B2B Marketing Expo: Uncertainty Breeds Marketing Innovation

Hot on the heels of our trip to The Global ABM Conference, 6sense’s EMEA team descended on Europe’s leading marketing event, B2B Marketing Expo.

As headline sponsors, we were proud to fly the 6sense flag (and logo — everywhere) at the two day event which featured 150+ speakers, 200+ exhibitors, and 6,000+ attendees.

The main takeaway from this marketing jamboree: Uncertainty breeds innovation.

Economic headwinds be damned — the buzzy expo hall was packed with inquisitive marketers hunting for new ideas, relationships, and tech to help win over prospects and fill their pipeline.

But, attendees and speakers were also acutely aware that the key to success is cutting waste.

Ditch the Guesswork, and Build Pipeline with Confidence

This message was central to our Chief Market Officer Latané Conant’s keynote, Ditch the Guesswork, and Build Pipeline with Confidence.

It was standing room only at Conant’s day-one keynote as she told the audience that, while the prevailing sentiment says proceed with caution, she believes marketers should proceed with confidence. To do that, marketers must cut their contribution to the $2 trillion of waste that revenue teams are losing to guesswork and inefficiencies.

Conant said she derives her confidence at work from a deep focus on GTM strategies, customer experience, and paying close attention to the numbers.

She also shared advice outlined in the 2nd edition of her book, No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls, on how marketers can nail these areas, including:

• Define your ICP, then go beyond that to define your In-Market ICP. Next, get your entire business to focus on winning these accounts.
• Uncover your anonymous prospects in the Dark Funnel™. Gather as much intent data as you can to understand your prospects and where they are in the buyer journey so you can serve them appropriate content and messaging.
• Don’t focus on vanity metrics. How are your marketing activities contributing to hitting your revenue number and how are you tracking it?

The tips proved popular — after the talk, attendees lined up at the 6sense stand to get Conant’s signature on their copies of her book.

B2B Buying Groups Keep Growing

A recurring theme at the B2B Marketing Expo was businesses seeing increasing numbers of buyers involved in every deal. As Conant shared in her keynote, the size of buying teams is rising quarter after quarter.

Our European Marketing Director Stefano Iacono picked up on this topic in his day two keynote, Adapt or Die: Why It’s Time to Rethink Your Revenue Programs. Iacono broke down the reality of today’s B2B buying journey:

• B2B buying is done by (ever-expanding) groups
• The majority of the buying journey is spent anonymously in the Dark Funnel™, with only 3% of website visitors filling out a form.

Yet marketers are still relying on the same tired tech stacks, old-school attribution, and pipeline plays to generate revenue. Instead, as Iacono shared, it’s time for a new approach that includes:

• Pursuing the right prospects (the ones primed to buy)
• Engaging buying groups on relevant channels and using multi-threading
• Align sales and marketing behind systems and processes that recognize buying teams

For more on how to adapt to the new B2B buying journey, check out ABM is Dead, Long Live ABM.