There’s a new reality for B2B marketing and sales in a world where the customer journey is digital, from the top of the funnel through conversion to post-sales service. This led us to ask what this all means in practice for marketing and sales and the interaction between them. Sales technology vendors, of course, are tracking these trends closely.

We spoke with Dennis Fois, CEO at Copper, the CRM software solutions company, and Mark Kosoglow, VP of Sales at Outreach, the sales engagement and automation platform. “What we are seeing still with our clients and partners is that there is still a divide in the funnel. We’re still treating the funnel as if it were a linear thing where there’s some sort of hand-off somewhere in the middle,” said Fois. On this familiar model, marketing is responsible from the top to the middle of the funnel, then hands the journey over to sales. There’s only one problem. “It’s not how people are buying, and we’ve known that for a long time. People are well informed, the time they engage sales gets later and later, and they like to try a product before they buy it.”

Fois argues for radically rethinking the funnel. “We should be cutting the funnel vertically, not horizontally. Instead of saying there’s a hand-off in the middle of the funnel, sales and marketing are responsible for the whole journey.”

Kosoglow had a slightly different perspective on who would own this fast-evolving digital journey. “I don’t think it’s marketing, I think it’s operations,” he said. “I think operations doesn’t understand the power it wields yet. If you take sales out, there’s still a model in which you can make money and grow as a company, through self-serve and that kind of stuff. If you take marketing out, there’s still a way to generate demand. Without operations, nothing happens — the whole thing breaks down. Operations is the most important function in a company if you ask me.”

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Not everything will change as third-party cookies fade, but digital marketers are scrambling to solve for an uncertain future. Brands focusing on building and managing first-party data solutions will be ready for the so-called “third-party cookieless world” but also positioned to look smart and act on customer intelligence they own. When brands use their own data to know customers and prospects better, wonderful things start to happen.

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Stirista, a digital marketing agency with an extensive proprietary consumer database and data enrichment services, has announced the launch of Access B2B, a new division to support B2B marketing and sales teams. It will offer a self-service platform, Demand Exchange, where B2B teams can onboard and enrich CRM data and build addressable audience segments.

Stirista had already offered B2C, political and higher education data for purchase, licensing or rental. The new offering reflects the trend towards a digital customer journey for B2B purchases and significant changes in B2B buyer behavior. Access B2B will also support ABM strategies by making available an identity graph of 40 million professional personas and more than 22 million individual business locations

Why we care. Stirista is betting on the trends identified in our marketing/sales alignment story above being real, profound and enduring. We’re no longer just talking about a transformation in the B2B customer journey — we’re seeing brands and vendors respond to it.

As customers interact with your business through various channels, the streams of information they provide can be endless. But, that data can also be hidden and difficult to tap into. Join experts from Actian, who will help you simplify real-time customer insights across your martech stack while reducing dependency on IT, making faster decisions and recovering costs.

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AI-powered brand strategy service BlueOcean announced a new data API for financial institutions, enabling private equity firms, hedge funds and others to make decisions based on consumer and brand sentiment. The API is slated to be released later this year.

Financial institutions will be able to track sentiment for specific categories like automotive, healthcare or CPG, and use insights drawn from social media, financial data, forums, review sites and other data sources. BlueOcean claims that from these hundreds of sources, which are analyzed using an automated approach, that investors will be able to predict market shifts while also being able to track the moves of competitors, helping these institutions to make better-informed decisions.

Why we care. Marketers use sentiment analysis to maximize the return on their marketing dollars. If these insights are really valuable, might they also get a return for other kinds of investments? This, at least, is the question that this API poses. BlueOcean also states that it counts $18 trillion in stock value among its Fortune 500 companies (Google, Bloomingdale’s and Microsoft among them). Vendors don’t usually talk about their clients in terms of stock value, but this is new ground in the evolving relationship between social media buzz and trading, or “social-driven investing,” as they call it.

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Fans of Microsoft Advertising’s Google Import feature might be delighted to hear that the company has rolled out Facebook Import, which essentially does the same thing. Facebook Import was first announced as a pilot program at Microsoft’s Advertising Elevate event in April, but now it’s rolling out to advertisers in the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France and Germany.

If you’re looking to scale your Facebook Ads campaigns, this feature can help you do that without having to spend extra time reconfiguring everything for a new platform. 

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“The adtech and martech industry has their collective head in the sand when it comes to this issue. People don’t want to be tracked.” Stuart Meyler, President, Beeby Clark + Meyler