How Opportunity-Based Marketing Aligns Your Teams and Helps Close Deals

Most B2B marketers have used account-based marketing (ABM) for years. But today’s ecosystem demands an even more targeted approach to buying committees. A strong opportunity-based marketing strategy will help you achieve that.

Marketing and sales alignment is a big key to engaging accounts and closing B2B deals. I challenge marketers to rethink how they align with the sales team. This is step one to coordinated growth. The first initiative I have taken at every company I’ve worked at is to develop, design and implement a lead to opportunity process (ensuring leads end up on the opportunities they belong to). 

There’s pre-work to be done before carrying out this process. You need to spend time with BDRs and sellers to understand their pain points and wish lists. One of the things I learned during these conversations is there’s a lot of miscommunication and frustration between sales and marketing during the transition from one team to the other. 

That is why it’s vital for marketers to take ownership of the full lead lifecycle. If no one owns lead management, then no one is paying close attention to which leads are actually working and why. Until there is ownership, there’ll always be that notion that marketing “sends over bad leads” and “sales is not doing their job.”

Having an owner of the full lead cycle ensures that the process is accommodating both sales and marketing needs. You want to be in control of how leads are being funneled through the database and who touches them along the way. Here’s how opportunity-based marketing helps you do that.

What you’ll learn in this blog

What is opportunity-based marketing?

Let’s begin with a definition. Opportunity-based marketing is a strategy that uses market insights and collaboration across marketing and sales teams to identify, prioritize, and capitalize on existing opportunities and buying groups within an account. It requires a strong alignment between marketing and sales teams, and helps both collaborate to turn opportunities into deals.

A lot of B2B marketers might already be doing opportunity-based marketing but just don’t know it’s called that. Let’s describe it in relation to something you’re probably familiar with, account-based marketing. In ABM strategies, you align marketing, sales, and service teams to prioritize a specific account with highly targeted resources. 

Opportunity-based marketing takes this a step further by narrowing in on the buying group within an account. So instead of targeting an account with account-specific messaging, you are getting more specific with your personalization based on who you are reaching out to in the buying group. 

You’re targeting your outreach based on someone’s role within the organization, but also their role within the buying group – whether that person is a decision- maker, an influencer, or controls the budget. You’re also thinking about where they are in the sales funnel, targeting people based on their opportunity status. 

For example, when it comes to selecting products for commercial construction, there are a variety of decision makers. Sometimes those decision makers aren’t from the same company. The buying committee might be an architect from an architectural firm, the owner of the property or building, a general contractor from a different firm, and so on. 

All of these personas are important when it comes to the selection of a commercial product. So, when you launch an opportunity-based marketing campaign, you’d be targeting all of those personas with the products you know are a great fit, with the messaging personalized to their needs. 

The architect, owner and general contractor all have different selection criterias. Plus, messaging is aligned with the opportunity stages. At the beginning, it’s all about education. As the opportunity progresses, the messaging needs to show proof via case studies and personalized events.  

What are the benefits of opportunity-based marketing?

Opportunity-based marketing works best when your company sells multiple products, and your target accounts have multiple stakeholders within their buying committee.

Here are a few benefits to the approach:

• Relevance. It ensures messages are relevant to where prospects are in the buying cycle. 
• Efficiency. It allocates time, budget and efforts toward closing deals.
• Customer-centric. It tailors messages to specific needs and roles and builds brand loyalty.

Which scenarios would an opportunity-based marketing strategy work best? Let’s say your company sells multiple products and opens up multiple opportunities for those products. In that case, it makes sense to tailor your outreach based on the opportunity for the product they’re most likely to purchase.

You might target an account with multiple buying groups. For example, a college textbook publisher might have more than one opportunity within an account, each with its own buying group – say, one for the chemistry department and another for the history department.

Next, you might have opportunities that have multiple stakeholders across multiple accounts. This is very common in manufacturing, as mentioned before where architects, building owners, and general contractors are all part of an opportunity and come from different accounts. 

For example, when I was at Sika, a chemical manufacturer, the roofing product had to appeal to different groups within the buying committee. The message was adjusted for the building owner to talk about the cost savings and energy efficiency, while the message for architects was about flexibility and sustainability to meet LEED compliance. 

We also sold complementary products such as flooring and adhesives. These different products might apply to the building owner but not the architect as they are more structural, so we’d ensure the building owner received additional communication about other product offerings. 

Then we’d start identifying the buying committee that was responsible for the interior design.  All of this hyper-personalization can be achieved with dynamic content within Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. We made those personalized emails available to the sales team within Salesforce, so they simply pick a template and send it right from the contact record. 

Now let’s finish with four things to keep in mind when creating a lead management process in Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. This will set your foundation for opportunity-based marketing.

1. Become an Opportunity Object expert. That is where all leads are aimed to funnel through, and that is where the sales team spends most of their time. As you develop this streamlined lead to opportunity workflow, marketers need to ensure proper mapping and enhancement of the opportunity object with vital marketing data points.

Aligning on the opportunity will help create effective feedback loops because marketing and sales can see which marketing touchpoints are converting the most revenue. When we can see growth across the business, then we can measure reach and effectiveness of campaigns. 

2. Protect your most important fields and ensure they go from lead to opportunity. Things like Source, UTMs, Campaigns, conversions, activities have valuable data that you’ll want to pull through into the opportunity to help everyone understand what’s working and what needs improvement.

Ensure proper field mapping from Account Engagement into Sales Cloud. Know which fields are overwritten and why. Check to see if any platforms or settings overwrite data once leads are entered in Sales Cloud. Map fields from Lead to Contact, Account, and Opportunity.

This is a simple setting that any admin can perform, but it requires direction. Custom fields aren’t going to be automatically mapped over, so every new field created requires a mapping update if that field is important on the other objects as well. 

3. Break out the different types of leads and sit down with the sales team to agree on the actions that should take place. If you are running ABM campaigns, leads entering the database might either be existing ‌or new. Both scenarios require different handling and come with different expectations. 

If you are running opportunity-based marketing, you’ll find new leads generated for open opportunities. Unless that lead is converted and placed on the Opportunity, you won’t be able to see attribution and measure success.  Make sure you incorporate these lead types into the process and align with the sales team on what you expect them to do. 

4. Revisit definitions. This is a great way to retrain teams to ensure everyone is speaking the same language. I’ve been in many rooms where leads have multiple meanings, which causes misalignment.

For example, sales refers to leads as an initial opportunity, while marketing refers to a lead as someone they turned from an unknown to a known. These are two completely different things. This is even more important when reporting on results. Definitions help define criteria and fine-tune reporting needs. 

Closing B2B deals can be hard, but you’ll find more success with strong alignment between marketing and sales that helps you carry out a hyper-targeted opportunity-based marketing strategy. Set the foundation and see how your business moves forward.