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While you probably won’t get your mouth washed out with soap by using a marketing and sales funnel strategy, your revenue generation machine is likely not as effective as it could be.
Today’s enterprise sales are anything but linear. Using a model like a funnel, where leads progress through successive, linear stages, might be helpful in some scenarios. However, this model is overly simplistic for today’s highly complex procurement processes within enterprises. In fact, the funnel’s oversimplification can work against success.
Here’s why the revenue generation paradigm needs to shift and what you can do to accelerate growth—even in lean times.
The enterprise sale is complicated
Antiquated methodology suggests that marketing works on their side of the funnel and sales on theirs, with these distinct efforts culminating in a sale—game over, cha-ching. However, revenue generation in enterprise sales has many moving parts, making success more of an art than a science. Here are some of the components that add to the complexity.
The rise of buying committees. Enterprise purchase decisions are now being made by cross-functional committees. The size of these buying committees has roughly doubled in the last decade, averaging six to 10 members, according to Gartner. Naturally, as the buying committee grows, the sales cycles tend to take longer. In fact, Challenger reports that each additional member of a buying committee reduces the odds of making a sale. The odds drop from 80% with a single buyer to 31% or less with a buying committee of five or more. However, marketing can help turn this around by supporting multithreading, a concept that expands relationship-building beyond the key players to include all buying committee members.
Understanding the different personas within these committees—CIO, CMO, legal, procurement and more—is critical to do this successfully. Each committee member has unique requirements, timelines and influences in the decision-making process; making a sale is no longer about convincing a single decision-maker.
New revenue opportunities after the sale. Sales opportunities exist long after a prospect becomes a customer. One strategy to increase your success in a downturn is by working with existing customers—understanding their challenges and needs and designing solutions that will increase revenue through greater sales volume, upgrades or expansion into new products and services. If marketing’s involvement drops off at the funnel’s marketing qualified lead (MQL) stage, there are missed opportunities to help your organization grow.
