🕵🏻‍♂️ driving pipeline and revenue in 2024

Dear Trencher,

In today’s newsletter, we want to share with you 7 marketing lessons from 2023 that can help you drive pipeline and revenue in 2024.

Let’s get right into it.

1. 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗴𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘂𝗽𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁.

If sales teams aren't actively involved in your marketing initiatives, all you're left with is brand awareness and maintaining product-led growth (PLG) motions.

While these are important elements of a holistic marketing strategy, they're simply not enough to drive significant growth in the upmarket.

Upmarket buyers are more sophisticated and demanding than their downmarket counterparts.

They require a more personalized approach that goes beyond simply raising awareness of your brand or product. They need to understand how your solution can address their specific pain points and help them achieve their business goals.

That's where sales come in. 

Salespeople are the ones interacting with your target accounts on a daily basis, so they have a unique understanding of their needs, challenges, and decision-making processes. This makes them invaluable allies in your upmarket marketing efforts.

By actively participating in your marketing efforts, sales can help you build deeper relationships with your target accounts, qualify leads more effectively, and close more deals.

2. SMEs should be a part of the GTM team

It’s not enough to rely on marketing and sales teams to drive pipeline and revenue. Whenever planning an account journey (warm-up and activation), you need somebody with in-depth knowledge of the product, market, and missions of your target buyers. 

In other words, you need to tap into the expertise of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). By integrating SMEs into your GTM team, you’ll gain access to a wealth of insights that can inform every step of your sales and marketing efforts. SMEs can help you:

• Develop targeted content that resonates with your audience: SMEs understand the specific language and interests of your target buyers, ensuring that your marketing materials are tailored to their needs and preferences.

• Craft compelling messaging that highlights the value proposition of your product: SMEs can translate technical jargon into easy-to-understand language that resonates with potential customers, effectively communicating the benefits of your solution.

• Identify and leverage the most effective marketing channels: SMEs understand the preferred channels of communication for your target audience, allowing you to target your campaigns effectively and reach the right people at the right time.

3. Weekly pipeline review

Weekly pipeline reviews are regular check-ins that bring together marketing and sales teams to assess their pipeline, identify potential roadblocks, and make adjustments to their strategies accordingly.

All our clients that started a 60-minute weekly marketing and sales meeting saw a spike in revenue.

Here’s an example of the agendas they use:

• Review current pipeline

• Share collected account insights

• Plan the next steps for account warm-up and activation

• Add/remove accounts from the program

• Sharing small wins

This structured approach helps teams stay focused, identify opportunities, and make informed decisions that drive pipeline growth and contribute to overall business success.

4. Setting clear expectations

A key to success in B2B marketing is setting clear and realistic expectations from the outset. See, not every click or piece of content will directly lead to an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) or revenue. 

That's why it's important to focus on how your marketing programs can solve specific challenges faced by your target audience.

So, interview sales and stakeholders about existing challenges and then:

• Explain how marketing programs help to solve the challenges

• How are you going to measure it

• How they contribute to the pipeline

Also, forget about rolling your eyes and sighing "My team doesn't get marketing". Nobody gets unstructured and unclear programs.

By interviewing sales and stakeholders about their pain points, you can develop clear and measurable goals for your marketing initiatives. This will help to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that your efforts are aligned with the overall business objectives.

5. Segmented GTM

Your GTM teams have different challenges and goals based on their location, so it's important to segment your GTM strategy accordingly. This means tailoring your messaging, content, and sales tactics to each segment to ensure you're reaching the right people with the right messages at the right time.

6. A change agent who leads new marketing initiatives

A lot of B2B companies in 2024 plan to:

• Switch from lead gen to demand gen

• Go upmarket

• Introduce enterprise sales to their PLG motion

These changes require mindset changes on the organizational level and need a person who'll actively work on it.

7. “ Operationalize” your marketing processes

A lot of B2B teams just "do random acts of marketing" and work on demand.

Creating a demand generation calendar, workflows for content creation and distribution, sourcing accounts for ABM, and collaborating with sales to warm up and activate accounts significantly impact revenue.

PS: If you want to elevate your B2B marketing game in 2024, join the Fullfunnel online academy and unlock the keys to B2B marketing success with our comprehensive courses.

You'll be joining a vibrant community of forward-thinking marketers driven by revenue growth.

Here's what you'll gain access to:

• 📚 All our B2B marketing courses including a 6-week ABM playbook, LinkedIn Allbound marketing playbook, and 11 more courses that aren't available to the public

• 💬 Private Slack community to answer all your burning questions

• 📋 Personalized learning plan. Unsure where to start or how to maximize your learning potential? We'll craft a tailored plan based on the time you can dedicate to your education.

• 🔍 Exclusive 'Behind the Scenes' sessions: Gain insights into what's working and what's not as we dissect real campaigns for our clients and ourselves.

• 🎟️ 30% discount for live events and bootcamps.

BEST SHARES FROM THE TRENCHES COMMUNITY

• We need to generate revenue NOW. Here is how a GTM (marketing & sales) team should work on it.

• What accounts marketing and sales should actively focus on [A NEW TEMPLATE] 

QUESTIONS FROM FELLOW TRENCHERS

Dear Trencher, if you can join the discussion and answer any of the questions below, click on the link and share your thoughts.

• For those of you who advertise in the EU, what are some great examples of bottom-funnel marketing tactics that have worked really well?

• I have a list with First Name, Last Name & LinkedIn URL, and now want to target them on LinkedIn...But looking at the sheet you need to fill in for LinkedIn ads there is no column for LinkedIn URL... Does anyone have experience here?

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See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina ODJO