B2B Marketing: Growth Strategies for Your Organization
Kellogg School of Management
Online
About Programme
Marketing strategies for B2B organizations are evolving rapidly. Technological innovations and significant shifts in buyer behavior toward digital have dramatically rerouted the journey of B2B organizations.
One notable sign that digital sales have come of age, is the ease with which B2B buyers are making large new purchases and reorders online, according to McKinsey Research. The prevailing wisdom used to be that e-commerce was mainly for smaller-ticket items and fast-moving parts. Not anymore. Remarkably, 70 percent of B2B decision makers say they are open to making new, fully self-serve or remote purchases in excess of $50,000, and 27 percent would spend more than $500,000.
In terms of digital practices, Gartner predicts that 80 percent of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur via digital channels by 2025. However, one of the biggest hurdles for B2B organizations is aligning sales and marketing functions for maximum efficiency and revenue impact.
B2B Marketing: Growth Strategies for Your Organization reveals the processes, strategies, and tools that successful marketers use to drive growth within their B2B organizations. The value proposition for your products and services is the greatest weapon in your arsenal. Learn how to develop, communicate and deliver it to your prospects through a new, modern set of tools and frameworks that put your customers at the center of your universe.
Programme Content
This program serves as the preeminent A-to-Z strategy playbook for B2B marketing, sales, and growth-seeking professionals, unfolding in eight sequential modules, and is aimed at driving measurable impact in your organization.
Module 1: The New B2B Marketing Imperative—Driving Profitable Growth
Gain a foundational understanding of why B2B-oriented organizations need to modernize and formalize their marketing practices, what that transformation looks like in practice, and the proven tools to get you there.
Understand that customers have different needs (heterogeneity), and your marketing needs to reflect these differences
Define the roles that B2B marketers play in an organization and why great B2B marketing matters now, more than ever, in the digital realm
Assess your organization's current marketing effectiveness
Interpret a profit and loss statement to quantify the impact of marketing on the organization’s performance
Module 2: Your Go-to-Market Strategy—Understanding the Context
Explore qualitative methods for identifying your customer segments with more precision and determine how to solve their most pressing problems.
Conduct effective market research, including competitive and category analysis, to uncover customer needs and goals
Translate customer information into actionable insights
Develop market segmentation processes that align with your organization's skills and goals
Estimate the value of customer segments by conducting a break-even analysis
Module 3: Your Go-to-Market Strategy—Choosing Your Path
Apply customer insights to create a compelling value proposition and product marketing strategy.
Use the Value Proposition Canvas tool to make sure all the key elements are covered
Analyze current value propositions to identify strengths and opportunities for improvement
Create a compelling B2B value proposition for your products
Analyze a marketing plan within the context of these go-to-market concepts
Module 4: Product Pricing
Once you have identified what your customers want and how your products address their unique needs, you can then determine pricing strategies for different segments.
Gain insights on the strategies and considerations when pricing a product and when changing the price of a product
Review the value propositions of several example organizations, and reflect on the most and least effective ones
Discover the immutable link between value proposition and product pricing
Examine price elasticity to determine the impact of price changes on the net margin
Module 5: Demand Generation and Outbound Marketing
Recognize that demand generation is about building awareness for your brand or product. Employ the Strategic Marketing Framework as a tool for refining your marketing objectives.
Assess the effectiveness of your organization's current demand generation tactics
Determine the strategic role of demand generation in support of your marketing objectives
Identify metrics to measure the success of your demand generation and outbound marketing activities
Position products using the Strategic Marketing Framework
Module 6: Lead Generation
Generating a lead means that your product or service is now in the consideration pool, but it requires nurturing to convert leads to customers.
Determine the criteria for marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and evaluate approaches for scoring and nurturing leads
Master the handoff from demand generation to lead generation, driving better alignment between marketing and sales
Examine the B2B customer journey from multiple perspectives
Enlist Kellogg Executive Education's Comprehensive Campaign Template to help drive better results for your organization's B2B marketing efforts
Module 7: Customer Relationship Management and Marketing Automation
Technology plays a crucial role in every marketing organization; it is critical to understand which tools will add substantial value to your organization.
Conduct a MarTech Maturity Assessment using six key criteria
Survey the essential marketing technologies needed for optimizing B2B marketing efforts and examine how these technologies interact with sales technologies (e.g., customer relationship management)
Learn how to automate your A/B testing processes
Evaluate opportunities for using account-based marketing (ABM) technology platforms
Identify emerging marketing technologies that could benefit your organization
Create an action plan outlining steps to improve your organization's use of B2B marketing technologies
Module 8: Your Path Forward
Your learning journey culminates in the creation of a marketing action plan that outlines the next 30, 60, and 90 days, giving you a roadmap for success and enabling transformation.
Examine your organization’s "Marketing DNA" based on five classic archetypes
Identify concrete steps you can take to enable marketing transformation and become more agile
Develop your marketing action plan on how to advance your marketing goals over the next 30, 60, and 90 days
Capstone Project
The final project culminates in the creation of a B2B marketing action plan that you can present to your leadership team, colleagues, or prospective clients. To ensure that your plan is truly actionable, you will also create a schedule for implementing it over a three-month period. A series of pilot programs will test your vision so that you can determine what works and what does not work. Individualized feedback is offered to help you achieve your best output.
Programme Audience
Sales managers and key account managers seeking to improve alignment between marketing and sales—including the handoff from demand generation to lead generation—as well as building stronger funnels and identifying metrics for success.
Marketing managers, including professionals shifting from B2C environments, seeking the proven tools and frameworks to create and execute strategic B2B marketing plans that support organizational goals.
Department heads and senior leaders without marketing-specific backgrounds who seek a deeper understanding of the knowledge, skills, and language of B2B marketing so they can more effectively articulate the organization's vision and develop strategies that are modern and growth-oriented.
Programme Benefits
Assess your organization’s current B2B marketing capabilities and identify improvement priorities
Apply modern B2B marketing principles, tools, terminology, tactics and strategies to inform and accelerate organizational performance
Define the roles that B2B marketers play within an organization, and describe why, in a digital-first environment, great marketing matters more than ever
Apply the knowledge and skills gained from this program to create a B2B marketing action plan for yourself and your organization
Take a holistic approach to B2B marketing based on its foundational definitions and applications, to influence your organization’s B2B marketing strategy and drive growth
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