3 Tips to Help Your Marketing Team Become B2B Opportunity Experts

What defines success in B2B marketing? Sure, you need to engage the right people with the right content, and you have to align with sales teams and work toward closing deals. Timing is crucial. You have to identify when deals are near the finish line and take action, or pivot when a prospect stops responding. When working with sales to help close deals, B2B marketers need to understand the sales funnel, including how customers move through the stages of an opportunity. Simply put, your team has to be B2B opportunity experts.

What is a B2B opportunity expert?

Many marketers think they don’t need to understand the sales funnel and how sales uses Opportunities in Salesforce to track deals. However, if you don’t make time to understand them, you could be leaving revenue on the table. Understanding how sales uses Opportunities in Salesforce can help you:

• Create upsell and cross-sell campaigns, especially if you target closed-won deals with new offers
• Nurture customers for future deal cycles, especially if you target buying committee members in closed-lost deals 
• Close deals more quickly, especially if you work with sales to target key buying group members with information related to their role in the organization and decision-making process.

Now that you have a primer for opportunity-based marketing, let’s dig a little deeper into how to build and execute the strategy. Here are three ways your marketing team can better use sales Opportunities in Salesforce.

B2B Opportunity Tip 1: Create large deal alerts to help sales accelerate pipeline

When thinking about where to spend time personalizing marketing efforts, it’s critical to focus on large deals that will result in the highest ROI. With B2B Marketing Analytics in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, marketers can easily identify large deals. 

Account Engagement can alert you when a deal at an account hits a certain threshold so you can work to build more personalized marketing content specific to those accounts. For example, you can host personalized events to get face-time with customers. You can also send content targeted to the buying committee within a company that builds on presentations, pitch decks, and overall messaging. 

This way, you’re addressing‌ individual prospects’ pain points to help close those important, large deals. This tactic also helps you work closer with Sales to build on that crucial alignment.

B2B Opportunity Tip 2: Focus on the buying committee, not one person

There’s often a pull to communicate with a single lead person on an account that you’ve built a strong relationship with. However, you need to cast a wider net. 

The key here is to engage with the buying committee within the account, not just the contact you had the initial conversation with. Within a buying committee, there are a lot of personas that require a different understanding of the value a product delivers to them. You need to personalize your communication to deliver what they care about most. I’ve seen this turn cold opportunities into clients. 

When I used to work for a construction manufacturer, we had to engage with various personas. For example, the architect or engineers had to approve our products so they fit their design, and the building owner needed to understand the ROI, and the contractor had to install the product.

B2B Opportunity Tip 3: Engage with accounts that you lost to a competitor 

Not all opportunities turn to wins, and there are a lot of reasons why opportunities go cold. Maybe the timing wasn’t right, or the budget was cut. Maybe there was an organizational change. Or you lost out to a competitor. Contracts expire and requirements change as companies scale – that’s the world we live in. Stay in touch with accounts you lose so you stay top of mind.

We can’t always find out exactly why buyers stop engaging. However, accounts that go cold during the later opportunity stages make a perfect nurture segment. We know there was interest because they took the time to talk to sales. If we continue to provide value to these accounts via targeted and personalized outreach, we can stay top of mind and be there when they are ready to move forward.

When engaging contacts from opportunities that have turned cold, you need to avoid generic campaign materials and focus on high-value content that will have the most impact – like research papers, thought leadership articles, certifications, or case studies. Show how your expertise and technology is evolving, and they’ll reconsider you when their needs change or contract expires.  

Marketing and sales alignment is crucial for winning B2B deals. That includes being on the same page within Salesforce. Become a B2B Opportunity expert, and build a successful framework for success over the near- and long term.