How to Improve Win Rates Despite Marketing Budget Cuts
Gartner’s recent survey uncovered that CMOs have seen marketing technology significantly decrease in productivity, with utilization rates falling from 58% to 42% in 2022. For this reason, 75% of marketers report being under pressure to cut MarTech spend this year to deliver better ROI. Despite marketers still investing in tech, most of it is not being utilized effectively. Cutting costs is a given these days but it must come with a change of strategy.
Evolving from Account Based to Buying Group Marketing
Changes are happening at an ever-increasing pace. With the challenging market conditions, we may be witnessing another major paradigm shift in B2B sales & marketing. Just as ABM revolutionized the classic B2B marketing approach, we are now seeing the next evolution of it – shifting from the level of account-based to Buying Group Marketing (BGM – yes, another acronym) within target accounts.
With BGM, we consider and build journeys not for ICPs, industries, or accounts, but rather for the buying committee within accounts. Understanding the needs and journeys of people within those groups differ, we still need to support each of them as much as possible. For example: “Economic Buyers” are more interested in certain aspects (like ROI, economic analysis, or how to get through those tough conversations with the CFO), while “The Practitioner/User” may be interested in compatibility with the stack and product/service capabilities.
BGM Outperforming Classic ABM approach
After experimenting with this approach over the past several months internally and with our customers, and, updating our own platform to better suit this approach (more on that below), here are some initial stats from the start of the year across our different accounts:
Engagement Uplift – we’ve seen an average of 3.4X increase in the average page reads of optimized journeys that engaged with BGM-level campaigns and personalization compared to those that didn’t.
Conversion Rate Uplift – on the conversion to business goals, we’ve seen a 14.1X difference in the average conversion rates between BGM optimized journeys to non-optimized.
Aligning Tech Spend with Strategy, not just ROI
Going back to what we opened with: How to improve win rates while saving costs in your martech spend? First, re-examine your current strategy – there is no chance to succeed if you plan on executing the playbooks of yesteryear just with fewer resources.
One solution is to re-strategize and prioritize increasing the win rate of opportunities through better support of the journeys of the Buying Group. See which tools in your stack are necessary for supporting BGM and work from there to align budget, plan, and team. It’s always worth reminding – tools are nothing without the right team, and the right team is nothing without the right strategy.
As part of our work on Buying Group Marketing, we’ve just released Streams an easy, cost-effective way for keeping every person in your buying group on track. For more information and to get started on a free POC get in touch here.
