I’ve attended numerous Town Halls, All Hands meetings, Annual Strategy Summits and Quarterly Business Reviews in large corporations. The purpose of these meetings was to update and align the entire company on high-level goals, performance, and strategic priorities. The problem is that each meeting was usually outlining their own version of the four pillars of excellence for the upcoming year or the three key developments to guanrantee success for the next quarter. On top of that, every company and team had their own corporate lexicon, turning these presentations into a puzzle of buzzwords and cryptic bullet points.
Rather than passively deciphering these slides, I decided to create my own Rosetta Stone. One that a marketing and sales analyst could truly understand and apply. This framework breaks down the core missions of a B2B organization into three actionable business objectives that structure the way we plan [1], drive revenue [2], and optimize performance [3] in a data-driven business environment.
1. Strategic Development
Strategic development is about planning the business. The business objective consists in defining the team’s long term direction by developing a roadmap for sustainable growth and competitive advantage. Three interconnected components drive this process: competitive intelligence, strategic planning, and product development.
Competitive Intelligence. It is Sales mission to understand market dynamics, identify market growth opportunities through penetration or expansion, and to optimize brand positioning.
Strategic Planning. When it comes to planning, it is both Sales and Marketing responsibility to align long-term business goals with achievable targets and to an effective resource allocation by using data-driven scenario forecasting and bottom-up field insights.
Product Development. The Product team manages the product mix and innovation lifecycles strategically by aligning the offering with long-term goals and customer needs.
2. Revenue Growth
Now that the business is planned, we need to run it. This means increasing the organization’s revenue by acquiring new customers and maximizing profit from existing customers. This process unfolds across five sequential missions: content creation, lead generation, lead conversion, customer acquisition, and customer retention.
Content Creation. First, Marketing crafts content with a message tailored for the audience. They also need to pick a communication style that connects to the branding. The hardest part being creating calls to action that are at the same time engaging and that align with the business goals.
Lead Generation. In the meantime, another team in the Marketing department will work on identifying and attracting high-quality prospects. They will leverage the content created by their colleagues and the Ideal Customer Profiles they will have defined to create targeted campaigns across diverse channels, and to foster brand advocacy programs.
Lead Conversion. Marketing will have another responsibility once the leads are generated. They need to nurture and engage them with several fine-tuned campaigns further shaping the customer journey. They can use predictive scoring models to prioritize converting the most valuable and already pretty engaged prospects through the marketing funnel.
Customer Acquisition. Then Sales takes over and prorgresses valuable and engaged accounts through the sales pipeline towards deal closure by prioritizing outreach efforts and selecting the right sales tactics and pricing strategies.
Customer Retention. Finally, both Marketing and Sales join efforts to prevent churn, keep existing customers engaged, and maximize their Customer Lifetime Value through targeted loyalty programs, upselling and cross-selling campaigns.
3. Performance Optimization
To properly run the business, the final business objective focuses on improving the efficiency of all functions _ from marketing, sales and finance to operations itself _ to ensure the organization achieves an optimized return on investment. This objective is driven by two key components: execution through Operational Excellence and insights through Business Analytics.
Operational Excellence. Martech & RevOps are in charge of supporting the execution of Marketing and Sales initiatives. To keep up with the increasing workload and evolving technologies, they need to continuously improve operational efficiency, quality and scalability by automating repetitive tasks, optimizing workflows, processes, and data flows. This also involves identifying bottlenecks, investigating outages and leakages, and last but not least fostering collaboration within the functional teams.
Business Analytics. This is the core mission of the Analytics and BI department. They combine business analysis, data analysis and business intelligence expertise to surface actionable insights to guide and prioritize not only strategic decision-making but also weekly field efforts. Concretely, they develop predictive models, run simulations and tests, perform data analysis, build dashboards to track and monitor recurring key KPIs. They also report on challenges, opportunities, trends, attainment to targets, industry benchmarks, competition …
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To learn more about the role of Data Analyst, check this post exploring their working methodology in The Data Analytics Lifecycle: From Exploration to Prescription.
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