2023 Revenue Resolutions: Driving Business Growth and Customer Satisfaction

2022 was a tough year for sales and marketing organizations, and 2023 is not shaping up to be any easier. Revenue teams are feeling more pressure than ever to hit targets with even fewer resources. To help you achieve your goals, Sendoso has worked in partnership with Hubspot to survey revenue leaders to learn what bad habits they are leaving in 2022. We also asked what revenue resolutions they were committing to in 2023 to drive better results. If you want to make your B2B marketing efforts more successful in 2023, keep reading.

Our research shows that resolutions are most needed in five key areas:

• Defining your Audience
• Messaging and Personalization
• Campaigns and Nurturing Relationships
• Monitoring Results
• Investing in Customers

In a recent webinar, Sendoso’s Karen Steele and Hubspot’s Sarah Casdorph discussed the seven most common B2B marketing bad habits within these key areas, and the resolutions you can make to break them.

Bad Habit #1: Not having a clearly defined target audience and failing to have all  critical details in one place

Resolution: Take the time to map target accounts and personas, and accurately map data in your CRM system.

“A lot of people know the people they want to get to, but there’s not always alignment across functions on what that means and what that looks like,” Sarah said. As a result, the GTM team is often not aligned on how the audience is defined. However, having team alignment on what your audience looks like and who your ideal customer is is critical to your GTM success.

In order to achieve this, you need to ensure that you are taking the time to research, document and build detailed profiles on not only the individual personas, but you also need to map what the buying committee looks like with each target account.

The next step is to make sure the entire team is aligned on your targets and personas.  Once these are defined, accurate data about your target accounts needs to be added and regularly updated in your CRM system. As Karen underscored, “Starting with a really good audience, looking at all of the segments, having that data accurate in your CRM system, is elemental to your marketing strategy.”

Bad Habit #2: Doing events the same old way

Resolution: Rethink events for today’s hybrid world

As B2B marketers, often a large part of your budget is for events. But the B2B event landscape has dramatically changed. It’s no longer enough to set up a booth and scan badges, hoping to gain exposure and qualified leads.

Now that events are a combination of in person and online, you need to ensure that you create an experience, attach sales metrics to the event, and use every channel of the event to showcase your brand. When choosing which events to attend, be intentional. It’s much better to go to 5 high impact events than to go to 20. Once there, be sure to make personal connections. As Karen said, “You want to make sure you have sales reps there that are having engagements, having meaningful conversations, and having sales meetings on the show floor.”

See how Sendoso drove success at Hubspot INBOUND event

Bad Habit #3: Blasting multiple personas with the same generic messaging

Resolution: Create targeted messaging that resonates with each persona

In the world of automated marketing, it’s easy to fall into the trap of targeting everyone with the same generic messaging. However, with everyone being inundated with marketing messages at every turn, it’s almost impossible to cut through the clutter.

In order to win your buyer’s attention, you need to create targeted messaging for each persona which includes business solutions and use cases that solve their most critical challenges. When creating personalized messaging, Sarah says, “It’s important to challenge your assumptions about what messaging will resonate and be willing to experiment to discover what works with different audiences.” Take the time to fully understand the personas that make up your target audience; this includes their pain points, goals and buying behaviors. Incorporate this personalized messaging into marketing nurtures, sales outreach cadences and digital content campaigns.

Bad Habit #4: Running one off/ad hoc campaigns that are executed independently of each other

Resolution: Create and execute a half yearly integrated campaign strategy

Many of us have adopted the bad habit over the years of running one off marketing campaigns to achieve a specific short term goal. However, these campaigns are run with  no consideration for cross functional coordination or how it might fit across the entire customer lifecycle.

In contrast, a half yearly integrated campaign strategy combines multiple tactics around a single theme to promote a consistent message to a specific audience. An integrated campaign not only delivers a more impactful and memorable message, it can also increase your chances of reaching and resonating with a wider audience. You also  build momentum and create excitement. As Karen said, “It creates a sense of urgency inside your company when you can get the sales team CS teams focused behind these bigger campaigns.”

Bad Habit #5:  Focusing messaging around the product rather than building relationships and trust

Resolution: Nurture instead of aggressively selling

Now more than ever, it is critical to get the right message to the right person at the right time.  “It’s really important to recognize when the right message is not a sale, the right message is value, and hitting them at the time they need that value,” Sarah said. Knowing a potential customer is in-market to buy is key. Once you have this information, taking the time to nurture them and provide useful information about your product and how it can help them is much more effective than focusing on just the product itself. Taking the time to reach out in multiple ways to provide value and focusing on customer success results in a much more authentic experience for your customers.

Bad Habit #6: Not taking a holistic and transparent approach to outreach and campaign performance

Resolution: Constantly review the data to analyze and optimize campaign performance

Implementing marketing attribution techniques is critical to fully understanding the effectiveness of your outbound marketing efforts. Unfortunately, most B2B marketing organizations don’t do this well. “As B2B marketers we are data people. We have to dig into the data, know the data, and do the analysis to really understand everything that’s working across every aspect of any campaign we do,” said Karen. You must fully understand how your outreach, campaigns and tactics are performing. Once you have that information, it’s imperative to act quickly to make modifications to focus on what is working.

At the same time, those who are doing the analysis need to be transparent about the implications of the reports they’re generating and the boundaries of the data used to create them. This transparency is crucial to building trust with stakeholders, including executives, sales teams, and customers. Being transparent about the data and the conclusions drawn from it helps ensure that everyone is aligned and working toward the same goals.

Bad Habit #7: Only focusing on new customer acquisition

Resolution: Focus on customer retention, upsell, and cross-sell opportunities

As the market shifts from the paradigm of growth at all costs to one of efficient growth, the focus needs to shift from new customer acquisition to customer retention. You need to prioritize the investments that help your customer realize more value from your products. This in turn will result in healthy retention rates, as well as opening up opportunities to upsell and cross sell within the organization. “As B2B marketing leaders, having a really strong partnership with your customer success team is critical,” said Karen. Marketing and CS teams need to work in concert to drive net revenue retention and foster long term, personal relationships with customers.

In addition, marketing teams need to measure and analyze the effectiveness of their customer retention efforts to ensure that they are making progress towards their goals. This includes tracking metrics such as customer satisfaction, churn rates, and net promoter scores. By taking a data-driven approach to customer retention, marketing teams can identify areas for improvement and make the necessary adjustments to maximize the lifetime value of their customers

To learn more about the key revenue resolutions you need to make for 2023, download our eBook, 5 Keys to Capturing Qualified Leads, Closing Deals, and More