Why do quarterly B2B campaigns have no impact?

June 30, 2010

It takes a long time to gain a new customer. An ‘average sales cycle’ in B2B can be 3 months, 6 months or even 24 months. Industries vary but whatever speed the sales-cycles moves at Marketing needs to keep supplying more leads.

So press on with the campaign planned for this quarter? Isn’t that a contradiction –quarterly campaigns for long-sales cycles?

Firstly, the sales team don’t pay much attention to new leads given to them in the last month of the quarter – they are busy closing existing opportunities.
..and your industry average sales cycle’ is 9 months nothing you do in this quarter will have any impact on revenue.

As a seasoned B2B Marketer you know that there is too much emphasis on quarterly activities. How can campaigns designed for just one quarter fill a gap in the revenue pipeline? The sales (or lack of) that drop this quarter are the result of the choices and activities already completed months ago.

Old school marketers will carry on generating activity at the top of the sales funnel and passing leads onto sales. The buyer’s journey was always long and complex. What’s new?

Buyers are spending more and more time on the internet before they stick their hand up and ask to meet a sales person. Branding and positioning occupies the front-end of the cycle. That’s where marketing is most comfortable. Another comfort zone is in the latter stages of the buyer’s journey. The buyer has made up their mind to purchase, spoken to a few vendors and is now shopping around to ensure they got a good deal. Offering ‘deep-discounts’ to buyers whose solution concept has already been formed by your competitors is a ‘lose-lose’ scenario.

The middle of the buyer’s journey has a gap. Marketing needs to put in a bigger shift in conditioning and nurturing leads who are not yet ready to buy from you. Here’s why? Sirius Decision found that 80% of the leads disqualified by sales buy within 24 months. Progress those buyers along the journey or lose them to competitors.

So how long should the journey be? A nine month campaign for a 9 month sales cycle seems sensible? This only works if every buyer starts the journey at same time. They never do (and remember sales don’t bother them the last month of every quarter anyway).

My good friend Hugh MacFarlane author of ‘The Leaky Funnel’ recommends Marketers build campaigns that last very much longer than the buying cycle. As a rule of thumb he suggests that your campaigns need to last 4 times longer than your buying cycle. So using the 9 month example, then we’d need a 3-year campaign.

Yes a 3 year campaign! Campaigns that last this long create a shorter funnel length

A nurture cycle lasts a long time, and a buy cycle can start at any time.

This is rhythmic marketing! A rhythm tactic can be repeated over and over again, slowly moving the buyer along, without scaring them off. It’s a tactic that nurtures your buyers until they are willing to accept that that they have the problem you solve, and want to engage. That’s when they enter your sales funnel.

Want to see how to do it? Download this WhitePaper “5 Steps to Automate Your B2B Marketing” for some insights on how to adapt your agency to the new requirements of B2B Marketing.