Instead of more new year’s predictions, we present another post on the imperatives B2B executives must address in 2011 to optimize and evolve their business:

• Relative Targeting. With fast-growing economies in Latin America, pragmatic US and EMEA markets, and Asia/Pacific continuing to evolve, the question every CMO asks themselves is “where can I be more successful?” Relative targeting is an exercise to determine which markets, products and audiences you’ll be most successful with. It’s kind of a cold shower to determine where you can really win and where you need to invest, but essential for effective planning. To Do: Relative targeting exercise with heavy sales engagement.
• Alignment. How is your head of sales doing? Right now he or she is knee deep in kicking off their new year and marketing is probably not on the top of their list. So what put’s the “and” in “sales and marketing?” Being able to describe marketing plans in the context of the sales challenges is the most effective way to demonstrate how marketing has listened and where they can have an impact. As an example, if you were to look at each sales segment (major accounts, enterprise, SMB, channel and ecommerce) and show the marketing “menu” of programs available, it will be more meaningful than seeing a list of programs without any context. To Do: Structure marketing programs in a sales framework to allow them to see what it means specifically to them.
• Website Optimization. If 58% of leads are coming from the web and this will accelerate during the next five years, how are you leveraging your web properties to your advantage? Inbound marketing (particularly social media marketing) and website content optimization are critical success factors for today and more so into the future. The implication suggests the skills required in marketing, the ability to integrate social media into the tactic mix, the tools we use, and how we create and manage content are moving to a new paradigm — if you’re not on a path to restructuring your web strategy you will be late to the game. To Do: Evaluate your web strategy — properties, skills, processes and tools — and build a 2015 roadmap.
• Organization Interlock. Most CMO’s are in search for the perfect organizational structure. How can I organize to maximize efficiency, cost and impact? The reality is the organizational model of the past was linear with processes that went from function to function. The new model requires considerably more collaboration. Organizational effectiveness is all about how functions interlock within the marketing organization and across the rest of the enterprise. To Do: Develop cross-function marketing groups with specific responsibilities establishing clear interlock plans.
• Enablement. If demand generation was the wave in B2B marketing for the last five years, coming up quickly is enablement. Marketing’s role in accelerating pipeline, targeted account marketing and providing sales with the tools (particularly relevant, useful content) they need has moved from an ancillary set of activities to more strategic. To Do: Implementing and measuring enablement should start now; establishing marketing’s role, fostering the sales/marketing relationship and charting pipeline velocity will be critical for the future.

Products like Alexa (owned by Amazon.com) Google Analytics or Compete are interesting tools for high-level marketing metrics. They measure basics like web visits, page views etc. and do a fairly good “arial” view of what’s happening on a web site. But are these tools relevant to sales?

We’ve found a deeper view is needed to make this information relevant to sales. The web pages your prospects visit, how they got there, and how often they come back tell you a great deal about their interests and when they may be ready to make a purchase. By augmenting your web analytics with lead tracking capabilities, you can identify individual prospects by name, (even before they fill out a form) and see what pages they visit. You can track their relevant behavior, assign a score to it and pass the information to sales real-time.

Sales insights such as these allow you to build much richer, deeper prospect profiles. Now your sales team has a reason to call their prospects and they are able to more minutely tailor their pitch to meet each prospect’s individual needs based on what pages they visited.