The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council announced it is collaborating with WM America on a new Q4 thought leadership program. Designed to advance marketing compliance using lead revenue science, the thought Leadership initiative is an urgent response to inefficiencies in demand generation and customer engagement in a rapidly evolving, digitally driven buyer journey.
The best practice study aims to improve content-driven demand generation campaign predictability, integrity, and performance. The B2B marketing-focused initiative “Boosting Yield in the Account Marketing Field” will develop a certified Lead Evaluation and Assurance Process (LEAP) model. This will bring new transparency, accountability, and reliability to prospect verification, validation, and sales conversion.
LEAP will enable augmented actionable intelligence at scale. It will draw from the unification of data sources and AI-enabled mining of real time buyer insights, behavior, and intention-based content consumption. This expertise will build on technology in partner organizations.
“Seeding and harvesting the sales pipeline – the process of acquiring, capturing, qualifying and converting business opportunities – is essential to the growth and profitability of B2B marketers across every industry and geographic sector,” said Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council. “Customer demand generation is a mission-critical process in which companies invest heavily but are generally dissatisfied with the results.”
Neale-May points to a need for smarter buyer insight and intention based strategies and approaches in the rapidly emerging account based marketing field. These employ new AI-driven systems, resources, content, channels, and platforms for improving prospect harvesting, conversion, and yield, particularly in the B2B technology sector.
The CMO Council highlights significant shifts and changes that include:
- Globalization of corporate operations multiplying divisions, geographies, and lines of business
- Consolidation of markets both enlarging and shrinking the corporate customer base
- Extended groups of stakeholders and constituencies involved in enterprise purchasing decisions
- More cross-functional involvement and oversight; new compliance and governance considerations
- Online content sourcing and sharing with multiple buying decision-makers are central to shaping and influencing specification, consideration, and selection processes.
- Peer-to-peer interaction through professional communities providing a growing source of trusted third-party referral and affirmation
- Greater customer insight and intelligence and smarter and more productive pre-sales qualification by marketing are now essential to account-specific engagement.
- Enabling the right, targeted, and pre-qualified customers to engage with high-value, timely, relevant, and market-specific content faster and more efficiently is the biggest challenge
- More actionable “firmographic” traffic intelligence is needed to increase customer targeting precision and to minimize onerous form-filling activities which reduce response rates and qualified lead flow
- Delivering the right message to known customer prospects at the right time boosts the performance of business conversion and reduces engagement and selling cycles.
The new initiative will audit and assess where and how B2B account-based marketers can boost lead performance mapping, modeling, and measurement. This includes:
- Customer modeling, targeting, and prioritization capability
- Lead nurturing systems and lead scoring practices
- Lead obsolescence, deliverability, and decay
- Speed, efficiency, and timeliness of lead processing and qualification
- Leveraging of tools and sources for richer prospect profiling
- Moving opportunities through every stage of the selling cycle
- Rigor, discipline, and process using automation and accountability
- Cultivation, conversion, and closure disciplines and outcomes
- Conversational strategies and consultative approaches
- Volume and caliber of opportunities delivered
- Predisposition and actionability of prospects
- Selling cycle productivity and transparency
- Level of automation and qualification
- Opportunity quality, conversation ability, revenue potential
- Use of social media in multiplying effectiveness
- Pipeline visibility and funnel effectiveness
- Measurements of lead value – cost-per-lead, cost-per-opportunity, cost-per-deal
Championing a certified Lead Evaluation and Assurance Process (LEAP) will be a new strategic focus area for the CMO Council in 2024. It will help marketers and their media and agency partners improve campaign performance and business outcomes. The CMO Council’s Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness (CLOSE) and Content ROI Center will participate, along with the Business Performance Innovation (BPI Network).