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Towards the customer-centric B2B organization
For many years, business-to-business (B2B) organizations have been dominated by sales-led cultures.1 Marketing was -- and in some cases is still -- seen as purely a support function to sales, unlike in business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations where marketing 'owns' the customer relationship. Many B2B organizations have struggled to align marketing and sales best to deliver the business strategy, with tension over the volume and quality of 'leads' that marketing delivers to sales.2 This tension is exacerbated by increased revenue pressures and the need for more accurate forecasting to the board. B2B organizations are also often heavily product-focused and have been slower to move to a customer-centric model than B2C companies.
Technologies such as customer relationship management (CRM) tools, especially Salesforce, began to disrupt the balance 10 years ago, and the pace of change has accelerated with the arrival of more tools, such as marketing automation, and the shift to digital marketing. Why the shift towards a more equal partnership between sales and marketing? CRM software has allowed the sales pipeline to be more visible and provide more accurate forecasting.
In addition, two key trends have helped drive increased budget to marketing: the need to reduce costs (salespeople are expensive), and the new marketing tools providing more cost-effective scaling for growth and allowing return on marketing investment (ROMI) to be reported to the board in more detail than before, which provides more visibility of demand higher up the lead funnel. In my opinion, these internal factors,3 not the desire to reorganize the business around the customer, have been the main drivers for change. (This argument has previously been made by Kasabov and Warlow, who describe this internal focus as a 'customer compliance' business model.)
Some confusion appears to exist over the terms 'CRM' and 'marketing automation'. Initially, CRM was all about systems that allowed a business to identify, acquire and retain customers, with a database at their heart. Marketing automation software, on the other hand, grew out of email systems that provided automated segmented campaigns triggered by customer behaviour, but not always based on the single customer view that a CRM system could provide, based on diverse data sets from across the business. Today, the two categories are blurred,...