How to set a B2B marketing strategy based on target business growth

One of my most recent experiences has been working with marketing managers and supporting them setting up strategies that would help them reach their goals.

To do so I have worked on a framework that defines and provides alignment inside the organisation with regards expectations amongst sales, marketing and media teams.

This framework known as “source of growth” or “reverse engineering pipeline” helps us plan ahead what will be the roles and responsibilities of each team and will look to answer questions such as:

• How should marketing align with the business growth targets?
• Do I have enough budget to reach my expected growth goals?
• What is the role of media Vs CRM?
• Will our growth be based on targeting existing customers or new customers?
• Are the goals we’re setting achievable?

We will start from the base that we know we’re working with a funnel looking pipeline that includes different teams such as: Sales, marketing, and media.

We would also understand that there is a hierarchy and connection within the goals that we set at different levels of the organisation. This can be represented in the following way:

Funnel stage	Objective
Sales in volume (u) or margin ($)	Business objective
Sales Qualified leads (SQL)	Sales objective (Onboarding new accounts)
Marketing qualified leads (MQL)	Marketing objective (Marketing scoring customers)
Inquiries / Leads	Media objectives (Media generating leads)

We would look at historical performance data to calculate what is the average revenue that a sale/account will provide in terms of value in the form of volume and margin ($).

Once we know this we have to look at the conversion rates that we generally achieve converting Inquiries – > MQL’s – > SQL’s -> Sale

We can then run through the calculations to understand what is the volume of leads we need to acquire to reach the business objective.

To use an example, let’s say we’re looking at ACME, a software service business that is trying to achieve a target growth of 20% for the year with the launch of a new product. Last year’s sales volume of $1M was achieved through 100 clients.

This business had a historical conversion rate of:

• 15% inquiry
• 25% to MQL
• 40% to SQL

We could further refine this model by using different rates between new and existing customers, and give us an idea of the role of CRM Vs the role of Media.

Existing customers (CRM)	New customers (Paid media)
-% inquiry	15% inquiry
30% to MQL	25% to MQL
50% to SQL	40% to SQL
=100 * 30% * 50% = 15	= 5 / 40% / 25% / 15% = 333

As we can see, with calculations based on historical data we would be able to acquire 15 customers with CRM only and the remaining goal of 5 customers would be reached by using paid media.

We’re given a budget of $10K to run a campaign to acquire this customers, and we know that we’ve been acquiring leads in the past at a cost of $34 a lead.

This would give us a total cost of $11,322.

With this calculation we can now either go back to the business and ask for more budget, or we can go to our media partners and ask them to find ways to run the acquisition campaigns more efficiently.

We’re now ready to go and start planning our marketing efforts for the year with a better understanding of the potential growth that can be achieved and through which channels.

This is a very helpful exercise that will help align the efforts of an organisation and let each team realise about the potential growth that can be achieved through CRM and media efforts.

Have you found this helpful? Are you planning your growth targets this way? How effective you think this framework would be for your organisation. Please let me know in the comments below.