How do B2B Advertising Teams Work with Sales?
There’s two models for modern B2B marketing orgs: sales led growth and product led growth (see an article on the differences here).
This article focuses only on sales led growth - how marketing and sales can work hand in hand. Specifically, because we’re advertising specialists, this article discusses how advertisers can work most effectively with sales teams to drive revenue.
When To Use Different Marketing Strategies
As a general rule, the fewer decision-makers in the target market you’re going after, the more marketing supports sales. The more decision-makers in your target market, the more sales support marketing.
What do we mean by this?
When Marketing Support Sales
If your target market is enterprise, especially the Fortune 500, you have relatively few key decision makers who can buy your product. You’re very likely to have under 50,000 or even 10,000 decision makers that you’re targeting.
Sales is typically the main character with this kind of target market because it’s very possible for a sales team to be assigned to every individual in this group and have the bandwidth to reach out to them successfully. These are generally high-touch and long-term sales cycles that require a lot of sales effort.
In other words, sales is the part of the team responsible for getting a direct response from high-level decision-makers.
But that doesn’t mean marketing can’t be a powerful support tool.
How can you support an enterprise sales team with ads?
When you have a number of accounts your sales team is already assigned to, one of the best methods of support is account-based marketing (ABM) using LinkedIn ads.
The case for ABM is: you only have so many accounts to go after. When a sales team actively pursues a company or vertical, those companies will be more likely to respond if your brand is top of mind. You can serve advertisements and content to this target audience in particular and measure results based on overall lift in performance.
Why use LinkedIn advertising as part of your ABM strategy? LinkedIn has:
More than 750M professionals on the platform worldwide
The ability to target your ideal customers using given information about their role, company, and seniority level
Opportunity to hit the target list when they are in a business mindset
With other channels, there might be some business-focused content and activity, but overall, there are hundreds of other competing topics. LinkedIn is solely focused on business—and that means users are more likely to be receptive to your B2B messaging.
There’s a lot more to it, but for the details, see our full guide to ABM + an on-demand webinar going over the topic.
When Sales Supports Marketing
When targeting scalable B2B audiences with over 200,000 decision makers, sales typically supports the marketing team. This is usually the case when your target market is contractors, SMBs, mid-market companies, or a mix of the above.
For these companies, sales is another part of the conversion funnel but not the primary driver of handraisers.
Generally a lead starts by seeing an ad. The lead then:
Visits your landing page.
Fills out a form.
Sales converts the user who’s raised their hand by filling out the form.
Your sales team in this scenario is an important conversion step to optimize, just like you optimize your ads, your landing pages, and your forms.
The Golden Rule of Increasing Sales Team Conversion From Ads
Don’t send warm and cold leads to the same sales team if possible.
The highest quality leads are always warm, organic leads that visit your website naturally, do their research, and fill out your form.
These leads have already:
a. Done the research.
b. Convinced themselves they could use the product.
c. Anticipated a sales call.
Leads from advertising are necessarily lower quality. You’ve piqued someone’s interest in your product through search or social ads. Leads from paid search are higher intent than paid social but are still not as easy to sell as organic leads on your website.
If your sales team sells to both kinds of leads, they will prioritize warm website leads because they are easier to sell to. It’s almost two entirely different types of sales people needed for each - hunters versus gatherers. A sales team of gatherers means your expensive paid advertising leads won’t convert at the level they should.
That’s why when you reach enough scale with your ads, you should split out a team that focuses only on leads from advertising. This has several advantages:
You can train a team of hunters who are more used to dealing with leads that need more persuading.
The focus on one type of lead will help sales have more tailored conversations.
It is easier to train a single specialized sales team on how to adjust calls based on content or offers leads have downloaded.
It gives you more consistent results with less variation quarter over quarter, which finance will appreciate.
If you have an outbound team, they’re also a great fit to field paid advertising leads.
What specific rules should your advertising-focused sales team put in place?
Time to call is very important. 5 minutes to call is much more effective than one hour, which is much more effective than next day or next week.
a. This is more important in advertising because:
With paid social, the person just heard of you and clicked an ad. You are top of mind. They may not remember filling out the form in a few days.
With paid search, users often click multiple ads for multiple services. If your sales team is the second or third to call, you can get screened out.
2. Your sales team should remind people how you are, what your brand does, and how the lead heard of you.
3. Email nurture should come from the address of a sales person - not info@yourcompany.com.
How do you help the sales team in this scenario?
The big answer is qualification! No sales person wants to waste time with unqualified leads. The higher the ratio of qualified leads you send, the higher the sales team morale and efficiency.
There are four main levers to improve lead quality:
We’d recommend you start with your form - its the first line of defense against bad leads. We have a full guide to form best practices here.
That’s it for this high level summary of how marketing teams and sales teams should work together to drive revenue and growth.