Best Practice Toolkits

Eloqua 101

Eloqua Library B2B Marketing Email Marketing Lead Management Lead Nurturing Marketing Automation Marketing ROI Sales Effectiveness Software as a Service

The Grande Guide to
Sales Enablement
Powerful tools to
arm the modern salesforce

Sales 2.0 & Marketing 2.0

Back to B2B Marketing

Today days most buyers begin their evaluation process online. Marketers and sales reps have responded by embracing new processes and technologies which have come to be called Marketing 2.0 and Sales 2.0.

With the Web forcing drastic change in how buyers evaluate products and vendors, marketers and sales reps need new processes and technologies to compete. Buzzwords like “Sales 2.0” and “Marketing 2.0” have emerged to describe the radical reboot of the sales and marketing functions. To understand what Sales and Marketing 2.0 really consist of, let’s review what marketing and sales meant in a B2B (Business to Business) context before this sea change…

Back in the Day, Sales and Marketing
At one point marketing was mostly about advertising and branding. Marketing budgets were heavy on print and broadcast, making it very difficult to measure the exact return on any marketing expense. Furthermore, when marketing did result in leads (through direct mail or trade events) there was no real way to understand what happened after Marketing passed them over to Sales.

So what was Sales up to at this point? They were doing a lot of prospecting and cold calling, because most of the so-called “leads” from Marketing weren’t worth much. Established sales reps relied on connections into key accounts and milked them for years, mostly interacting in person or over the phone. In one respect sales reps had it easy: customers and prospects had few ways to find out about the value of different solutions other than by contacting sales.

So, What Now?
Today every organization down to your local hairdresser has email and a website. Larger organizations have CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems integrated with a bevy of technologies to track, automate and report on customer and prospect interactions. Granted, all this marks a huge change in the environment for sales reps and marketers. However the biggest change in today’s environment is that the buyer is driving the sale. In the past, sales reps controlled much of the information prospects needed to evaluate solutions and make buying decisions. Now prospects can, with just one Google search, gather a tremendous amount of information, and even come to a buying decision on a large-ticket item, without ever speaking to a sales rep.

Enter Marketing 2.0
To adapt to the new environment, marketers have completely upended their investments. Instead of print and broadcast advertising, marketers are focused on inbound marketing and web marketing 2.0 tactics like social media, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. Company websites are monitored real-time and integrated with CRMs--that way incoming leads can be rated for quality and the good ones routed quickly to the right sales reps.

Marketers have also been pushing productivity by automating many processes that were either manual, or impossible, just a few years ago. So, for instance, prospects who are not quite ready to be contacted by a sales person can now be put into automated email lead nurturing programs that keep the marketer’s brand top of mind until they are ready to buy. Finally, the greatest gain from the Marketing 2.0 revolution is that marketers can now get a comprehensive view of exactly how their investments have resulted in increased revenue and prove the value of marketing to Sales.

Sales 2.0
The revolution has not left sales people behind. Good sales reps have developed new ways to connect with and influence buyers. Instead of cold calling, they are active in social media and focused on building relationships with key influencers. They’ve become LinkedIn ninjas—mining the service for company and contact data. Reps are also hyper focused on how prospects are accessing online content and responding to email campaigns with specialized tools to compile all the data they need before making that all-important first phone call.

With CRMs, Sales Managers have new ways to monitor and manage sales reps and the pipeline. At the executive level, Sales and Marketing VPs are working hand in hand to analyze demand generation and close rates of each stage of the sale—working toward revenue performance management and “one view of the truth”, a comprehensive view of exactly how revenue is created and the levers to pull to accelerate it.

Sales 2.0 & Marketing 2.0 Resources

Exploring Social Media for Demand Generation video

Exploring Social Media for Demand Generation
Learn how to use social media as an effective demand gernation tool that can take your marketing to the next level in this video from the experts at Eloqua.

9:59 minutes

Reading Your Buyer's Digital Body Language (TM)
Learn how to read your buyer's digital body language™ and improve your marketing performance in this whitepaper from the experts at Eloqua.

7 pages

Guest Post: Stop Selling and Start Helping People Buy
Marketing automation has amazing potential as a way to close more sales, make the selling process more efficient, and help buyers get the content they need. The field is working hard at discovering all aspects of the buying process and how to influence it. With that in mind, I’d like to add my 2 cents.

Top 10 LinkedIn Tips for Lead Generation
If you haven’t logged into LinkedIn these days, it’s time to get back in there and see some of the cool stuff that is now available. This post will provide tips for sales professionals and marketers to get the most out of LinkedIn.

Revenue Performance Management: The Next Frontier of Competitive Advantage
Eloqua has studied a small group of companies that consistently out-perform their peers. It is not luck. It's Revenue Performance Management (RPM).

Sales Enablement: Helping the Sales Team Win
The headline in a recent Forrester Research report says it all: “Executives don’t believe salespeople are well prepared to engage with them.” The Forrester study reported that only 15% of executives say that their meetings with sales people met their expectations. Yuk!

next steps

Launch
Overview Evaluating? Contact Us

Automate Marketing Target the right buyer Do more with less Easily execute campaigns Get the right leads to sales	Nurture leads automatically Connect social and revenue Deliver sales intelligence Measure everything	Next Steps View Demo View Product Overview
Accelerate Revenue Eloqua Revenue Suite	How to Buy Evaluating? RFPs and more! Pricing & Packages	Next Steps View Demo View Product Overview