Scaling Success: B2B Marketing, Product & Digital Strategies for Growth

(Part 1 of 5)

In today’s dynamic business environment, organizations must continuously adapt and innovate to stay ahead of the competition. Alexander Group’s new research report, Scaling Success: B2B Marketing, Product, & Digital Strategies for Growth, provides a comprehensive overview of five key initiatives to accelerate growth goals.

Research Participants

• 215+ Survey Responses from Marketing Executives
• 35+ Interviews with B2B Marketing Executives
• 50+ Client Engagements

Insights across technology, manufacturing and distribution, healthcare, life sciences, business services and financial services industries

Executive Summary

The research dives into the organizational structures and performance insights to drive growth through:

1. Scaling a marketing, product and digital organization by aligning resources with customer, product and industry segments to increase effectiveness.
2. Determining the talent, roles and competencies by evaluating and assigning talent internally to the right job and cover gaps with external talent.
3. Generating and fulfilling demand through a balance of high volume and account-based marketing.

Accordingly, 72% of research participants are increasing marketing investments across product, digital and demand generation. With 98% of buyers expecting a seamless physical and digital interaction, marketing, product and digital impact all points along the buyer journey. 52% of marketing leaders are tasked to lead the deployment of product, sales and service resources across customer needs. Overall, marketing leaders cite generating demand, driving conversion and improving customer experience as the main organizational growth goals with the following five key initiatives to accelerate growth:

1. Organizing for Growth
2. Achieving Functional Excellence
3. Enhancing Product Commercialization Strategy
4. Expanding Digital Coverage
5. Optimizing Demand Generation

In part 1 of 5 of this article series, we will highlight the first initiative to accelerate these growth goals, organizing for growth.

Organizing for Growth

Companies with efficient organizations grow twice as fast, but for marketing teams to drive efficiency and meet the demands of internal and external partners they need to be synchronized across the marketing ecosystem. This translates to a need for alignment across demand generation, customer marketing, marketing operations, field marketing, content and strategy development, marcom/creative/public relations, product marketing and product management. Mature marketing organizations differentiate roles by function and segment and scale the marketing organization by evolving from generalists to specialists, reducing agency reliance and aligning structures to overcome silos.

Business objectives should dictate marketing functional investments. As an example, to drive awareness, marketing functions like brand, creative, marketing intelligence and research should be primary investment areas to attract and engage a wide audience and build brand awareness. Investments in a robust marketing technology stack can enhance team efficiency and effectiveness. Utilizing CRM systems, marketing automation tools and data analytics platforms can streamline operations and improve real-time decision-making. As the organization matures, leading firms elevate marketing as a strategic function and build functional expertise to find product-market fit and drive revenue growth.

There is also a need for evaluating and assigning talent internally to the right job and covering gaps with external talent. Overall, most companies use at least three factors to determine the headcount of their marketing organization, which may include workload (e.g., leads, campaigns), revenue/bookings, sales leadership feedback, number of business units supported and sales velocity/number of deals. In fact, on average 53% of marketing costs are allocated to programs while 47% are allocated to people. Developing in-house talent to improve internal productivity can reduce agency reliance, leading to a positive impact on time management and cost efficiency.

Case Study Example: Reducing Agency Usage to Strengthen In-House Talent

A $400MM B2B company successfully reduced marketing expenses and grew its marketing organization from 10 FTEs to 35 FTEs by integrating previously outsourced functions. The company took a two-step approach, first hiring strong marketing leadership to manage and align each marketing function and then moving external roles in-house to reduce agency usage. This approach allowed the company to have greater control, increased specialization, and improved marketing cost savings.

Part 2 of this article series will highlight the second key initiative for accelerating growth goals, achieving functional excellence.