B2B Marketer in charge of growth agenda, ET BrandEquity

For a long time, organizations viewed marketing as a support function that supported growth, rather than something that drove it. CMOs and marketers have made separate efforts within their organizations to change the perception of marketing within their organizations and align key stakeholders, especially the CEO, to lead the organization's growth agenda.

The two-day “B2B Marketing Unplugged” conference, hosted by ETbrandEquity.com, brought together leading B2B marketers to discuss how to transform the perception of marketing from a cost center to a powerful revenue and profit driver within your organization. We talked about Taka.

The panel discussion was chaired by Kaustubh Chandra, CMO, Airtel Business, and included Amit Thapliyal, VP of Marketing, PeopleStrong. Akshay Dhamdere, Head of Marketing, India, Middle East and Global Service Provider, Tata Communications. Arjun Laxminarasu, Senior Director of Marketing, ServiceNow, India. Rittik Mondal, Country Marketing Manager, India and Singapore, Indeed. Udit Agarwal, Vice President and Global Head of Marketing, Exotel India, researched how various B2B marketers have been leading the growth agenda of their respective companies.

The majority of CEOs tended to have a product or sales background, and it was important that marketers met their expectations. The first order of business, Thapriyal said, was to understand their ideal customer profile (ICP), what kind of growth, brand and retention parameters they were looking for, and provide them with a 90-day plan of action.

“Once we jointly set the KPIs and got the green light from the CEO, we had to execute very quickly to give marketers a sense of optimism to continue investing in marketing,” Tapriyal said. We needed to not only increase, but also win big every quarter.”

In global organizations, marketing decisions were communicated top-down using solution frameworks or template formats that told marketers what they could and could not do. But Laxminarasu said that at ServiceNow, he is semi-entrepreneurial in his thinking, and that he has conversations with the CEO, head of market development, or head of sales before deciding how to interpret the market and what to do. said that it will be done.

“Multinational companies are setting up global capability centers (GCCs) in India and a lot of product development is happening in India,” Lakshminarasu said. “We've seen a shift within organizations where marketing is driving many of the growth strategies, including deciding which top accounts to track, what data points to focus on, and how to generate demand.”

Additionally, with the rise of account-based marketing (ABM) approaches, hyper-personalization has become a major tool for marketers whose investments are delivering significant revenue growth.

Internally, marketing practitioners needed to bring rigor to the discipline and start talking about business metrics to change perceptions. Reflecting on his journey within Tata Communications from 2018, Damdere said that the marketing department actively interacts with the sales team to understand their expectations and what impact marketing has on achieving them. We have demonstrated that.

Dhamdere recalls: “We abandoned metrics like Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). Instead, we focused on how we could drive transformational efforts with large enterprises. I guessed it.”

Tata Communications, which has worked with around 600-800 companies in the Indian market, is looking to increase the deal size of its existing accounts by focusing on cultural change and providing more value to customers. started.

When global companies enter the Indian market, their marketing strategies change completely. According to Mondal, the biggest challenge for Indeed was maintaining global objectives and key results (OKRs) while considering local market nuances when it came to campaign execution.

Another fundamental change that Indeed was trying to bring about was moving from an outbound marketing model where they constantly call customers to generate leads to an inbound marketing model where customers see and engage with job listings. did.

Mondal said: “Senior decision makers understand the benefits of such a model, so it's not difficult to convince them. But for the end users who actually use the product, it's a challenge.”

When Mr. Agarwal joined Exotel, India was the company's largest market, accounting for 90% of its revenue. This was a matter of concern since for most software companies around the world, India's revenue contribution is only 1-2% of his.

Mr Agarwal said: “What we were building was so interesting that I thought there was tremendous potential for the company to expand globally. There were no companies looking to integrate below.”

The second challenge was to combine three brands that cater to Exotel's different customer profiles into one brand. Agarwal added: “We didn't have the science of business predictability or funnels, which means you don't know what business you're going to do next month.”

Six months later, the conversation changed again to talk about profitable growth. Mr Agarwal said: “Right now, we do all of our planning and budgeting at the gross profit level, which means if you spend $1 today, how much will you get back in the bank in terms of EBITDA?”

B2B marketers have changed the perception of marketing within their organizations by creating a predictable pipeline of new business and talking about marketing source revenue and marketing source profits.