What you need to know:

• 78 per cent of B2B buying decisions are initiated by the buying group, and the first seller contacted wins 82 per cent of the time according to research from Green Hat.
• MD Stuart Jaffray says B2B marketers should focus on increasing brand awareness, mental availability, brand recall, and trust to become the first choice for buyers.
• Jaffray, along with B2B marketing leaders from ABB and Logicalis, say it's time to remove Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) from the centre of every conversation. MQLs have limitations – and often come in too late – and businesses should prioritise account engagement and progression instead.
• ABB's Sophie Neate and Logicalis's Lara Barnett agree buying committees are gaining authority, and B2B buying is becoming increasingly complex, with hidden buyers influencing decisions.
• It's not that MQLs are dead says Barnett, but they are just one buying signal that marketers can use to further nurture our prospects.
• For ABB, customers prefer digital channels for engagement, with websites being the primary source for information gathering.
• Effective marketing strategies should include targeted messaging to influence various stakeholders within buying committees.
• There is a prevalent "sea of sameness" in B2B marketing; companies should invest in distinctive brand assets to stand out.
• Businesses should measure awareness and engagement metrics to refine marketing strategies and improve sales alignment.

Lacking awareness 

B2B buying groups initiate first contact in 78 per cent of buying decisions, says Green Hat managing director Stuart Jaffray, drawing the results of data from research conducted earlier this year.  Plus, he stresses, "82 per cent of the time, the first seller that they reach out to is the one that wins their business. And 81 per cent of the time, the winning vendor was already known by the majority of the buying group."

"The implications of this are clear. The primary objective for B2B marketers should be to increase buying propensity, and you do this by expanding brand awareness, increasing mental availability, growing brand recall, and growing brand building, or growing brand trust. So put simply, you're making your business easy to buy from. You need to get this right so that your organisation is the first one the buyers call when they are ready to do business."

Green Hat's Research is one of a clutch of studies this year that challenge the conventional wisdom of B2B marketing in Australia. Earlier this year Bain and LinkedIn noted the role of “hidden buyers on buying committees” who influence half of the purchase process and have very different requirements from target buyers while a Dentsu B2B highlighted how buyers see almost no differentiation between brands but believe instead they are swimming in a sea of sameness.

Likewise global research by US firm 6Sense across 900 cross-category B2B buyers – which spurred Green Hat's own deep dive – found almost exactly the same issues.

The themes are consistent; B2B buying is becoming more complex, buying committees are garnering more authority, and just as importantly, brand marketing is reasserting itself as B2B marketers respond to myriad critical shifts in customer behaviour.

And the corollary; when we spoke to Jaffray, along with B2B marketing leaders from industrial giant, and the Australian arm of global IT services giant Logicalis, the process of obsessively chasing marketing qualified leads each quarter to fill a spreadsheet and meet some KPIs is being left behind by marketers who have found a better way, and have the data to prove it.

Vale MQLs

Marketing qualified leads, or MQLs, are a pervasive measure in B2B marketing but they have serious limitations says Jaffray, who offers three, but says there are more. "We could talk for hours about this," he suggests, with the world-weariness of a man who has had the same conversation with clients many times over.

“Firstly, we know that B2B buying decisions are made by groups, not individuals.”

He gives the example of a B2B sales team being handed a lead from a very large client (it’s a fictional example). “The business gets excited. It's Coles. It's a big account, so they start chasing down Coles. While that's happening, five members of a buying group from Woolworths are engaging with content on your website, but 97 per cent or more of your web visitors, they don't fill out a form. It's anonymous, so you continue to chase down Coles because one person filled out a form and while you're doing that, you're missing the genuine buying signals that are coming from Woolworths.”

The second limitation is all about timing, he says.

“[A B2B] buying journey takes on average 13 months. So let's say the customer is interested in a piece of gated content on the site. He fills out a form at the start of the buying group's 13-month journey. He’s an MQL soon, because he's filled out a form, so sales start their outreach process."

But in this case, the early bird doesn't catch the worm.

"The customer’s buying group is at the start of their buying journey, they don't want to talk to sales. They're not interested. So the sales development rep eventually gives up and closes out the lead – because he started talking to the customer too early. Coles was going to go on and make a purchase, but you've missed it because of when you actually started talking to them in your process.”

The third limitation has to do with the nature of MQLs themselves.

“When we call a lead an MQL, what we're basically saying to the organisation is that 'marketing's qualified it, but we're not really sure. We think that they might be interested in buying something for us, but we can't work it out, so let's give it to sales. Sales can have a look at it, and sales can tell us if they're right or wrong, or if we're right or wrong'.”

This process debases marketing's role in the organisation, says Jaffray.

“I'm okay with B2B marketers using it as a measure, but not as the measure.”

Shaper signals

To break the dependency on MQLs Jaffray suggests reporting on account engagement and account progression, and then over time "demonstrate to the business that these are much stronger indicators of buying intent, and therefore much better things to be measuring and optimising towards”.

It's a path that is familiar to ABB’s global digital marketing and content boss, Sophie Neate.

“When I first started off my marketing career, I was all about MQLs, I lived and breathed it.”

But over time, it became clear MQLs were sucking up all the oxygen without commensurately increasing business cardio intensity. 

“You need to focus on other opportunities such as sales-attributed opportunities as well. We no longer utilise MQLs as a KPI and instead focus on those other opportunities,” says Neate.

"We don't hand over marketing qualified leads. We have a scoring system. We also focus on sales-qualified leads. So they go through a screening process. They go first to our customer contact centre, which screens the leads, and then the sales get the actual qualified lead."

She thinks the approach better aligns sales and marketing, and "strengthens that relationship, because we have that process in place".

Recounting an earlier conversation with team members, Lara Barnett, the head of marketing in Australia for the global technology-managed service provider Logicalis jokes, “I recently said to someone that for Halloween, I might go as the MQL, because it's dead.”

Though she accepts "dead" is probably an overstatement. 

“What I would say is that it's a buying signal that we can leverage and utilise as marketers to further nurture our prospects.”

“What we do at Logicalis is we pass on to sales the 'hand raisers' as we call them [i.e. initial inbound customer contacts]. And what that does is not only makes a better experience for the customer, which obviously we're all pushing towards, it also improves our relationship with sales. Because what sales team member wants to go calling down a list of people who downloaded a white paper or attended an event?

“They don't. It's really about improving that relationship and passing on real quality leads that will actually convert.  We make their life easier and we can support each other as two different functions on the same team.”

Both Neate and Barnett have fresh research they can call on to confirm their approaches.

According to Neate, the company recently conducted research into customer buying behaviour to better inform them of the impact of marketing strategies.

“We found that customers are increasingly engaging with brands online, and have a strong preference for digital channels over traditional ones. Social media, email, and search engines all play a critical role in their buying journey.”

The research showed how important the website is in the customer journey, proving to be the most important initial source. It came first at 60 per cent, followed by sales reps at 53 per cent and industry peers at 51 per cent.

If 60 per cent of customers are using the website "as a main source of information gathering”, that reinforces the importance of digital marketing and focus resource allocation on content, social media and SEO as well as paid digital campaigns to bring them in.

Neate also says personalisation and tailored experiences are also key to increasing engagement and conversion.

The power of many

The ability to identify and influence key members of the committee is therefore essential. But there is an element of chicken and egg: Neate believes you don’t really understand the membership of buying committees until after a sale is made.

“We map key stakeholders, like decision-makers, influencers, end users, procurement teams, and ambassadors through sales conversations, customer visits, and past insights. Then we rank the influence and tailor our marketing initiatives accordingly.”

To educate buying groups, ABB uses targeted messaging workshops and continuous engagements, such as utilising digital channels to align them with its value proposition.

“We then track the engagement metrics to refine our approach, ensuring key influencers are informed and involved throughout the entire process.”

Explain funnel, get backed

Logicalis’s Barnett acknowledges the complexity of B2B buying cycles, but suggests approaches can be simplified if B2B brands' own stakeholder committees – i.e. finance, sales and everybody else with a say on budget allocation – can be shown one key metric, i.e. how brand awareness can do a lot of heavy lifting within target customers' own buying committees.

She's channeled the work of Thomas Barta, of the Marketing Leadership Institute, who acknowledges while the marketing funnel is by no means perfect, it's the best tool marketers have to get CEOs and CFOs on board.

“It's really simple. If you show the funnel to anyone in your business they can understand it. They can understand if a certain percentage of the market is aware of you, and then another percentage of that market would consider you as an option, and then the other another percentage prefer you. Then you can start to look at optimisation points within that funnel to really clearly see how increasing the number of people who are aware of you increases revenue … at the other end of the funnel, even when all the other conversion points stay the same."

Barnett ran the numbers to prove the hard dollar impact of brand investment on demand growth.

“We commissioned a brand study to find out what our conversion numbers actually were. We recognised after that study that our optimisation point is that awareness piece – and that if we could increase our awareness even just one per cent that's actually a number of million of dollars at the end of the of the funnel.”

The impact was striking.

“Once you prove the point it creates a kind of fever in the business where we know the brand awareness is our optimisation point.”

It delivers clarity from the top to the bottom of the business, she said, and helps focus B2B minds on the brand aspect of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's 95:5 rule, which suggests only 5 per cent of B2B customers are in market at any one time, therefore selling to the other 95 per cent will be a waste of time – because they are not ready to buy. But that building brand awareness and salience will pay off in the long run, putting brands in prime position when that buying committee starts to convene in earnest. Or at least, giving them a fighting chance of being considered.

“That's really the goal,” says Barnett. So the firm measured on a campaign per campaign basis and found that only 21 per cent of the addressable market was aware of Logicalis. I.e. it could therefore only ever stand a chance in fewer than a fifth of potential buying decisions.

Taking those results to key stakeholders helped quantify what many with in the business instinctively knew – and helped focus minds.

“Funnily enough, I didn't find much resistance," she says.

Brand signals

Then comes the challenge of taking effective brand action in a market where plenty of research suggests brands are struggling to cut through; The LinkedIn-backed B2B Institute has found 71 per cent of B2B ads are a waste of money, attracting zero attention and delivering zero sales impact; Dentsu research has underlined that brands are drowning in a "sea of sameness".

Barnett tested that theory within its own research.

“One of the questions we asked was, ‘What advertising from managed service providers (MSPs) do you recall seeing in the last 12 months? Really importantly, 57 per cent of respondents said they didn't recall seeing any advertising from any of the 16 we have on the list of MSPs from the last 12 months, which is incredible.”

“So there is a sea of sameness, but also that sameness is resulting in nothingness. Everyone does the same stuff for all the same trade shows.”

One of the ways that Logicalis sought to address was to focus on different styles of brand activations rather than just doing what Barnett calls “the safe thing.” 

Gartner Symposium is one of the most important third-party live events tech brands participate at and this year Logicalis entered into a partnership with McLaren Formula One. “We put our logo on a McLaren and set that out the front [of the show] for the duration of the event.

“We've also then brought out a brand campaign called Game Changers, where we really shown or elevated the profiles of our customers as our advocates and to tell their stories and to give them a platform. These are really incredible people that we work with every day and we put them forward as our brand advocates.”

“Our people are our products because we're a service business. That customers experience, and having them talking about it is much more valuable at the end of the day,” she says.

ABB meanwhile is doubling down on personalisation of its messaging and content to hit the different needs of buyers within the buying group – from the C-suite to technical experts to end users, says Neate.

“By delivering targeted, relevant information through digital channels and ensuring consistent messaging across the multiple touch points, we can influence the entire buying group, and guide them from awareness to decision, and after-sales support, with a deeper understanding of our value proposition.”

From a content perspective, Green Hat's Jaffray thinks B2B brands can give themselves the best fighting chance of landing with prospects by "taking the last 10 RFPs that your business has been asked to complete and then ignoring all of the answers you gave. They are not important.”

It's the questions customers are asking within those RFPs that are critical to develop content around – as those questions are strong clues about what the wider buying group cares about.

“If you develop content and promote that content, and ensure that that content is strongly and distinctively branded, the buying group will search for that information. You will help to educate them ... Hopefully, you're the first one that they start to talk to.”

He nods to the ongoing debate around distinction (focusing on making the brand easily recognisable) and differentiation (focusing on product features or benefits versus rivals). While Professor Byron Sharp has been banging the drum for distinctive assets for years, Jaffray says that B2B firms haven't yet twigged. 

“The mistake that we often see businesses make is to invest in differentiating their product or service. But in doing so, they make it impossible for buying groups to compare them, and therefore they're making themselves high too hard to buy from.”

Instead, he says, “Invest in creating those strong, distinctive brand assets and then deploy them consistently across their ideal customer profile (ICP) or target account list (TAL) to increase brand awareness and recall.”