Building an annual B2B marketing plan is no simple task. The plan must provide a strategy to transform business objectives into marketing priorities and goals, while outlining how to execute and reach those goals.
In B2B, marketing is all about supporting sales, making it easier to sell, and helping the sales team achieve the business goals. But what often ends up happening is most businesses try different marketing tactics without a clear plan and walk away with little success.
The B2B sales funnel has changed considerably within recent years. In the old school days – marketing would generate leads, pass it over to sales and hope they close the deal. Without a proper sales and marketing alignment strategy, the organization creates silos among key cross functional teams, ultimately breeding failure.
Most of the Marketing teams tend to creation of a plan that falls into one of two categories: overly complex plans that are hard to understand and therefore not actionable, or overly agile plans that create a lot of activity, but not enough business impact.
David Balazic
