If you’ve just been focusing on the top of the funnel, that’s okay. With the advent of marketing automation platforms about 20 years ago, B2B marketers became obsessed with “inbound marketing” and trying to hit MQL goals to fuel their sales team. Things are a lot different now. Modern CMOs are no longer measured on qualified leads, but revenue generation. Our 2020 State of ABM report found that mature ABM programs are generating 78% of all sales opportunities and 73% of revenue. Only 10% of those programs consider “leads” to be an indicator of success.
Hot leads are great– no one would ever say no to those. But they’re an unreliable way to scale a revenue program. A clear focus on revenue means a focus on the full-funnel: growing brand awareness efficiently by focusing on best-fit future customers, creating opportunities with them based on engagement data, accelerating those opportunities to closed/won, and retaining and growing those customers. Let’s take a look at the entire revenue funnel that today’s revenue-oriented marketers need to focus on for growth, from awareness to customer expansion and everything in between.
Awareness
With live events a thing of the past (for the time being) today’s buyer is doing their research entirely online. Even before COVID, 62% of B2B buyers developed their selection criteria or vendor list based solely on content. By leveraging firmographic and intent data, modern marketers are able to put highly relevant messages in front of their best-fit future customers via targeted display and social advertising. This generates initial interest and edges out competitors vying for the same attention. If they get good at creating tight segments and associating personalized messages with them, they can experience huge lifts in display ad performance. The Terminus research team found that industry or persona-specific ads perform twice as well as normal display ads and account-specific ads perform five times as well!
Opportunity Creation
Here’s where teamwork makes the dream work. By sharing real-time engagement data with their sales team (extremely easy to do in Terminus, btw), marketers can alert them to the accounts that are seeing those ads and taking action. When that happens, your sales team can start reaching out, trusting that the people they’re contacting are already familiar with your brand and your solution. Expert ABM marketers take this a step further with Chat From Anywhere™, a unique feature of Terminus Chat that makes connecting sales teams with their buyers happen in a single click.
Pipeline Acceleration
If a sales team member loves it when marketing connects them to buyers through chat, then they’re going to love how marketing can deliver personalized, mid-funnel content to buyers to expedite the sales process. It all starts with “progression rules”. By aligning relevant creative and content to discrete sales stages, accounts can automatically be targeted at every stage of your opportunity cycle. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Start showing ads with those phenomenal G2 ratings to interested buyers on Linkedin.
- Promote various case studies in every email your AEs send with Terminus Email Experiences.
- Answer questions by instantly routing incoming chats to the AEs that they can answer on their laptop or their phone with the Terminus app.
With Terminus, sales teams have intelligence into an account’s penetration and propensity to buy with Relationship Data. By analyzing the frequency, recency, and velocity of emails and meetings, Terminus presents data on how many relationships are developing with the buying committee and how strong those relationships are. This is great for predicting pipeline and helping sellers understand who needs more attention and engagement to create their next customer.
Customer Retention and Expansion
The new rally cry for CMOs is not only revenue, but overall customer lifetime value (CLTV). With a shrinking economy comes tightened budgets for both you and your customers. Those CMOs that focus on CLTV will weather the storm much better than those who stay focused on top line growth. To see just how important customer retention and expansion is, take a look at this.
Over the course of 3 years, a company with a modest -3% retention begins to plateau. Conversely, a company with a modest 3% expansion rate sees revenue begin to spike after three years, putting them in unicorn territory.
Terminus makes it easy for marketers to create tight customer segments based off of their data. They can organize and group customer segments by NPS scores, product usage, contract renewal dates, or even contract type. With these clusters of customers, marketing teams can deploy product best practices and usage applications to customers who aren’t using your product as much as you’d like them to. They can educate customers on new features or product lines well in advance of their renewal date. They can use Terminus Relationship Data to understand account health based on how much they’re interacting with your customer success team, while helping your account managers find new contacts to expand into different organizations or branches of the company for expansion sales.
For a deeper dive on account-based customer retention and expansion programs, check out our ebook, “Retention Is the New Acquisition.”
Full-Funnel Campaign Matrix
Terminus combines our first-party firmographic and relationship data with your own data, sprinkles in best-in-class intent data, and helps marketers create precise segments to deliver incredibly relevant content, regardless of where accounts are in the funnel. An easy place to start visualizing your full-funnel strategy is with a customer journey matrix like this:
A matrix like this also helps content and customer teams understand gaps in their content library. In this example, because there aren’t case studies for Industries B and C, they’re running a general customer review campaign while they build those case studies. Keep in mind- this is a very simplified example of the kinds of progressive campaigns you can run. Terminus’ Data Studio and automation rules make it easy for marketers to put their entire funnel on autopilot.
It’s Not Tofu, It’s Not Bofu, It’s Fufu.
No longer is it just about top-of-funnel or bottom-of-funnel. With endless segmenting capabilities based on a wealth of first- and third-party data, more channels than anyone out there, and deep analytics that measure every stage of your funnel (fantastic infographic on that here), Terminus provides a platform for revenue-minded marketers to help their sales and customer success teams succeed. Terminus can help companies dramatically grow in more efficient and effective ways than ever before. Welcome to the era of full-funnel marketing.
