A well-oiled B2B marketing framework coupled with a well thought-out and structured sales-marketing alignment and lead handover processes can help an organization fuel their short term and long term goals a lot faster.
In this process, agile marketing methodologies can help B2B marketers measure outcomes, coordinate better with other teams and departments and have more structured reporting tactics; all essentials to future marketing and sales success.
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First, what is Agile Marketing?
Agile marketing is one of many approaches to marketing that uses principles from agile concepts and methodologies to create a more iterative process for marketing teams. It is known to drive organizational efficiencies and helps teams focus on driving growth with a customer centric mindset.
Some of the more common agile marketing frameworks include Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban.
As an agile marketing framework, Scrum creates a culture of transparency and adaptation in real-time. It usually involves having a daily scrum (stand up or huddle) with the team, to align on current tasks and previous matters, to adjust campaigns in real-time based on recent metrics and discuss challenge areas. The onus lies on the scrum master or marketing leader to manage scrum processes, task backlogs and discuss matters to align in real-time appropriately.
As a lean-agile framework, Kanban was introduced as a method of process management for knowledge work. Kanban requires marketing teams to visualize the stages of the marketing plan and then work on managing workflows and create feedback loops.
Kanban typically involves: visualize work flows and the stages of the marketing plan, manage that workflow, build feedback loops among roles and teams and fix issues in real-time.
Kanban allows marketing teams to prioritize tasks in unison creating better outcomes for the company.
Scrumban is a popular hybrid approach to agile marketing and is a combination of best practices from both scrum and kanban. Marketers who already use some sort of agile methodology usually pivot to Scrumban to have the best of all agile processes.
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How Can B2B Marketers Benefit With Agile Marketing?
Boosts Alignment and Outcomes
One of the major challenges is modern B2B marketing and B2B sales is lack of alignment between marketing and sales teams. This is where, daily agile practices (like scrum), if held between the marketing and sales team or its relevant members can enable a more seamless internal process and B2B buying journey for the audience.
Larger teams may benefit by having weekly scrums in which every campaigns, target prospect list, outreach practice and results of each are discussed cohesively with aligned points on handovers of accounts between marketing and sales.
Creates a Sense of Transparency that Leads to Better Prospect Journeys
Any kind of silo in an organization is detrimental to the future growth of the company. Agile marketing methodologies can boost trust between marketing and sales if the framework is used to align on target accounts and outreach practices with a clear indicator of which brands the marketing team is going after and which the sales.
When marketing and sales leaders drive this from the higher levels, there is a more unified brand messaging and prospecting or purchase experience that is built for the end user.
Drives a Data Driven Marketing and Sales Experience
Agile methodologies are meant to drive discussions between the relevant team members and to enable regular catch-ups that help these members measure what they are doing. Using data to jointly breakdown outcomes and evaluate what’s working and not, sharing these insights between teams is crucial to fix problems areas in the buying cycle and prospecting journey.
Agile marketing can help B2B technology marketers and their sales counterparts focus on providing a more unified brand story in a market that is strife with competition. The constant exchange of insights, analytics and real-time measurement can help build that well-oiled internal marketing-sales system that churns better output for the brand as a whole.
