Meagan White, Head of Marketing at Kibo talks about a few marketing optimization practices that can benefit B2B teams:

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Welcome to this martech series chat. Meagan, can you describe your marketing journey over the years and more about your role at Kibo?

I’ve been fortunate to have paved the path to a rich marketing journey that spans across diverse disciplines such as communications, product marketing, demand generation, and head of marketing roles.

I started my career on the agency side where I had an opportunity to work on a range of projects. I’ve always been excited about tech, so when an opportunity opened, I moved into a role where I managed communications and social media for tech clients.

This communications role progressed into a product marketing role at another company, and from there evolved into a demand generation role. Because I had the chance to learn from great leaders and colleagues, I’ve built a wealth of knowledge and expertise in a variety of marketing functions.

It was the right time for me to accept the Head of Marketing position at Kibo Commerce, a composable commerce technology company, where I’m currently managing marketing and sales development.

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When it comes to go-to-market norms for 2023, what are some of the fundamentals that you feel B2B marketing and GTM teams need to keep in mind?

Most companies know that if their GTM teams aren’t aligned, it’s going to be very hard to meet their goals. Nonetheless, many companies still struggle with alignment for various reasons. Alignment covers everything from shared goal setting and strategic go-to-market plans across sales, marketing and partner functions, to tactical execution of activities in support of those shared goals.

From a strategic perspective, it’s key to ensure any objectives and projects roll up to those shared goals. Having your GTM team and engine working together is critical for co-selling and co-marketing initiatives to be successful. To do this well, tactically all teams need to be operating in sync. An example of alignment on a tactical level could be shared account mapping and targeting. In this case, marketing would be focused on targeting certain accounts as part of their account-based marketing programs, and sales teams would be focused on targeting a subset of those accounts as part of their inside sales and outbound programs. In that same context, partners should feel confident that they’re aligned to our goals — this requires a strategy and goal planning session, a joint value prop, documented communications plan, and joint account mapping too. Regular communication with partners is key: At Kibo, we meet with our GTM partners weekly to talk about where we are with our objectives and our next steps to support progress.

When it comes to fundamentals for B2B marketing, we need to be paying attention to where we’re winning and where we’re losing. If we’re consistently winning deals based on certain product capabilities, all GTM stakeholder groups — sales, marketing, and partners — need to be in the know so that we can leverage those insights moving forward when it comes to tactical strategies.

Conversely, if we’re losing deals, sales needs to share that information with the marketing team and partners. Oftentimes these conversations surface questions and concerns that persistently come up in the sales cycle, as well as competitive insights. Marketers can often use this information to create campaigns, content or sales assets that can help salespeople and partners navigate challenging conversations.

What are some of the most common GTM fails you’ve seen B2B teams make, and what best practices can you share?

When GTM initiatives are unsuccessful, it’s highly likely that the team struggled with misalignment and inadequate communication.

Successful GTM teams meet every week, which keeps them on track and aligned on objectives. During these meetings, team members should feel free to be very direct about where they need support, and they should not be hesitant to ask for help.

Not diving deep enough into the details of the sales funnel can also derail GTM initiatives.

For example, Sales relies on the marketing team to bring in new leads and help build pipeline. The disconnect can happen if marketing is bringing in the wrong leads. If marketing is creating leads, are these leads converting through the funnel or not? Is the GTM team digging deep enough in to know what’s working and what isn’t? Is the sales team capturing the details of the conversations they’re having with customers and relaying this information to marketing to optimize campaigns and messaging?

It goes back to communication, but it also relies on the triggers we can pull to ensure that we learn from those activities. In this example, GTM teams need visibility into what leads are converting: which ones are converting to ops, which ones are converting to closed deals, and what channel these leads came through (including leads that came in through channel partners). It could be our paid campaigns are converting better than organic. Or maybe certain outbound messaging from sales converts better than others. Continuous testing and making the necessary adjustments ensure a good path forward, because we have solid data as to what’s working and what isn’t.

Whether we win or lose, we need to know why at a granular level. Most companies will do win/loss data on the B2B side to gain visibility into potential strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to improve. These insights need to be shared across the organization and with partners so that everyone can learn from it.

What are some of the top marketing challenges you and others have experienced repeatedly in your B2B marketing roles?

Although it’s not B2B-specific, I’ve seen many teams struggle to do too much at once, which causes them to lose focus. In marketing, you must test and experiment constantly, but you also need to learn from those tests and not spread yourselves too thin by over-testing and over-investing — it’s OK to say no to certain activities that don’t align with your overall goals. Building in enough time to interpret and learn from your campaigns is critically important, as is building in the flexibility to respond to new asks from the sales team.

Inevitably, marketers will get excited about the next new thing or trying something different. You should experiment, but you need to make sure that you remain focused on the 70% of the tactics that reliably work. From a budget perspective, you want to make sure that you’re investing in the tactics that you know are going to generate pipeline versus unproven experiments, which could be new technology, messaging, or unexplored channels.

Depending on the size of your company, you may have numerous buyer personas — you need to carefully consider how much you’re investing in marketing to each of those persona segments from a time  and budget perspective. Sometimes it’s an even split, and sometimes a specific persona group is more engaged or is generating stronger conversion rates for certain programs or campaigns throughout the funnel. If this is the case, you may want to invest a higher percentage of your resources into this segment.

This goes back to the details piece: Does the data show that you need to drive new pipeline? Do you need to focus on retaining your existing audience, or are you in the position where you have the right audience, but need to figure out how to retarget them to reengage?

From a B2B perspective, all the resulting tactics should tie back to your goals.

What type of martech features will become more prominent in this space in the near term?

Almost every marketing strategy or campaign has some kind of testing, segmentation, optimization, and personalization to make sure that you’re leveraging different tactics to communicate the right message to the right persona — this should be very familiar to most marketers today.

AI is the relatively novel capability in the marketing realm.  There are already many AI-assisted marketing technologies available in the marketplace that people don’t know about. For example, aspects of dynamic personalization depend on AI capabilities. I envision AI helping marketers become more efficient, and I think it will make many people’s lives a lot easier.

For example, AI makes it easier to send personalized emails because marketers can create something once and then swap in and out specific content based on what will likely resonate — there’s no need to send out a unique email to each audience group, which simplifies the process and saves time.

Similarly, leveraging AI capabilities for testing helps reduce the time it takes to create a new program while eliminating duplicative efforts in campaign creation.

When it comes to data and reporting, AI helps marketers surface the right data and intelligence quickly so that they can spend less time on manipulating the data to make sense of it and more time on putting it to good use. Ultimately, AI enables marketers to spend more time on marketing by eliminating tedious manual processes.

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Can you share your thoughts about the advancement of martech and B2B tech marketing over the next decade?

I think that the industry will continue to advance its segmentation and testing capabilities; the process will become increasingly dynamic, and marketers will benefit from better granularity when analyzing the results and adjusting their campaigns.

I think many marketers will rely more heavily on AI-assisted alerts to notify and advise them when certain things happen on their platforms. For example, an AI-assisted alert can warn a marketer that a campaign is performing poorly and that adjustments should be made to get it back on track. Eventually, I think that innovation will lead to alerts across multiple types of technologies that will collectively play a critical role in strategic planning and execution.

Customer service teams will expand the use of chat bots to streamline their operations. When teams have a general script for common questions and responses, they can make sure that the customer service and call center teams are addressing novel inquiries and spending the most concentrated time on the customers with critical and time-sensitive issues that require high-touch service. As customer service becomes increasingly enmeshed into the buyer journey, teams will be focused on making sure that staff have the information they need to continuously improve.

Although attribution is always challenging because it’s rare that one source is driving a result, innovative new tools that can track multiple touchpoints across the customer lifecycle will provide valuable insight into the buyer journey. The industry will be able to better articulate the specific path that led to conversion; for example, a customer may have come in through the website, interacted with two social media messages, and opened three emails from the company before converting.

Eventually, marketers will have access to new experiences where they can essentially gain insights and data across all these channels in a more holistic way; being able to conceptualize what that cross-channel journey looks like will empower marketers to take decisive actions.