Until recently innovative products, brilliant engineering and/or outstanding salesmanship were sufficient for a B2B company to achieve some degree of success. Globalization and the progress in technology have resulted in more intense competition, increased product possibilities, highly demanding customers, creative & changing business models, and reduced opportunity windows.

In the B2B landscape, sales cycles have morphed from being difficult to being arduous; and from being long to being never-ending. Customers have changed from being detailed to being meticulous; from being ready to try/experiment, to being gun-shy; from wanting proof of product to wanting clear, verifiable & demonstrable return on investment. From a product & service perspective, customers no longer accept a one-size fits all – “we will buy what you have and use what we need”. They want products & services tailored to their specific requirements and buy only “exactly what they need and nothing else”.

As a result, there is increased pressure on sales (external – market facing) and product development (internal – product making) thereby widening the rift between the two groups. Conventional B2B marketing does next to nothing to bridge that gap, and very little to support the highly pressurized product and sales groups. Most marketing organizations have failed to rise to the challenge in today’s changed business landscape.

Some of the problems in B2B marketing include

Silo-Ed and Disengaged Function
To-date, most B2B companies have treated the marketing function as a perceived essential – but functionally as an unwanted appendage to the organization. From a business perspective, marketing doesn’t align with the CRM system at the front-end, neither is it a part of the accounting / ERP system at the back-end. Marketing to a large extent is silo-ed and disengaged (or partially and ineffectually engaged) resulting in the different departments in the Enterprise (Product Management, Engineering, Support, Services, Sales) being at best loosely coupled, and at worst completely fragmented.

Tactical Messaging
One of the challenges most B2B companies face is a poorly designed message framework. Even worse, more often than not no message framework exists, and marketing itself is highly tactical – “Sales has been hounding us for a technology white paper” – “Did we get featured in Forrester’s latest report?” – “Let us do one webinar a quarter and put it in our list of activities completed”. This results in limited and deal specific short term benefits but doesn’t provide for sustainable long term success. It is ineffective in building a real brand with strong perceived market value.

The other common error that most marketing teams make is to build collateral that is rigid. For example: The VP of Marketing who builds a single continuous 75 slide deck isn’t helping the sales team as much as he is indulging himself in an exercise of self-gratification (“Hey, these slides look great, don’t they?”). In reality, the slides make little sense to anybody, but himself and his marketing team (and perhaps other thought leaders (?) in the company) – A colossal waste of resources that serve no purpose.

Zero Influence Leading to Lack of Synchronicity
In some ways, marketing is the glue that holds the market facing and operational units of the company together. One of marketing’s big challenges is to ensure complete synchronicity between the internal and external worlds, between external promise and internal operational execution, and between sales & production / engineering. It is one thing to build a strong message framework but it is quite another to ensure that internal product development and operational execution align closely with that message framework. Most marketing organizations today aren’t able to “influence” the other functions in the organization. “Influence” is not “control”.

Marketing can’t and shouldn’t control or lead the other functions. Managing and executing is neither their mandate nor their core competence. Their job is to “influence” the other departments and achieve synchronicity. Influencing departments that don’t fall under the ambit of marketing is a challenge. It calls for superior communication skills, an exemplary ability to articulate and achieve buy-in on the company and product vision, coupled with the ability to establish strong trust-based relationships with the different operational units.

Most marketing units today don’t have the cross-functional talent required to empathize and be multi-lingual (understand and speak the languages of sales, product, engineering and services). As a result, more often than not, strong bonds based on trust and respect between marketing and other departments in the Enterprise are absent, leading to a lack of synchronicity between sales and operational execution.

Partial Process Ownership
Given the difficulty of owning the entire process, marketing today has a tendency to take partial ownership – let us generate some sales collateral; let us do a few seminars and webinars and feed some leads into sales; let us make sure the marketing calendar is full for the next quarter etc. This type of ownership is highly task-based and non-strategic.

Marketing neither takes ownership nor responsibility for ensuring that when a G2000 organization decides to buy a product – the company almost always makes the initial call list; for ensuring that internal operational execution is in-synch with what sales is telling the marketplace; for ensuring that the product roadmap is based on market realities; for ensuring that the strategic direction of the company is correct; for ensuring that the message framework is strong, effective and consistent.

Poor Metrics / Benchmarking
Despite a lot of marketing teams and company boards being number happy – number of leads, sales pipeline, sales stages, conversion rate, number of press releases, number of conferences etc.; there has been no attempt to assess the strategy, positioning, messaging and product marketing that has a substantial impact on these numbers.

There is currently insufficient emphasis on – Strength and effectiveness of the message framework; Extent to which the message is resonating in the marketplace; and degree of synchronicity between production / engineering and sales. How good have we been at “internal evangelization”? Are all our employees in synch with what we are doing from a long-term or vision perspective, what we are focused on today, what we expect to be focused on tomorrow and why? What is the “awareness level” of our company and products in our target market? How can we improve this awareness? Is rote increase in marketing activities the best way? Do we need to re-define our message framework? What parts of the framework if re-worked will provide maximum impact? Where will we get the maximum value for the $?

The complex, long and difficult sales cycles coupled with the shift in customer mind-sets calls for a superior and different marketing organization – a marketing organization that is intellectually sharp (positioning, planning & strategy), empathetic & multi-lingual (speaks the language of sales, engineering and product management) and possesses phenomenal execution skills.

Marketing, when executed right becomes strategic and central to the Enterprise, akin to the gearbox of an automobile, with the help of which the company can travel in the right direction and at the appropriate speed. In its most pristine form, marketing is fully engaged with every other department in the Enterprise.

How does one build such a marketing function?
The next part of the series will outline the first step of scientific marketing, viz. the design of a strong message framework.


Navin Nagiah is a senior business executive in Silicon valley with extensive experience taking technology products to market in US, UK, India, China and SE Asia. Mr. Nagiah can be reached at navin35@yahoo.com