In the world of businesses that sell to other businesses (B2B), marketing should have one primary focus:

To generate leads that convert to revenue - That's it.

Quite an important task I expect you will agree! But what's the best way to achieve this? Should business leaders opt to build their own marketing team in-house (DIY) or outsource their marketing function - Or perhaps blend the two approaches.

Lets start by taking a look at the internal and external factors many businesses are facing with their marketing right now.

Internal Forces - The marketing function

Marketing is changing fast. New online/digital tactics and techniques are sweeping through the industry like wildfire. Many firms are creating large volumes of data on their visitors, leads and prospects, but few have an idea how to harness this information to make improvements and increase sales.

The CEO is increasingly demanding answers from marketing. Many CEOs, quite rightly, demand that there is a process in place for measuring the return on investment on marketing dollars. Marketing heads struggle to build a ROI framework across the engagement lifecycle.

Marketing spend is switching rapidly from outbound to inbound tactics. Firms are struggling to keep up with the pace of change and select techniques and tactics that maintain an edge over the competition. If the marketing function fails to innovate the business risks losing the battle for lead acquisition and ultimately business growth.

Managers are looking to upskill their marketing staff to build internal competence in the required inbound, online, digital skillsets, but for the most part there is little training available that provides a comprehensive framework.

The laundry list of skills required in the online era is daunting and its hard to hire across all the skills required without spending a fortune, especially for small and medium sized organisations. Some of the skills required are:

• Inbound, online campaign planning
• Project management
• Buyer persona development and messaging development 
• Website management and content maintenance
• Building landing pages, forms and calls to action
• High value content writing (white papers ebooks etc)
• Blog calendar generation, writing, editing and distribution
• SEO Keyword research and analysis
• Setting social media strategy
• Ongoing social media management & community building
• Lead nurturing, lead scoring and automated workflows
• Email marketing
• Lead database management
• ROI Measurement Analysis & Reporting
• Marketing automation set up and use
• System integration with CRM

One of the main risk factors and points of failure facing organisations is staff turnover. Imagine if your eDM expert leaves just as your main lead generation campaign for the year is about to kick off. Or the internal website guru you use to build your website landing pages and lead capture forms takes a sabbatical to go traveling or worse still leaves to join your competitor for a ludicrously inflated salary. If a key member of the team leaves mid way through your lead generation campaign, your business can be left with a worrying drought of leads as the campaign grinds to a halt.

Gen Y are often armed with some of these new marketing skills. but finding and keeping Gen Y staff is one of the core challenges facing all organisations and is an idenified risk factor for achieving and maintaining business growth. Modern marketers with the required digital skills are in hot demand and are close to the top of the "hard to find" list.

External market forces - The era of the buyer

With the advent of the "internet of everything" (source: Cisco) B2B buyers are in charge of the buying cycle in a way not seen before.

Buyers are self educating online, grazing on a rich diet of content that informs and educates them, at a time, a place and on a device of their choosing.

A 2011 study by the Corporate Executive Board and the Marketing Leadership Council with 1,500 participants found for B2B companies, those prospects complete 57% of their research before the first engagement with Sales.

Many industry thought leaders, believe the number is even higher today. Forrester research suggest 85% of B2B buyers start their research online before ever raising their hand. Some salespeople may love this because these prospects are essentially self-qualifying. But great solution salespeople used to be able control the sales cycle but in this new era, now sales are getting pushed further and further down the funnel, increasingly leaving marketing to pick up the task of influencing the buyer in the early and mid stages of the funnel.

Modern B2B marketing functions need to quickly transition to this new marketplace reality.

Marketing's challenge is to wield influence over the buyer by adjusting their traditional interruption based tactics like buying email lists, telemarketing and print advertising to account for the fact that the B2B buyer is using other ways to engage, educate and inform themselves. Now B2B marketers need to build comprehensive content marketing strategies and distribute that content in a format and at a time of the buyer's choosing.

Building the 5 stages of a modern marketing function.

Our experience has told us that to build a successful marketing function you need:

1) A plan that aligns both your sales and marketing team around your targeted buyer and particularly around solving their business challenges.

2) A framework of methodology, processes and technology that combines to deliver the right volume of qualified leads to your sales team.

3) Content that is buyer stage specific that engages and pulls your buyers through the buying stages from the very initial point of engagement to the point of sale.

4) Campaigns that create the required volume of activity to feed your sales team

5) Correctly skilled resources to make stages 1-4 happen.

Outsourcing - The fast track to transitioning your marketing

Many organisations are turning to B2B Marketing firms who specialise in the world of inbound/online marketing to facilitate a speedy transition of the marketing function. In these instances its imperative to work with a firm who provides, at a minimum, stages one and two. Creating a plan and a framework of processes and technology provides you with a skeleton on which to build. Engaging with a specialist in just one of the disciplines, say Social Media, will not deliver the consistent results required over time.

However, many firms are realising that putting flesh on the bones of the skeleton is equally challenging, as content writing and distribution (via social media, sophisticated personalised email and the skills required for inbound campaign management) are hard to find.

Equally, when you consider the fully loaded cost (salary, benefits, expenses and overheads) of a single mid level marketer is at least $120k per annum, many see an economic benefits of outsourcing as well.

Many marketers have long and trusted relationships with their marketing agencies for point expertise, such as graphic and website design or PR. Certainly the demand for these skills will not evaporate but the traditional pay-by-the hour agency model is under pressure.

Its increasingly difficult to prove the return on investment on these costs. Indeed the model has an inherent conflict of interest with the agency motivated to maximise the number of hours they charge their client and the client looking to minimise those same costs.

However an engaged inbound marketing partner is motivated to provide a full funnel, flowing with leads at a rate that feeds the sales team to meet your business goals and should insist on building an analytical framework that measures ROI. Shared goals are a far better basis for a fruitful long term relationship.

Here is an interesting eBook from the world leader in marketing automation, Hubspot on how to select your inbound marketing agency. Please feel free to download and read it. If you are sufficiently interested in transforming your marketing function please contact us.