Article

Vincent Manlapaz
Vincent Manlapaz 5 July 2017

How adaptive strategy gives a remedy for the top B2B challenges

Based on the survey, approximately half of all sales and marketing representatives considered that not generating enough leads is their top marketing challenge. Learn how adaptive strategy gives a remedy for the top B2B challenges.

Based on this recent survey from InsideSales, approximately half of all sales and marketing representatives claimed that generating enough leads for their business was their top marketing challenge.

The report also indicated top B2B challenges most B2B companies were facing and rallying cry for a solution. Those are as follow:

  • Generating More Leads – 49%
  • Converting Leads to Customers – 43%
  • Improving Lead Quality – 39%
  • Reaching decision makers – 37%
  • Increasing Product Awareness – 31%

 Every marketer in the B2B space will face at least one of these challenges, if not, most of them. 

According to Dana O’Donovan and Noah Rimland Flower - "creating strategies that are truly adaptive requires that we give up on many long-held assumptions. As the complexity of our physical and social systems make the world more unpredictable, we have to abandon our focus on predictions and shift into rapid prototyping and experimentation so that we learn quickly about what actually works".

The image (below) illustrates how to develop useful strategy which you can adapt and put into practice.

Let's look at the prime tactics/strategies and how it should work or resonate best with Adaptive Strategy's method (taken from the same report).

  • Company Website – 83%
  • Email – 74%
  • LinkedIn – 69%
  • Tradeshows – 62%
  • Blogs – 53%

1) Company Website

The company website should help the business circumscribe what is working well, and what needs to be improved. In the Sales 1.0 period, prospects had to talk to those in Sales in order to get information about products and services. Today, they check out the websites first, quickly making the first impression. If the website works & does well, it will become the go-to’ resource throughout the buying cycle.

Hence, during the Experiments and Pattern stage, it must satisfy the following questions:

  • Who is getting to our site?
  • How are they finding?
  • What are they doing while they're browsing?
  • How long are they staying?
  • Do they return at a later date?
  • Did we gather an email, or lead from them?

After identifying the challenges and its results, the next stage (Execution by the whole) can augment and resemble from Experiments and Pattern stage into cascading and illustrative strategic measurements, as shown below:

The adaptive strategy should allow you to ascertain the following:

  • How to truly get to know your audience
  • How to find out what interests your ideal prospect, what gets them to click, to read, to buy and to advocate certain products/services
  • How to find out when they will be online and which channels they’ll be consuming content
  • Whom they trust and what media are they reading
  •  What changes or types of articles grab people’s attention and cause them to read on vs. hitting the back-button

The 3 stages of Adaptive Strategy will show us where your ideas are wrong, and where you need to double-down, while each stage is an ongoing process of its own right.

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