Early B2B Marketing Is About Sales Enablement, Not Lead Gen

We walk into a drab conference room on the third floor of a non-descript office building in an office park in suburbia. In front of us sit three members of one of the biggest VCs in the region.

"What will you spend the money on?" one of them asks, referring to their potential investment in us.

"Marketing, to generate more leads." we reply.

What might you spend the money on?

When I ask this question to pitching founders, "marketing, to generate more leads" is almost universally the response. Marketing is expensive, and often drives the decision to raise outside capital in the first place. But is it the best area to spend funds on?

Because it's traditionally thought of as driving the top of the funnel (mmm... TOFU), the logic is the more you spend on marketing, the more leads you'll get, and the more revenue you'll generate. Makes sense.

The problem is this assumption doesn't hold true in the early days of the business. It's piggybacking on the "build it and they will come" fallacy, i.e. the only thing that's between you and your customers is their lack of awareness. Once they become aware, they'll be throwing bags of money at you. The reality is many businesses are already well aware of you, but still aren't compelled to take the next step.

We went through two marketing agencies and a PR agency, all of whom were focused on raising our company profile and organic discovery. Paid search, social media, blog posts, SEO, webinars, direct mail, print ads, PR, landing pages, automated forms... we tried it all. And all of it sort of worked! But no one thing was moving the needle at a pace we were happy with.

We looked at Hubspot's marketing strategy and assumed that's the way we were supposed to do it. What we weren't aware of is the almost-decade that their sales reps spent toiling away, trying to convince the world that marketing automation is not just a thing, but a thing worth buying. Only then did their lead generation machine take hold. When getting started, we needed to be prepared to toil away. No amount of marketing-based lead gen would have changed that. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have invested in marketing.

Questions to ask

Before proceeding with an alternative approach, we didn't know what the right one would be until we answered the following questions with 95% confidence:

1. Are you sub-10mm in ARR?
2. Are you in a niche with few competitors?
3. Up to this point, have most closed deals come from sales-sourced leads?
4. Is your sales cycle 3-months or longer?
5. Is the 'close' decision influenced by many buyers (economic, user, technical, coach)?
6. Do a lot of your prospects go MIA without any warning?

An alternative

If you answered 'yes' to any of the above, this alternative might make sense: marketing as a sales enablement tool. What does that mean? It means marketing's focus is to help sales to close deals that they've sourced earlier and more often. Here are just a few of the ways we've used marketing for sales enablement:

1. Creating case study and testimonial materials that reps can pass along to prospects as a "social proof."
2. Creating collateral designed for each type of buyer (economic, user, technical, coach). This compresses the sales cycle because it gets more stakeholders bought into the process more quickly.
3. Creating slide deck templates based on the prospect's unique needs. This supports the relationship-based strategic selling approach.
4. Automated drip campaigns based on the lead score of the prospect (i.e. an A-scored candidates get the full attention of a sales rep, C-scored candidates get put into a drip campaign to drive further action). This allows us to focus our sales efforts on areas that have the highest probability of a win.

All of these things ultimately frees sales to do more actual selling instead of internal busywork. In short, instead of having marketing focus exclusively on the top of the funnel, it sits squarely in the middle, making it more efficient, with sales having some involvement in the entire process.

By the way, this isn't a "one or the other" situation. To continue to scale beyond a 10mm in ARR, marketing will have to drive your leads, and the only way to find out if you're ready is to keep trying.