3 Best Practices for B2B Product Marketers To Navigate Today’s Business Landscape
Learn from Sridhar Ramanathan the key challenges of B2B product marketers in today’s business landscape and the best practices to navigate the landscape successfully.
Enterprise B2B marketing professionals and sales teams are working overtime to adapt to a fast-changing business landscape. Here, Sridhar Ramanathan, co-founder and COO, Aventi Group, discusses key challenges for product marketers and best practices to navigate the landscape successfully.
Enterprise B2B marketing professionals and sales teams are working overtime to adapt to a rapidly changing business environment.
For starters, prompted by the pandemic, 75% of people have changed their buying habits, according to McKinsey. As part of this, 39% of buyers have purchased from new brands — a disruptive trend since nearly 80% of them intend to continue exploring their options.
As a result, B2B sales teams are changing their approach as they look to convert leads to drive revenue and outpace the competition. These efforts are supported by enterprise product marketing departments, which were already taxed before the pandemic raised the stakes and accelerated existing problems.
Such challenges are captured by our new survey of senior decision-makers, from C-suite to director levels within B2B technology organizations, which found that many product marketing teams are understaffed and underfunded at a time when product marketing is more important than ever to drive revenue growth initiatives. According to the survey findings, sales enablement, go-to-market (GTM) strategy, and product launches are the top priorities for product marketers in 2022.
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However, these outcomes are often undermined by a lack of resources for sales enablement, content development, and strategy implementation.
In other words, product marketing leaders have a difficult job right now. For these leaders and their teams, three best practices can guide their efforts in today’s rapidly changing business environment:
Properly Resource Product Marketing Teams
Persistent hiring challenges coupled with the effects of the Great Resignation have made it more difficult for product marketing leaders to fill their teams with top talent. As a result, 57% of product marketing teams report that they need to add resources or reduce projects to support sales enablement goals adequately, according to the survey.
Staffing shortages are unleashing a variety of consequences across marketing teams, and the repercussions can be significant, including:
- Low team morale or team burn-out (63%)
- Ineffective campaigns or launches (56%)
- Attrition of highly skilled team members (40%)
- Inability to achieve revenue goals (36%)
Unfortunately, opening the door to new hires does not offer an immediate solution. Nearly 50% of marketing executives surveyed say hiring new people can drag on for four to six months or more. Meanwhile, the Great Resignation is accelerating the number of people changing jobs, resulting in many marketing-team leaders investing time and energy in dealing with turnover.
Regardless, to properly equip product marketing teams, leaders will need to open more requisitions and hire more permanent staff to support business growth.
Leverage Outside Resources to Bridge the Gap
About 67% of the product-marketing executives polled indicated that staff shortages and too many projects are hindering their ability to produce the quality results they desire. When hiring challenges and staff turnover exacerbate these problems, companies are increasingly turning to outside expertise and resources to support their efforts.
For example, nearly 90% of the survey respondents plan to use external expertise to help execute product marketing initiatives in 2022.
When outsourcing such talent, product marketing teams are looking to achieve two key outcomes: First, according to the survey findings, leveraging outside resources would help them achieve a faster time to market. Secondly, such resources would also help them meet or even exceed their marketing objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs).
What are the most tangible outcomes of expanding resources in this way? When armed with the right resources, 63% of the surveyed marketing executives said they would create more dynamic, robust content for their sales and marketing teams. About 60% would invest resources to develop strong, targeted messaging and positioning. Both these components are highly critical to supporting the sales cycle.
Bottom line, those organizations that leverage external expert partners to effectively fill the void in their human capital, especially in light of today’s hiring and retention dilemmas, further enable the greater agility and rapid scalability that are increasingly essential for today’s dynamic and fast-moving product marketing initiatives and campaigns.
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Develop a Robust GTM Plan
Regardless of the mode or medium, marketing should drive sales by cultivating leads and providing content collateral that guides prospects through the sales funnel.
Collectively, 61% of product marketers view sales enablement as their top priority, followed closely by GTM strategy. Many B2B marketers emphasize tactical elements, like email templates, presentation decks, and social media assets, so developing a robust GTM plan becomes even more critical. It is the foundational investment that makes all other areas of marketing work. This includes:
- Identifying and refining target personas and pain points
- Establishing a product or solution’s messaging and value proposition
- Creating a start-to-finish campaign plan that accounts for activities such as events, email marketing, and content syndication
When marketing teams need to deliver, the right GTM plan can turn aspirations into realities, ensuring that marketers and salespeople are as effective as possible.
A Time To Change and Adapt
Enterprise B2B marketing professionals are navigating a uniquely challenging operational environment. The stakes are high, and the outcomes imperative, making it especially critical that they use the right tool for the right job. By properly resourcing their teams, leveraging outside resources, and developing a robust GTM strategy, product marketing managers can ensure that these tools are always ready to be deployed when they are needed most.
What best practices are you following to navigate today’s fast-changing business environment? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Image Source: Shutterstock
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