While marketing automation is an important factor in being an efficient marketer, automating your buying experience with chatbots has become a popular but detrimental choice in the B2B website world. When buyers are ready to engage with your team, they want real, human connection–not to click through a virtual game of twenty questions just to be told no one is available right now, try again later. 

But, this battle of the bots can actually work in your favor–all it takes for your B2B website to stand out is creating a more human experience. 

Take it from some of the top CMOs in the tech industry and learn how to rethink your marketing program, figure out what your buyer actually wants, and create a more human experience, right on your website. 

If we aren’t being helpful, then what are we doing?

Your first step to generating more pipeline, is to rethink how marketing fits into your overall organization. We know, that sounds overwhelming, but Dave Kellogg, who helped guide Business Objects to a $6.8 billion exit in 2007, lays it out clearly for us: 

“As a board member, if I could only receive two employee-related numbers to judge the success of a company, it would be the number of code-writing developers and quote-carrying salespeople. It’s a two-engine plane. We build stuff and we sell stuff, everybody else is here to help.” 

That can be a little jarring as a marketer–where do you fit on the two-engine plane? 

It’s not a demotion, marketing exists to help get people onto the plane. Without a marketing program, no one even knows the airline exists, but it’s time to think of your marketers in terms of revenue and pipeline generated, not as just a creative department that fulfills the sales team’s requests. 

More importantly, it’s time to focus on marketing and sales alignment. Marketing teams have the power to interpret what sales needs, run experiments, and guide sales team’s requests to align with the overall company strategy. 

I practice sales connection to a degree that surprises some people. The CMO should be locked at the hip with the CRO. They should pick up each others’ calls. They should take a proverbial bullet for each other in the boardroom.” 

–Dave Kellogg, Principal, Kellogg Consulting

It’s time to rethink our roles as marketers and aim to be the best guides for our sales teams as possible. As a marketer, stop, reflect, and ask: how much more might we all achieve together if we made sales the hero, did less, and focused on easing the sale? 

What do buyers actually want?

Contently recently found that marketers waste 19% of their budget on inefficient projects, 65% of content goes pretty much unused, and 77% of buyers believe that it’s getting harder to actually buy from companies because of the friction between them and sales teams. 

If you really want to stand out in the B2B world, you have to prioritize understanding before doing. 

Randy Frisch, Chief Content Experience Evangelist at Uberflip, encourages his marketing team to ask this question: 

“What do people actually care about? That’s the content we should create. If you look at the content created by the stakeholders in your organization, I think you’ll realize you can actually get away with creating a lot less, if it were better.” 

Connecting your content, programs, microcopy, and calls to action to the actual things that your buyers care about will help you keep the scope of your marketing programs in the realm of efficiency, and prevent aspiration from taking over and creating content no one actually needs. 

Buyer research is critical. You have to be aligned on what your buyers actually want before you can be the solution to their problems. 

The power of the connected website

Once you’ve realigned on where your marketing program fits into your organization and identified what your audience actually wants from you, it’s time to bring it full circle by providing a more human experience that gives buyers what they need when they need it. 

Suzanne Kounkel, CMO of Deloitte Consulting, put it this way: 

The website used to fill a niche… it was a brochure. But during the pandemic, ours grew into a good place to publish, listen to our clients, create role-based content, and nurture. People increasingly went to research there.” 

–Suzanne Kounkel, CMO of Deloitte Consulting

You can do this by creating personalized website journeys that serve buyers content that relates to who they are and where they are in the buying cycle. Instead of a generic brochure with tons of unnecessary content, you can leverage the right technology to identify who a visitor on your site is, what they’ve already seen, and what they might need to know next. 

Focus your marketing tech stack on tools that allow you to create a personal and on-demand experience. The Pipeline Cloud, for example, leverages intent and research data to work with your Salesforce instance to identify when accounts are heating up and ready to start talking to sales. 

And when they are ready to talk to sales, it couldn’t be easier for both buyers and sellers to connect using Qualified Conversations–your sellers have all of the historical data needed to know exactly what a visitor has engaged with, and your buyer doesn’t have to fill out a form or wait for someone to reach out. 

They can meet right on the website, in just a click, and have a live chat, video, or voice call–it doesn’t get more human than that. 

Are you ready to create a more connected, human-centric experience? Read the full eBook, Learn to Grow Your Pipeline From Industry Titans here, or see the magic for yourself and chat with someone on our team right here on the site. 

We’re ready to chat in the lower right-hand corner 👋