Hi there. I am Dhriti Goyal, currently working ar Pepper Content as Sr. Product Marketing Manager and a former Head of Growth Marketing at Happay - An expense management solution for enterprise businesses. At Happay, I used to take care of the entire inbound and outbound piece while also staying in a close loop with my sales team. I am a firm believer in the concept called SMarketing which is nothing but an effective alignment of your sales and marketing teams.
In this article, I will run you through a few ideas on how marketing teams could enable the sales team - all of them being either from my personal experiences at Happay or through talking and brainstorming with other fellow marketers.
Let’s deep dive then!
Defining a marketing function for B2B Saas, selling to enterprises
SaaS marketing can be tough. Especially when you are at an enterprise level and are subject to sell to other B2B businesses.
With my time at Happay, I understood - that one of the core skill sets that every enterprise B2B marketer should possess is the art of sales enablement and alignment - i.e. in layman supporting your sales teams with content, assets, and processes.
Identifying your target accounts
Shortlisting the right set of accounts to target can be tricky. Though we get inputs from the higher level (management) - I would always recommend marketing teams to sit and device a set of signals before coming up with a master list of accounts to target. Some of these signals could be
Demographics
For the Indian market, go through data from Money Control and other such IT platforms - they could indeed be a gold mine. They provide access to well-informed insights, making your shortlisting exercise a breeze.
Technographics
Next up - try and configure whether your potential prospects are already making use of technology. Do this exercise to gauge their budgets and to understand how well they are equipped with technology - because oftentimes most enterprises seem to be laid back when it comes to software products.
Relationships
Use existing accounts in your database - reach out to them with a slightly altered proposition. Try and figure out alternative ways to engage and incentivize your point of contact - inviting them for a webinar, writing a piece together, and so on.
Once you have shortlisted your accounts, encourage your SDRs to pick a cohort and run a few experiments. With relevant feedback, you might slightly have to tweak your process.
Making it easy for your SDR’s
After the initial set of experiments, SDRs could sit with the sales enablement teams(marketing) to figure out a structured way of approaching clients - basically carving out an ABM strategy. It would also be nice if marketing teams usually provide all the content that is required to execute the ABM campaign. If you are into horizontal SaaS - there are different industries and multiple personas to target. Sales Enablement with the help of Marketing should be able to figure that out for your SDRs.
Now with Content and the persona in hand, sales teams can go out on their own and start talking to people. One more thing to keep in mind while doing all of this is - always reach out to more than one contact per company. Because the buying decision usually involves multiple people and our goal is to create/find that one internal champion who can fuel their buying journey.
“Having more than one POC in an account helps in later stages of the buying process"
Coming to what is the right tech stack for your ABM strategy - there are a lot of tools in the market but before jumping on them, pen down the process you have in mind and objective. Then look for the right tools.
At Happay, we started manually with just two tools (for email marketing and database management), and over time as we grew we moved to a more sophisticated and integrated tech stack getting Marketing, Inside Sales, and Sales teams on the same page.
Note: Don't shy away from having multiple tools which can be integrated. This is the age of best-of-breed tools instead of all-in-one tool where you have to compromise on features required for your process.
Using Content to its full potential
Content always plays a crucial role when it comes to running and executing marketing campaigns. For an ABM approach, I would suggest you create more informational content that your respective stakeholders could consume and get better at their work. Always remember while sending emails - try to sound like someone who could help them grow their business. So instead of reaching out with salesy emails - send industry-specific content that can be put into practice by your stakeholders(prospects) right away.
Another activity that you can carry out is - inviting your prospects for your in-house webinars. Encourage them to share their knowledge and expertise. If they are camera-shy or don’t want to be shown live - get their inputs around an industry topic and write with them. You could then create a series of such thought leadership articles and re-use them in your marketing campaigns.
For Example, at Happay we ran a campaign called CXO Diaries/Spend Pivot where we brought in industry leaders to talk about the state of expense management at enterprises. This campaign did create a lot of eyeballs around the expense management space attracting a lot of other people in addition to the C-Suite folks. Also, we repurposed these webinars to written content which are now going out in our drip campaigns.
Final Thoughts...
Usually in a general case scenario if you look at any SaaS company which sells to enterprise - their marketing, sales, and support teams often operate in silos.
Now with marketing teams being more aligned towards sales (SMarketing) - this is helping organizations crack ABM and helping with positive results for the enterprise sales funnel.
The same thing happened at Happay and helped us open up to even broader markets.
