The rules of modern B2B marketing were largely shaped by Jon Miller in the early 2010s.
These principles have provided the framework for many marketing strategies for almost 15 years.
Today, Jon Miller warns us that this once groundbreaking manual has become obsolete.
But why? Because the model has worked so well that it has become a victim of its own effectiveness.
What can we learn from these years of B2B marketing? And above all, what does this new playbook look like, adapted to a saturated market and savvy buyers?
Inspired by an interview with Jon Miller on the Growth Driver podcast, this article explores the eight pillars of tomorrow’s B2B marketing.
Let’s be clear about the old B2B Marketing Playbook
I still remember downloading all the Marketo ebooks when I first got into it back in 2011-2012. It was the Bible of Marketing back then.
Let me briefly summarize:
- construct content that will bring traffic to your site
- capture the prospect’s email and other information through a form
- continue to educate the prospect (the “nurturing“) via an email drip campaign focused on the subject that interests him
- implement a scoring system that will score all automatically collected interactions, show prospect appetence and rank them
- advance prospects in the marketing-sales funnel thanks to statuses shared between Marketing and Sales
- Pass hot prospects to “SDRs” / “BDRs” / “Inside Sales” – each company has its own terminology – for an initial qualification call
- The purpose of this call is to obtain the BANT: Budget / Authority / Need / Timeline. Only prospects who pass the filter are sent to a sales rep
- The sales rep takes over and manages the opportunity through to completion
- Upstream, once the machine is set up, use Google Ads and social networks to attract prospects to your pages
And it worked! It allowed marketing to start acquiring its letters of nobility.
For the first time, we could measure marketing results in terms of :
- “Marketing Qualified Leads”
- “Conversion rate”
- “Pipeline Velocity”…
and have some semblance of a predictive pipeline.
What a change from the early 2000s!
15 years on: the “Gumball machine” effect
> If I put XX euros into marketing, I’ll get YY MQLs.
The next logical step was to maximize the machine by injecting :
- always more list purchases and Ads at the top of the funnel,
- more nurturing,
- more outgoing emails
- If conversion rates drop, we switch from “less hot” leads to sales to compensate for the lack of MQLs. Never mind, you’ve got to meet your quotas
Without questioning the drop in conversion rates.
Why B2B marketing strategy based on the old manual is outdated?
Prospect indifference
15 years of marketing practices have educated buyers. We all know that if :
- I click on this button, I’ll receive a litany of unwanted emails, if not a call from a aggressive SDR.
- I reply to this solicitation on Linkedin, within three seconds, I’ll receive a message offering me an appointment.
- I fill in this form, I’ll be put in a sequence of emails I can’t get out of
- I click on this ad for shoes, I’ll be followed for two weeks by shoe ads everywhere I go.
Not only are prospects educated, they’re also indifferent or even hostile to marketing techniques.
This means fewer clicks, less traffic, fewer forms filled in…
This is the advent of the “Zero Click Content” trend: I want to be able to consume content without having to click.
The focus on “pipeline generation” instead of “revenue generation”
The role of marketing has often focused on generating “new business” to the detriment of developing existing customers.
Success indicators are “New Business” oriented:
- number of Leads acquired by marketing,
- number of MQLs sourced by marketing
- …
Targeting often excludes customers: as soon as you’re a customer, you’re out of the campaigns. Or you’re treated by a separate team.
Tools are “New Business” oriented, via the “Lead” object found in all CRMs, which is used to carry and qualify new prospects. But this prevents any reconciled statistics between “new business” and “renewal”.
And even in “New Business”, the focus is on pipeline generation (i.e. input quantity) and not on improving conversion rates at each stage and the speed of progression of prospects in the funnel.
Underinvestment in the brand
The other bias of marketing automation tools has been to also focus on what is measurable:
- clicks on ads or email CTAs
- form fills
- engagement of nurturing sequences
- MQLs sent to sales
at the expense of “branded content“, which is less easy to track:
- content without CTAs such as blog posts, or “thought leadership” articles aimed at establishing your credibility
- organic content on social networks
- display campaigns
Budget allocation has gradually focused on the bottom of the funnel and the few percent of the market receptive at any given moment.
The 8 pillars of the new B2B Marketing Playbook
Pillar 1: Objectives and strategic priorities
- Growth often translates in the old playbook as acquisition (more new logos)
- The whole system is acquisition-oriented: incentives, KPIs on MQLs, budget allocation
- The credibility of marketing has improved, but not enough to influence management.
Unfortunate focus on pipeline generation
The budget discussion between management and marketing can sometimes be caricatured:
- Management: “We want XX% growth in new logos this year”
- Marketing: “Okay, given our conversion rates, pipeline speed and the like, we’d have to invest YY% and that’s going to be very complicated…”
- Management: “Bah, it’s your job, figure it out”
and the discussion ends with marketing “doing its best” but knowing full well that come September, discussions are going to get very heated…
It’s a complicated time for Marketing Departments:
- the effectiveness of classic campaigns falls,
- the rules of the game have changed but marketing’s interlocutors are still in the “Gumball Machine” logic: just invest XX in input to get YY in output
- The credibility of marketing management is not yet such that it can contradict management
- the result is that the average time in post for a marketing director is two years. Which is a short time to prove oneself.
- that investing in the brand with perhaps fewer KPIs is good for the company
- that focusing also on conversion rates, speed of pipeline, retention or cross-sell / upsell of existing customers is necessary
Pillar 2: Invest in Brand or Demand Generation
- Focusing mainly on everything that concerns and follows demand capture (activation, conversion, sales), not so much on reputation and brand building (the educational or emotional part).
- The focus has gradually shifted to the immediately activatable, whereas +100 competitors are targeting the same people.
- Because you don’t have a strong brand, you’re no longer visible.
Demand generation has taken the lion’s share of budgets
Paid campaigns and end-of-funnel content have taken the lion’s share of the marketing budget. At the expense of content and campaigns at the beginning of the funnel.
Why should this be?
Because pushing your white paper via Linkedin ads or a Linkedin Lead Gen form gives accurate indicators on the one hand, and on the other because the cost is out of all proportion to the creation of a blog article. De facto, more budget is absorbed by ads.
Conversely, when management asks for the results of display campaigns, or blog posts “without CTAs”, we’re often a little embarrassed, because apart from traffic figures, there’s little to say.
A strong brand makes sales’ job easier
It’s because you’ve developed a powerful brand attachment with “free”, engaging, educational content that the rest of the funnel will flow easily.
Branded content has a direct effect on conversion rates and pipeline velocity, as Marketo showed us at the time.
Jon Miller wrote his “Definitive Guides” and suddenly hundreds of marketers were discovering a new facet of marketing, educating themselves, being able to start a discussion with the Board.
The discussions that followed were “easy” for Marketo sales reps: prospects wanted to acquire the solution that met the new marketing rules!
No need for 15 sales meetings, the “brand” effect was in full effect, making the sales process easier.
Over time, less budget was put into free “emotional” or “educational” branded content.
The focus shifted to end-of-funnel content, which detects a prospect who is mature and ready for a discussion.
The problem is that all competitors focus on the same 1-5% of the market and neglect the other 95%.
Lacking strong brand content, it’s hard to stand out from the crowd.
- it’s not easy, quite a bit of education is needed on the CEO/CRO and CFO side
- the marketing department must also realize that it will have no extra budget to (re)invest in the Brand
- So we have to convince ourselves to go from
- “If I want to generate 100 million euros in demand, I need a budget of 10 million euros for demand.” to
- “If I want to generate 100 million euros of demand, I need a budget of 6 million euros for demand and 4 million euros for Brand.”
Pillar 3: new definition of audience
- Defining an audience too broad, which stretches Ads resources and budget over too many leads, and less impact on each of them
- Because the target is broad, too much budget is consumed, leaving nothing left for branded content
- the ABM strategy has been a good remedy for addressing desired accounts, but is difficult to apply for Key Accounts
The ravages of the “Gumball machine”
The “Gumball machine” effect came into full play: I was successful with my first Ads campaign, and converted leads into customers. The natural reaction was to amplify the effort, increase the budget, choose a larger audience to get more customers.
But in subsequent iterations, the effectiveness of the ads went decreasing, forcing me to increase the budget to keep the targets.
In the end, all the budget was spent on Ads, with a low ROI.
Progress with ABM strategy
In response, the B2B marketing strategy was enriched with ABM, allowing the company to re-align its marketing focus on accounts that were important to the company.
But it proved too ungranular to deal with key accounts, which have several teams who may be talking about different needs simultaneously.
- Identify people in the market (ICP) and approach them with a personalized, scaled strategy for better impact (Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, not in target).
- Work branded content with the rest
- Adopt a Buying Group approach to refine ABM strategy.
Pillar 4: channels and the buyer’s attitude
- The strategy is now well known to buyers and prospects, who are wary of it
- Engage your audience on your website, via email and corporate social networks with product-oriented or “corporate” communication or end-of-funnel content
- Then start the email machine or nurturing campaign
- and Paid Media campaigns do the heavy lifting of awareness and demand generation.
It was the marketing manual written in 2010 that worked so well when
- the market was immature and unsaturated
- prospects responded well to direct approaches and
- there was interest in educating themselves on brand sites
Today, no one wants to download an Ebook.
Zero Clic Content and exclusive content
Prospects want
- on the one hand, to have access to content without friction (no forms, no CTAs)
- and on the other hand to consume it wherever they discover it: on social networks like Linkedin or Twitter, in an email received directly…
- and finally they want proprietary content that they can only find from you. Generic AI-generated content is of little interest, and worse, can damage your brand.
Gong.io is a platform that captures customer interactions and delivers insights at scale, enabling teams to make decisions based on data rather than opinion.
Gong Labs uses millions of conversations to analyze discussion patterns and produce proprietary content and metrics that only they can produce.
- Go from a philosophy of restricted-access content with a form to a single portal, then a set of free content
- Expose your content on spaces you control (first party cookie)
- Create and animate your ambassador communities
- Find a way to mobilize your ambassadors on third-party sites that talk about you or your competitors.
Pillar 5: Using data with the FIRE framework
- 1st party data only
- Buying lists,
- Disconnected data sets (marketing/sales, by funnel stage, by platform)
- No automatic deduplication / No automatic lead conversion
- No consolidated view
The FIRE framework is a good acronym to define the data needed for today’s marketing
Fit
Quality firmographic data for initial targeting of key accounts, followed by demographic data to target the right profiles.
Here the keywords for quality data are :
- documented
- integrated
- automated and enriched
- fair
- compliant
Intent
Even better than firmographic and demographic data, which provide a “flat” view, behavioral and intentional data is the proper way to identify the 1 to 5% of the market that can be activated right now.
- Either first-party data, such as visits to your websites, clicks on emails, videos viewed or podcasts listened to, webinar or trade-show attendance…
- Or third-party data, which will enable you to detect the search intentions of all accounts, not just those who visit your site.
Relationship
Takes into account everything you have in your CRM and back office.
- Of course, the complete purchase history of your customers
- always appalled to see that some people can’t target their customers in marketing automation :-(, so I’m not talking about customers who have bought product/service A in the last three months
- Knowing that this contact who has just changed companies was an ambassador for your brand in his previous position
- Identify that such and such a prospect has a relationship of trust with such and such a sales rep at your company.
- Bear in mind that such and such an account has asked you for 5 proposals in 1 year, without ever giving you any positive feedback.
Engagement
This is the notion of Engagement so dear to Marketo: it shows active participation in your campaigns, and that the prospect or customer reacts with interest to what you have to offer.
By combining these four criteria, you can target accounts and contacts according to your objectives.
- Recent, enriched, quality firmographic and demographic data
- First and third-party behavioral data to pinpoint prospects’ intentions at the right time
- Plus the history of relationships between people, between accounts, the history of quotes and orders, which must be made easily available on the marketing automation side
- And finally prospect or buying group engagement.
Pillar 6: the roles of marketing and sales
- Although sales and marketing alignment is declared a national priority, in reality it hardly exists
- We’re in a relay race between marketing and sales
- each group has its own indicators of success, incompatible with a team vision.
The initial promise of Sales Marketing Alignment
One of the solutions in Jon Miller’s Definitive Guides was Sales-Marketing Alignment.
And it’s true that a solution like Marketo, integrated with the sales force’s CRM, made it possible to pass on relevant data to Sales so that they could continue the conversation started on the marketing side:
- interesting moments in the customer journey, milestones to be noted.
- Website pages viewed
- emails received, opened, clicked
- how scoring has progressed.
And sales reps could even engage their prospects with campaigns or emails specially prepared for them!
The harsh reality
But we all know that what predominantly drives behavior in business are insuccess indicators on the one hand, and remuneration on the other (the two are supposed to be aligned, but well, that’s another story…).
Now, if we look at the typical indicators of the two teams :
- Marketing: rather fixed remuneration, with a small incentive based on MQLs (possibly “quality”).
- Sales: fairly substantial variable portion based on business signed.
- you have a soccer team that moves as a team, with a common goal: getting the ball into the net.
- The ball has a non-linear path, exactly like the actual buyer’s path, with hundreds of touches (and there are dozens of balls)
- Share information on the pitch, have a feel for the pitch > Share a LOT of information
- Get together: bi-weekly meetings, standing up, 5-10 minutes, with marketing, SDR and sales, to talk about this rep’s account. What’s going on and what are we going to do about it?
- Change the incentive model?
Pillar 7: Indicators and Attribution
- Too many indicators measured, with no focus on what’s important, which drowns out the lessons
- Separate dashboards for each team (marketing, inside sales, sales)
- Attribution was a good way of recognizing and respecting marketing, but it failed to create a sense of belonging to the team, and is overused to prove marketing’s value.
Too much information kills information
A solution like Marketo has suddenly given marketing access to a host of indicators, from the most granular to the most global.
- email open and click statistics, page views on the site.
- prospects’ progress and success in campaigns
- scoring, which gives a summary of the prospect’s relevance and appetite for your brand.
- lead progress in the funnel, conversion rates at each stage and pipeline speed.
- first-touch or multi-touch revenue attribution to identify the pipeline and revenue generated or influenced by marketing.
These invaluable indicators helped establish marketing’s credibility, giving it access to discussions with management, and enabling it to assert itself vis-à-vis Sales.
The danger came with Business Intelligence tools, which could be connected to Marketo and CRM, making it easy to create dashboards. Companies have sometimes been too heavy-handed, and end up with hundreds of marketing reports.
This can make it difficult to pick out the important signals.
Dashboards separated by team
Each team has designed dashboards around its own indicators of success.
There are generally no common dashboards, and dashboard inflation doesn’t make it easy to want to add one more.
- Measures based on teamwork: total pipeline target / revenue target / success rate
- Keep KPIs from marketing and sales, but not to prove value, to improve overall performance.
- The team wins or loses together, but that doesn’t mean we don’t look at individual performance.
- We seek to improve overall performance.
Pillar 8: Technologies
- Taking advantage of the exponential growth in the number of SaaS technologies without an orientation strategy
- “Buy it and the ROI will naturally follow”.
- Technologies are under-utilized, with low levels of training, poorly integrated
The technology explosion
The last 15 years have seen an explosion of technologies. It’s a golden age for marketing, because there’s bound to be a technology to realize your new marketing idea.
And we know that marketing can be full of ideas!
As a result, we’ve seen numerous technological solutions arrive in the company, sometimes without the involvement of the IT department (the famous “Shadow IT”), with little or no integration with the rest.
This led to numerous manual data transfers, with low quality (duplicates, mapping errors…).
When the person who bought the technology leaves, the solution is likely to be abandoned, but still paid for.
The importance of integration for a better customer experience
From the prospect’s point of view, disparate, non-integrated technologies often mean a frictional customer journey. This is no longer acceptable today.
We offer videos on our site, hosted by TwentyThree, because this allows us to finely measure who has seen our videos, how many times, and which passage.
TwentyThree also allows us to reserve our longer videos for readers who agree to give us their email address.
Marketo and TwentyThree are well integrated, including in terms of cookies.
This means that if I’m known in Marketo (my email and cookie are associated), I’ll be recognized when I watch a video in TwentyThree.
The advantage?
We don’t ask people known to Marketo to fill in any TwentyThree forms. The process is seamless.
The gaps in training
I sometimes work at a customer’s site and discover people working on Marketo without any training (often apprentices or trainees on whom we don’t “want to invest”).
It always feels like leaving the keys to the Ferrari to your best friend, who has never been on a racetrack.
The arrival of AI is changing the nature of Marketing Ops
Artificial Intelligence will very soon become our co-pilot, but soon it will be our auto-pilot.
We can imagine that tomorrow
- marketing will be in charge of creating the best possible experiences: videos, podcasts, blog posts, webinars, …
- and that AI will orchestrate prospect and customer journeys based on their profiles, interests, hot reactions…
- AI is your co-pilot, but it will soon be on autopilot.
- The go-to-market strategy must be the driving force behind the technology you buy.
- Prefer highly integrated technologies
- Don’t skimp on training
Conclusion
B2B marketing is at a turning point. Traditional strategies, while effective in the past, no longer meet the demands of a saturated market and savvy prospects.
To thrive in this environment, it’s essential to adopt the eight pillars of the new B2B marketing handbook:
- Redefine strategic objectives: Go beyond simple lead generation by focusing on conversion, retention and customer satisfaction.
- Rebalance brand and demand generation: Invest equally in building a strong brand and capturing demand to differentiate and naturally attract prospects.
- Redefine the audience: Segment targets according to their potential and adopt a buying group-centric approach to better address decision-makers.
- Rethink channels and content: Offer frictionless content accessible directly on the platforms where prospects are located, to meet their need for immediacy.
- Exploit data to the full with the FIRE framework: Use Fit, Intent, Relationship and Engagement data to identify and prioritize the most promising prospects.
- Align marketing and sales: Work in synergy with common goals and fluid communication to optimize sales effectiveness.
- Simplify metrics: Focus on relevant KPIs that reflect collaboration and the real impact of actions taken.
- Integrate technologies: Ensure consistency between tools to deliver a fluid, personalized customer experience.
By adopting these principles, companies will not only be able to adapt to market changes, but also anticipate customer expectations. The era of modern B2B marketing demands a more human, transparent approach focused on creating real value for the customer. It’s time to turn the page on the old manual and write a new chapter, more in tune with today’s realities.
