Marketing versus revenue marketing
This was originally a panel at the Revenue Marketing Summit London, December 2022, given by Nina Reschovsky, B2B Marketing Lead - UK at Uber; Cory Johnson, Growth Marketing Manager at Synthesia; and Tamana Faizi, Head of B2B Marketing at Florence.
What’s the key difference between a marketing strategy and a revenue marketing strategy?
Nina Reschovsky
There are a lot of definitions for a revenue marketing strategy. For me, the most straightforward way to explain the difference is that a typical B2B marketing strategy is pretty heavily focused on top-of-funnel demand generation, lead generation, and brand awareness, whereas a revenue marketing strategy is more closely aligned with sales and tracking metrics that are geared towards generating pipeline that, as the name implies, will ultimately convert to revenue.
Tamana Faizi
Definitely. I'm the type of person that loves numbers. If it's not impacting any kind of numbers, it's not motivational for me. However, when I've worked in different startups, there’s been a lot of emphasis on lead generation in the hopes that that would convert into revenue.
For me, the main thing that sets revenue marketing apart from other marketing strategies is working with more of the sales team. Instead of thinking about your marketing strategy in isolation, you’re thinking about how much revenue the company needs to make, how much marketing can contribute, how much sales can contribute, and working backwards from there.
Ljubica Radoicic
How to begin building a revenue marketing strategy
Where would you start when it comes to creating a revenue marketing strategy? Is it best to start with KPIs, a positioning statement, or somewhere else entirely?
Nina Reschovsky
You need to start by understanding where your revenue is currently coming from. Usually, that's from three buckets:
- Relationships with the sales team
- Outbound marketing
- Inbound marketing
It's really important to dig into that inbound. Look at what specific channels, campaigns, and activities have generated revenue. I find – and certainly I found at Uber – that the channels that are driving your revenue might not be the channels that you're investing really heavily in. For instance, we’ve invested a lot in events, but not a ton of revenue is coming from that channel. When you understand where your revenue is coming from, you can scale those efforts.
The second step – and this is important for any type of marketing strategy – is to get to know who your customer is. Talk to your sales team, talk to your customer success team, talk to your customers, and find the answers to all these questions:
- What are their pain points?
- What problem is your product solving for them?
- Why did they decide to buy your product?
- What does the purchase process look like on their side?
- Who’s the decision maker? Is it the same person who’s downloading your content or joining your webinar, or is it somebody completely different?
- How long is the sales cycle?
You also need to understand who you’re talking to. I work for Uber for Business. We have a bunch of different Uber consumer products, like Uber Rides and Uber Eats, plus a bunch of more business-focused products. We target a ton of different personas across different industries, so it's not always super clear who our audience is for each product. Aligning with the sales team about who those people are and how we’re talking to them is so important.
The third thing is to deeply align with your sales team on pretty much every level. The first thing you need to align on is the definition of a marketing-qualified lead (MQL). Maybe you’ve had the experience of hitting your target to generate a certain number of leads, and then the sales team complains that they don't have enough pipeline. That usually comes from sales and marketing creating their targets in silos and not feeding into one another.
You can prevent that by aligning on the definition of an MQL. What are the indicators that a prospect is ready to move to the next stage of the funnel? It’s super important to make sure everyone understands that and make sure your targets work together.
Next, you need to look at every stage of the funnel and optimize it. Let’s take another example from Uber. As I mentioned, we have a lot of different products, and I would find that people would come in through an Uber Eats campaign, wanting to create a meal program for their business, but then an SDR would respond with something about Uber Rides, which is not at all relevant to what they came for. That was a problem I worked with our sales team to solve.
You can’t just think, “I'm a marketer, I'm responsible for acquisition alone, and once the lead has been passed over my job is done.” You have to work with other teams along that funnel, to follow up on leads and make sure the messaging is on point throughout the journey. You need to understand if and why people are getting stuck at certain stages of the funnel and optimize accordingly.
Lastly, make sure you understand your data and the metrics you're tracking and make sure they align with your sales team and business goals.
Hannah Wesson
The challenges of marketing attribution
How do you go about attribution modeling?
Nina Reschovsky
It's very rare in the B2B buying journey that any closed-won deal comes exclusively from marketing or exclusively from sales. It obviously depends on the length of your deal cycle, but in most cases, there are so many touchpoints along the way.
You can run into trouble when you have a first-touch attribution model. You’ll find yourself in a situation where BDR reached out to someone two years ago and got no response; then two years later, they join a webinar, download an ebook, and book a demo, but that deal is still attributed to the BDR.
When you're trying to create a revenue marketing strategy, the best way to not incentivize sales and marketing to work together is by having a first-touch or even last-touch attribution model. That’s when you find BDR and marketing fighting for the attribution of deals.
For me, a multi-touch attribution model is best because it reflects the work that all of the teams have put into driving that revenue.
Getting the sales team on your side
What’s the best way to build a partnership with sales?
Nina Reschovsky
At one point or another, most B2B marketers come up against the challenge of getting the buy-in from the sales team. We’re often seen as just the department that orders swag, but we need to make sure we’re seen as revenue partners. We can do this in a number of ways.
One way to open salespeople's eyes is to show the cost per acquisition for new leads. A lot of times, salespeople see leads coming in, but there's no real understanding of how much the business is paying for those leads. Salespeople are often amazed when you show the resources that go into getting them.
Never forget that data is your best friend when it comes to showing the value of marketing. You want to dig into your company’s current revenue and see what is coming from inbound channels. Then, go to your sales team and show all the deals and revenue that came from marketing activities, and highlight that by working together, you can make that number grow exponentially.
Aligning your pipeline targets with the sales team’s targets is another surefire way to get them working with you. If they can see that you’re bringing in X amount of pipeline, rather than just a ton of top-of-funnel leads that are not ready to convert, it’s going to be much easier to build a working partnership.
Tamana Faizi
A lot of sales teams like to feel that they're the ones bringing in the money, and we're just supporting them. Let them think that, to some extent, until you start building a relationship. You can start small by offering to build a mini-campaign specifically for them and asking for their input on it. That works like magic. You've built that relationship, and now they're telling the rest of the teams, “This is what me and Tamana did – maybe you guys should try it.”
Then, as you see the progression in that relationship, you can go to your wider sales team and present them with data. If all your systems talk to each other, and you can track everything, you can show what percentage of those leads came from marketing and the revenue they generated. When it comes to salespeople, it's all about the numbers. If you can show that, you’ll make good headway.
Hannah Wesson
Brand awareness as part of a revenue marketing strategy
Do you think brand awareness as an objective has a place within a revenue marketing strategy, and if so, what's the place?
Tamana Faizi
Absolutely. I think brand awareness helps to build the credibility and authority that make people want to spend money with you in the first place. If the company is in its early stages, that should be your priority.
When Florence first started, just about a year ago, clients kept telling us that we had a great product but they’d never heard of us, so it was almost too good to be true. Then we knew we had to make our brand awareness a number one priority. That meant working with our clients to generate case studies that would let other customers know that we’re legit.
If you're in a saturated market, again, your number one goal is to establish yourself in the market as a credible supplier. If you’re quite well established as a company, but now new companies are coming along disrupting that, brand marketing becomes a priority again – it’s going to help you become number one and stay number one in your market.
How you approach brand awareness also depends on your target audience. The younger generation can find out really quickly if you're credible and authoritative, while our older personas are quite skeptical when it comes to online or digital products and services.
Nina Reschovsky
I agree with that. I also think it can be less about brand awareness and more about brand perception. Both these things are important, although they're hard to track.
It's about finding a balance between what you’re doing on the thought leadership and awareness side and what you’re doing on the revenue generation side. You want to be able to show direct results and pipeline to your stakeholders while still doing brand awareness activities. What that balance looks like is very dependent on the stage of the company and what your goals are.
Paul Campilo
Top marketing tips
Tamana Faizi
What would be your top marketing tip for marketers at any stage?
Nina Reschovsky
Get really aligned with your sales team. As much as B2B marketers sometimes hate to hear it, the ultimate key to success in B2B business is aligning on targeting, positioning, and messaging at all stages of the funnel.
Tamana Faiz
My top tip is to make sure you're able to track your activities. Sometimes we get so distracted with just executing and doing all these fun things that when comes to the end of the quarter, we're like, “We definitely did a lot – we just don't know how well it did.” Then all your efforts go to waste because you can't justify any of it. You don’t want that to happen, so track everything.
