measure that is with revenue.

Before we get too deep in the measurement of our marketing, let’s first look at how we do marketing. For ABM specifically, we have a number of marketing technologies which are critical to our execution success.

Implementing marketing attribution is not an overnight process. It's a journey that doesn't need to turn into a change management nightmare. 

In this post we discuss the nuts and bolts of implementing an organization-wide attribution model. It's all based on Sameer Khan's presentation at the 2018 MarTech Conference. 

Sameer Khan is Founder of Marketing Ops Pros. His presentation outlines the internal process for rolling out a company-wide attribution model at cloud security company, Alert Logic. 

Here are the takeaways. 

For C-level executives such as the CMO, generating a positive ROI is often part of the job description.

There’s a lot of content on why account-based marketing is a no-brainer for B2B marketers. Now there’s content emerging on measuring the ROI of account-based marketing (ABM). This short article is on the latter.

We’ve written about key ABM metrics you can use to track performance, but we didn’t dive deeper to explain how to generate and visualize those metrics using available tools. That’s why we created an all-in-one ebook on how to measure the ROI of all your account-based marketing activities.

In How To Measure Account-Based Marketing Performance we define the data sources for each metric, and outline the data cleaning steps needed to generate these metrics.

It’s all part of the process of using data to tell the story of how marketing is driving growth. Let’s go over in more depth what you’ll find in the ebook.

If you've been following our blog, you know we're excited to bring back print. 

Fast CMO magazine is a leadership and management magazine for B2B CMOs. Our third issue is launched and you're probably wondering what's inside. 

In our latest issue we had the privilege of learning from six successful business leaders across a variety of industries. We cover topics such as the customer experience, persona development, and brand strategy.

Here's what you'll read about.