The B2B buyer’s journey is a nonlinear process. But sellers still track deals using discrete stages in a linear sales process. This disconnect compromises pipeline analytics and sales forecasts, leaving sales managers without good information to identify risk in their sellers’ deals. 

It’s not your imagination. The B2B buyer’s journey has changed — and the changes aren’t making your job as a content marketer any easier. In truth, the buyer’s journey is becoming more complex with more people involved at every stage. According to SiriusDecisions research, half of B2B buying decisions today involve a group of people. And that percentage goes up the bigger and more complex the business.

Driven by new data, tools and technologies, the state of B2B marketing segmentation and personalization has reached an inflection point. Gone are the days where B2B marketers relied on basic, descriptive data like demographics and location to define marketing segments — a far cry from the much more sophisticated and multi-layered approach to segmentation and personalization used by B2C marketers.

Account-based marketing (ABM) that is combined with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is fast becoming the next technology game-changer for B2B marketers. But experts caution marketers should not think of it as “The Holy Grail.”

Examples and predictions about the power of ABM and AI were on full display at last week’s Marketing Innovation Summit in San Francisco, hosted by Demandbase.

For B2B companies, account-based marketing (ABM) represents a major shift in the traditional marketing focus from pure lead generation across all companies to lead generation and ongoing nurturing specifically to a named set of accounts that the sales team is also targeting.

While it has been a successful tool for top-of-funnel demand generation, predictive marketing is becoming more widely used by B2B marketers to improve engagement at all stages of the buying cycle. Companies such as Salesforce have launched new predictive marketing capabilities within their offerings, aiming to enhance the customer experience throughout the entire customer journey by embedding predictive capabilities within the marketing cloud.

Industry experts noted that the expansion of predictive beyond lead scoring and early-stage demand generation is a growing trend.

"Leaders, especially in marketing, need to be able to extract insights and make predictions based on existing and external data," said Meagan Eisenberg, CMO of MongoDB and former VP of Customer Acquisition and Marketing at DocuSign, in Demand Gen Report's 2015 Marketing Automation Outlook Guide. "Marketers also need to create efficiencies in the follow up of leads using predictive analytics and modeling to create a better scoring methodology to focus on opportunities most likely to turn into customers."

Many of the speakers at this year’s B2B Content2Conversion Conference noted that the buyer’s journey doesn’t always follow the path that marketers intend.

Marketers rely on campaigns to move buyers through the funnel, but Ardath Albee, CEO of Marketing Interactions, stated they can sometimes hinder the journey. “Campaigns are a company construct, not your buyer’s agenda,” she said. (Coverage of her session here).

Matt Papertsian, Research Director at SiriusDecisions, believes there is a wealth of untapped data that can help marketers improve content performance. He said it is time to move beyond some of the current initiatives — aligning content, understanding the buyer’s journey, building personas and leveraging campaign framework — to hone in on metrics.

We caught up with Papertsian as he prepared for his presentation at the upcoming B2B Content2Conversion Conference, titled: Developing A Content Architecture.

Bulldog Solutions, Inc. has launched Bulldog PowerPlay, which company officials describe as an integrated demand generation framework based on the buyer’s journey.

Comprised of three “plays,” the goal of the packaged solution is to enable marketers to drive a measurable impact on revenue by implementing a robust content marketing and promotion strategy at the top of the funnel, lead nurturing and conversion tools at the middle and sales enablement tools at the bottom, company officials added.

By Craig Nelson, Founder and Principal, Sales Enablement Group

In my previous Demanding Views column, I talked about delivering on the promise of sales enablement (SE). This installment will continue on the topic of SE, with a focus on mapping out the sales enablement lifecycle from a process and tools perspective.